Nabanita Sircar
London, December 14

Lord Chancellor Falconer has said what the ethnic minority community leaders have been complaining about for a long time, that too many Black and Asian people are being stopped and searched by the police. This has been quite evident in London but is more annoying in inner cities.

Muslims have particularly been concerned and have been saying that they are being unfairly targeted by over-aggressive policing as part of the "war on terror". The Lord Chancellor told The Independent that the high numbers of stop and searches could not be explained by local, social or demographic conditions.

He said: "It's absolutely critical that people believe that the law is enforced race blind. We have accepted that the disparity in numbers needs to be reduced because the disparity - between the black and ethnic minority groups that are stopped and the whites that are stopped - is much too high to be explained simply by different conditions in different places."

He added the National Criminal Justice Board, of which he is chairman and the Home Secretary David Blunkett is a member, was now taking this issue "extraordinarily seriously" and that it was important to "publish the statistics" to show exactly how great the disparity had become.

"You have to make it clear what the position is. You have got to seek to identify what the reasons are, and, in so far as they are not for legitimate crime-fighting reasons, stop them."

The daily referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions statement in October that a growth in racist crime and a sharp rise in the number of young Asian men being stopped by the police threatened to alienate Muslim communities in Britain. He admitted that the war on terror had sparked a growth in Islamophobia and led to a more divided society.

He warned: "Terrorism is creating divisions between our diverse societies. We have to be careful that we respect diverse cultures and we prosecute cases without discrimination."

"What the figures are showing is that a large number of young Asian men have been stopped by the police." He added: "This is a period of heightened security around the issue of terrorism and that's a position that has to be managed. It would be dangerous for us to alienate whole communities, we just have to tread carefully."

Home Office figures quoted by the daily show that stop and search of Asians under anti-terror laws have soared by 302 per cent in a year. At the same time, the figures for race-hate crime revealed an increase of 50 per cent in the past two years, with 2,000 more cases being prosecuted than when the law was introduced in 1999.

The trend is expected to continue when the Crown Prosecution Service publishes further findings at the end of the year. The DPP said that the typical race-hate element of a crime involved white youths calling Asians "mullahs, Bin Ladens or Taliban".

RACIAL DISPARITY IN 2004

*Black people are six times more likely to be searched by police than white people. There are almost twice as many searches of Asian people than white people.

*Stop and searches, under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, of black people went up by 38 per cent, Asians by 36 per cent, "other" ethnic backgrounds by 47 per cent and whites by 17 per cent.

*Stop and searches of Asians under anti-terror legislation has risen by 302 per cent from 744 to 2,989.

*Numbers of arrests per 1,000 population were more than three times higher for black people than for others. Other ethnic minority groups are slightly over-represented.

*All black and minority ethnic groups continue to be under-represented in the police service.