hello and welcome to this video on ethnicity crime and justice there are differences between ethnic groups with regards to their prevalence within the criminal justice system in the United Kingdom there are also differences between ethnic groups with regards to the risk of being a victim of crime so depending on your ethnicity we're either more or less likely to be within the criminal justice system that is as either a victim or else as on who's been prosecuted for having committed a crime and as sociologists we want to know why firstly we can look at official statistics to help us understand what's going on a little bit more in the UK we generally find that black people and Asians are over-represented in our criminal justice system blacks are 2.8 percent of the overall population of the United Kingdom but 11 percent of the prison population asians are four point seven percent of the overall population but six percent of the prison population white people however are under represented they are 7 times less likely to be stopped and searched than blacks and 3.5 times less likely to be arrested and five times less likely to be in prison so what we see here is a bit of a misnomer something that's difficult to understand when we look at our demography and then we look at our prison population trying to work out why is it the way it is official statistics can only give us the numbers they don't really give us the why so we need to dig down a little deeper secondly therefore sociologists may decide to use victim surveys this is where they asked people what crimes they have been a victim of and this may give us more detail on why we see this over slash under representation within our prison population our criminal justice system among certain ethnic groups what we find is the victims can then identify the ethnicity of the perpetrators so that is the people who committed a crime against them what we find when we look at victim surveys such as the British crime survey is that crime is often intra-atomic so 90 percent of the crime where the victim was white one of the perpetrators was also white so generally speaking it would appear that people commit crime against people of the same ethnicity is intra ethnic however we tend to find also that victims often over identified blacks could be whole range of reasons for this could be because of labeling within the media GUI because of underlying racism they also only cover personal crime so crimes against an individual your individual person of which only a fifth of all crimes are actually personal crimes they also exclude under-16s so minorities actually contain a high proportion of younger people and so therefore that's going to warp the data and it also excludes crime against organizations such as white collar crime so crime by the middle classes thirdly instead sociologists may decide to use self-report studies these asked individuals to disclose anonymously their own dishonest and criminal behavior graiman Barling found that black and whites have a similar rate of offending around 43% was Asians have lower rates sharpened but found that those from mixed ethnic origins were more likely to self-report their crimes and there would be maybe a whole range of reasons why this might be the case so 27% of nails of Nyx ethnicity claim to abuse drugs in the last year - compared to just 16% of black and white males whites roughly 6% were more likely to use Class A drugs such as cocaine and heroin rather than blacks at 2% and Asians at 1% so again quite interesting statistics but perhaps we need to take them ever so slightly with a pinch of salt the findings of self-report studies challenged the stereotype of black people as being more likely to offend them whites uphold the stereotype of the law-abiding Asian but self-report studies could be flawed a whole range of reasons it could well be that some people decide to over represent their own crime that is makeup that they're doing more crime than they really are whereas other people may decide to keep it to themselves because they may not trust that the survey actually is anonymous the discrepancy between official statistics and self-report studies makes it hard to draw definitive conclusions on ethnicity and crime so this is what we're going to have to bring in the British sociology to find out really what's going on it is useful to look at the whole criminal justice system and to consider it step by step and consider to what and racism may play a role in over representing ethnic minority groups when it comes to policing so the act of police being out there bobbies on the beat doing what they have to do since the 1970s there has been a persistent claim of oppressive policing of ethnic minorities so leaders of ethnic minority communities have often gone on record in the media and said that actually the way the police behave towards ethnic minorities is oppressive they tend to overuse stop and search against those of ethnic minority extraction in particularly young black men and they often use military policing this is where they flood an area where a particular ethnic group is considered to live in large numbers and essentially sort of spy on and surveil people who live in that area because they don't trust them in terms of stop and search please from only require what is known as a reasonable suspicion to stop and search someone and we tend to find that blacks are stopped more often than whites now obviously there's an issue here with that concept of reasonable suspicion because it's very subjective it's very personal where every single police officer will have their own idea of what is reasonable in terms of suspicion however since the Terrorism Act of 2000 and since the terrorist acts of the last 20 years or so the number of Asian stopped has increased this could be a product of police racism though famously the McPherson report that came out in 1999 after the death of Stephen Lawrence was an investigation into that said that actually the Metropolitan Police was in fact institutionally racist that the way it