Racial profiling describes practices of police, and security forces to use criteria such as ascribed ethnic affiliation, religion, and national origin to serve as basis for control, and thereby indicate the racist patterns of the executive forces. Therefore this practice is considered institutional racism.

According to Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, the police are allowed to stop suspects anywhere and search them, if the person is suspected to be involved, to have commited, or to be committing a crime. This permission is called “stop and seach”.  

Due to the increasing public pressure after a long absence of clarification for the race motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, a commission of inquiry was convened. The ‘Macpherson Report’ of 1999 contains 70 recommendations, most of which were addressed to the British police in order to reduce the identified institutional racism that causes the practice of ‘racial profiling’.

The British Home Office urged the implementation of the recommendations, which covered all areas of police work. After this, polices involving responsibility to citizens were more thought out, structures changed, and procedures were adapted. Officials were increasingly recruited from ethnic minorities, and there was improved reporting of statistical data on racist crime.

New guidelines for ‘stop and search’ identity checks were issued. Officially, personal, and vehicle controls shall be done on the principles of equal treatment and non-discrimination.  Suspicion may never be founded on the sole basis of appearance, and exterior signs, for example, hair color, skin color, clothes, age, and gender. In order to examine, and verify this, documentation of personal controls were reworked, and an independent complaint commission was founded. This is called “the Independent Police Complaints Commission” (IPCC).

Since then, ‘stop and search’ measures set up a protocal where the affected person can determine their own ethnic origin. The arrested person gets a copy of the recorded data with the number of the inspecting officer, and can thus turn to the independent supervisory body if they feel they were treated, and controlled unjustly. The information found in identity checks also includes the reason for the check. The data collected by the police is fed into a database that centrally holds all checks performed by the police.

The personal and sensitive information of the controlled person are kept anonymous, and are mainly used for internal purposes only. This is to ensure that this data will not reach the public. The recording of ethnic origin is meant to illuistrate which groups of people are controlled most oftenly. This allows the method of ‘racial profiling’ to be made visible. Statistics from the last few years show that black people and those from ethnic minorities were controlled at disproportionately high rates.

For example, from April 2007 to March 2008, Black people were controlled 7.4 times more and Asian people 2.3 times more than White British people. It is thus possible for NGOs, parties, and associations to denounce such practice with concrete numbers, and promote changes in policing.

The Interior Ministry urged the creation of measures to stop racial profiling. However, the situation evolved through legislative changes. Meanwhile, the indication of ethnic origin is increasingly voluntrary, making documentation of racial profiling difficult.