Wales, Ethnicity and Criminal Justice

The conviction of two of the members of the gang that killed Stephen Lawrence has once again raised the issue of the experience of violence and the treatment by the police of people from ethnic minority groups, and their confidence in the justice system.  The debate has a distinctly metropolitan air, but that is not to say that there are no problems in Wales.

Our report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission last year, How Fair is Wales, highlighted the negative experiences of crime and the justice system of different groups of people, including those from ethnic minority groups.

Across England and Wales as a whole, young men are at a particularly high risk of becoming a victim of violent crime with people from ethnic minority groups being more likely than white people to be victims of violent crime (although it is a combination of the different age and socio-economic profiles of ethnic minority people compared to the white population that explains the difference).

In 2007/08, there were 4,578 prosecutions for hate crimes in Wales, of which 568 were for racially and religiously motivated crimes. However perpetrators of hate crimes are less likely to be convicted than the perpetrators of other crimes – the conviction ratio for hate crime in Wales was 72% compared with 80% for all indictable offences.  The majority of hate crime incidents recorded by the police involve harassment, but the majority of cases that are prosecuted are crimes against the person. Incidents vary according to the group affected, for example religiously-motivated crime affects community institutions as well as individuals; whilst disability-related hate crime often targets people’s property.

One of the most contentious issues is use by the police of stop and search. Although the rate of stop and searches by police forces in Wales is at or slightly below the England and Wales average, there were nevertheless a total of 42,000 stops and searches in 2008/09, resulting in 4,900 arrests. Across England and Wales as a whole, rates of stop and search for black people are far higher than for other groups (135 incidents per 100,000 population, compared to 40 per 100,000 for Asian people and 20 per 100,000 for the rest of the population).

Barely half of people in Wales (56%), a slightly lower proportion than in England.   think the criminal justice system is fair.  People from ethnic minority groups are much less likely than white people to believe that their complaints about the police will be taken seriously, and are more likely to worry about police harassment. The lack of confidence in the criminal justice system contributes to the under-reporting of crime, including hate crime, by ethnic minority groups.

Together this is cause for complacency – the EHRC has hardly surprisingly identified reducing hate crime as one of the challenges facing Wales’s organisations in coming years.