behaves is actively racist and that amongst the rank-and-file members of the Metropolitan Police of the average Bobby on the beat there was a canting culture of racism so people making racist jokes and engaging in their policing practice in a racist manner terms of explaining this further it could also be a product of ethnic differences and offending but we need to consider the difference here between the low and high discretion stops so a low discretion stop is where the police act on intelligence so the police have been tipped off such as a description of the offender's or someone has done something someone's called up and said some of my property has been stolen this is what the offender looked like if the police see someone who looks like that description they'll stop and search them that's acting on intelligence that's a load discretion stop a high discretion stop is when the police act without intelligence that is they do it based on kind of their own thoughts and feelings their own ideas and it's in this type of stop that we tend to find that discrimination is more likely because if the police are hovering sort of racist ideas or stereotypes or prejudices this is where it's going to come out however the reason for stopping search could be a product of demographics so those who are young the unemployed manual workers and urban dwellers they city dwellers are more likely to be stopped regardless of ethnicity and we tend to find that we have more younger unemployed manual workers who live in cities amongst ethnic minorities so it might purify or it could be a product of racism there's a debate here to be had the next step in the criminal justice system is arrests and cautions figures in England Wales showed that the arrest rate for blacks is three point six times the rate for whites by contrast once arrested blacks and Asians were less likely than whites to receive a caution one reason for this may be that members of ethnic minority groups are more likely to deny the offence and to exercise their right to legal advice however not admitting the offence means they cannot be let off with a caution and they're more likely to be charged instead so what we have here is that often when whites are arrested if they have committed the crime they're far more like to say do you know what I committed the crime and what often happened is the police go well obviously depending on how severe the offence is we're going to give you a caution and let you go those from black Asian minority ethnic backgrounds often do not trust the police to actually pursue justice fairly and so if they have committed the crime they're far more likely to deny it and they're far more likely to alter legal advice as a result the police cannot issue a warning and so it has instead to move on to an arrest which obviously means it's going to become far more serious and the likelihood of prosecution and ultimately punishment increases in terms of prosecution the Crown Prosecution Service or the CPS is the body responsible for deciding whether a case brought by the police should be prosecuted in court study suggests that the CPS is more likely to drop the cases against ethnic minorities Barling and Phillips argue this may be because the evidence presented to the CPS by the play is often weaker and based on stereotyping of ethnic minorities as criminals so what's interesting is when the police do decide to prosecute say a member of a black age minority ethnic community who supposedly committed a crime the CPS often look at the evidence of God you know what there's not enough evidence here and so instead you brought me a case based on some stereotypes or some prejudice and so it gets thrown out often with a white individual who's been prosecuted there's a little bit more evidence and so the CPS actually take it to the next stage next we need to think about trial when cases do go ahead members of minority ethnic groups are more likely to elect for trial before a jury in a Crown Court rather than in a magistrate's court perhaps due to mistrust of magistrates impartiality however crown courts can impose more severe sentences if convicted so if you are prosecuted if the CPS say yes you get given a choice you can either go to a magistrate's court or Crown Court in a magistrate's court there's going to be three magistrates and no jury and they're going to decide whether or not you did in fact commit the crime if you did obviously they'll punish you but the punishment is much lower in terms of what they can hand out whereas if you go to a Crown Court we tend to find those from black Asian minority ethnic backgrounds trust crown courts more because they think well I'm going to be tried in front of a jury of my peers I've got a better chance of pleading to them and maybe being let off they're more like to trust that system then trust judges and lawyers and solicitors and so on and so forth and so when they do that if they are found guilty we tend to find the punishment is higher and so there's a problem or discrepancy here between different ethnic groups in terms of convictions is therefore interesting to note that black and Asian defendants are less likely to be found guilty in 2006 7 60 % of white defendants were found guilty as against only 52 percent of blacks and 44 percent of Asians they suggest suggests discrimination in that the police and CPS may be bringing weaker or less serious cases against ethnic minorities that are thrown out by the courts in terms of sentencing custodial sentences that is going into prison going into custody for a period of time were given to a greater proportion of black offenders 68% in the whites 55% or Asian offenders 15 percent whereas whites and Asian's were more likely in the blacks to receive community sentences which are generally considered more lenient theirs may be due to differences in the seriousness of the offenses or independence previous convictions however a study of five crown courts found that even when such factors were taken into account black men were five percent more likely to receive a custodial sentence on average three months longer than white men so if you are black and you are male you are generally going to prison receiving a custodial sentence for longer than any other group within the criminal justice system in terms of pre-sentence reports one possible reason for harsher sentences is the pre-sentence reports written by probation officers Hudson and Bramall argued that peer Czar's allow for unwitting discrimination they found that reports on Asian offenders were less comprehensive and suggested that they were less remorseful than white offenders they places bias in the context of the demonizing of Muslims in the wake of the events of 11th of September 2001 or 9/11 as its referred to colloquially so what we're seeing here is before sentencing takes place a probation offer has the probation officer has to put together a pre-sentence report which goes to the magistrate or to the judge who's then going to read that and work out what type of sentence to hand down if it says well jimmies person seems remorseful they you know worked with the police throughout all the processes they gave up evidence willingly the chances are the sentence will be much more lenient than if it says we actually this person isn't remorseful this person didn't really cooperate and so on and we generally find again there's a ethnic dimension to this or a racist dimension to this that we need to be aware of in terms of prison in 2007 just over a quarter of the male prison population were from minority ethnic groups including 15 percent black and 7 percent Asian among British nationals 7.4 per hour in jail compared to 1.7 per thousand Asians and 1.4 per thousand white people as such blacks were 5 times more likely to be in prison than whites black and Asian offenders are more likely than whites to be serving longer longer sentences within the total prison population all minority groups have a higher than average proportion of prisoners on remand that is awaiting trial this is because ethnic minorities are less likely to be granted bail while awaiting trial that is allowed out to be in the community before they actually come to trial finally we can note the existence of similar patterns in the US where two out of five prisoners held in local jails were are black while one in five are Hispanic so now we have the statistics and we have looked at a bit of a breakdown of the criminal justice system or what's going on at each stage and thought about the role that races may be playing in the discrepancy between individuals of different ethnic groups within it we now need to consider how we can go about explaining differences in offending if indeed there are differences in offending first-generation immigrants from the 1950s onwards in the UK were primarily from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent and generally we found that this or these groups had a lower rate of offending than average on the 1970s however conflict had begun to spark between the police and African Caribbean individuals or individuals from that community and this led to a fear of a rise of black criminality so it's often suggested actually was the first generation of immigrants were very law-abiding the second generation perhaps were not as law-abiding and it may well be that actually the first generation put up with a lot of racism when they first arrived in the UK but the second generation having been born in the UK what I'm willing to do so and that might be one of the reasons why we see this spike in criminality amongst in particular blacks but also other ethnic minority groups by the 1990s and 2000's there was a rise of the fear of Asian gangs clashes between Asian youths and the police in the wake of Islamist terrorist attacks and there's been a fear of the enemy within and again the media played a key role in this but subsequent governments have also often fostered this idea and empowered the police almost act upon these kind of ideas as well with regards to theoretical explanations for ethnic differences in offending left realistically and young put forward the idea that blacks do have a higher crime rate because of their level of relative deprivation marginalization social exclusion and alienation so the argument here is as a community this group is more relatively deprived so they are aware of their deprivation visibly other groups they are more marginalized and socially excluded so they are pushed in the margins of society they are overlooked by political leaders and policymakers they are voiceless in many regards but also alienation they feel disconnected maps in the world of work or disconnected from others within society this appears to refute the level or effect of police racism so Lee and young a pent effectively say this is not really a police racism thing it's because this particular group is suffering from these various different issues and actually that's why they commit more crime I was looking at differences in black and Asian stuff and searched figures it would seem to imply the police are highly selective in their racism which is unlikely so what Lee and Jung say is well if the police are racist why are they only stopping that particular ethnic group and not other ethnic groups if that was the case there's a bit of a selectivity here in terms of their racism and generally races aren't selectively racist they are racist in a blanket sense therefore there must be real differences between these groups and their levels of deprivation and so on however it could be that the rates may be lower for Asians not because they are less likely to offend but due to please stereotypes so perhaps the police stereotyped blacks as aggressive and Asians as passive and so therefore less likely to stop and search or investigate Asians versus blacks however as I stated before this may be changing since 9/11 and the rise of Islamist terrorism within the West another theoretical explanation we might want to pull upon to explain ethnic differences in defending is the work of neo-marxist such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall they would argue that statistics do not accurately reflect reality but are a social construction that stereotypes ethnic minorities as inherently more criminal so they would be arguing here that generally who is producing these two statistics it's going to be the bourgeoisie or their various tools of States their various different apparatus of state in particularly within the RSA if we want to pull upon a bit of outers there Paul Gilroy said that black criminality was a myth that ethnic minority crime is a form of political resistance against the imperialism of the past and the racism of the present what Gill was saying was when blacks are engaging in criminality is not actually criminality it's essentially civil war that they are fighting back they are engaging in a revolutionary act against the imperialism of the past where white empires from Europe when in conquered other parts of the globe and enslaved black minorities or black groups and also the racism of the present which would discuss previously however as we know first-generation immigrants were law-abiding therefore is unlikely the colonial struggle was passed down one would expect instead that it would be purposely not passed down more over crime tends to be inter-ethnic so the biggest victims of black criminality tends to be members of the black community themselves Stuart Hall and others said that the more panic over rising crime by ethnic minorities serves to distract attention away from the crisis of capitalism so actually this is the way the bourgeoisie is saying to the workers to the Paula Terry out of which I think minorities are a part of don't think about the fact that capitalism is exploiting you don't think about the fact that you are being constantly used as a form of wage slavery don't think about the fact that the bourgeoisie of growing fact on your labor instead focus on each other and focus on racism focus on climb amongst yourselves and that will prevent the proletariat forming class consciousness and aiming their ire at the bourgeoisie in capitalism in general however terms of criticisms this does not show how the crisis of capitalism leads to a moral panic specifically and left wheel it would say that reaction is not in fact panicky but real and that it's kind of makes sense to be panicked in the face of overwhelming crime statistics we now need to consider ethnicity and victimization there's been increased focus today by sociologists on the racist victimization of ethnic minorities within our society racist victimization is when an individual is selected as a target because of their race ethnicity or religion which is quite broad rather than having a very specific focus on just race we have also ethnicity and religion it's worth mentioning at Steven Lawrence's murder in 1993 was obviously was at the hands of a particular group of racists was often considered or is considered as a result the McPherson report to be the outcome or the product failures by the police which was motivated by racism also in the British Crime Survey we find these crimes categorized as racist incidents is when an incident is perceived as racist by the victim and racially or religiously aggravated offenses this is an assault or whatever type of climbing might be by so unmotivated by hostility towards a certain of race or religion so two different names for essentially the same concept of racist victimization the police recorded 54,000 racist incidents in England Wales in 2014 15 but much is believed to be unreported the British crime survey estimates that there were in fact eighty nine thousand racist incidents so there's a big difference there and the Shin number of these incidents goes way to this idea that actually we have a bit of an issue with the Goths to racism in the United Kingdom 38,000 racially or religiously aggravated offense has occurred in 2014-15 and 8.6 thousand people were prosecuted or cautions so it's unlikely that that is all of the people who engaged in these activities so again we've got this idea that many people seem to be getting away with it people from mixed ethnic backgrounds have a higher risk of being a victim of crime 27.9% more so than blacks 18% Asians 15.8% and whites at fifteen point seven percent so certain groups are far more likely to be a victim than others now the differences in these statistics on victimization may be partly due to also being young male and unemployed because we tend to find that those who are young those who are male and those who are unemployed are far more like to be victims and other groups in our society if there are therefore more of these types of people in your group or in your ethnic community there's a higher chance of victimization therefore so again it could just be a numbers game but of course racism appears to be a stronger argument here members of black Asian minority ethnic groups often coordinate their responses to races victimization we found in the past that they have engaged in things such as fireproofing their doors and letter boxes to prevent far-right groups from pouring petrol through letter boxes and setting fire to it for example self defense campaigns have been put together to help those who are elderly in those communities prepare themselves just in case they should be attacked even physical defending their neighborhoods so number of years ago when we had the riots going on in parts of London but also parts of the UK in general for that week we had Sikhs coming out onto the streets in various parts of the UK engaging in kind of foot patrols to defend their area and defend their livelihoods and their shops and so on because they didn't want them to be caught up in the riots now this should be understood in light of what is known as the under protection by the police it's the idea that when the police are deciding which areas to police which areas they're going to protect as it were where they're going to be putting their bodies on the beat they may decide actually not to protect the areas where they know there are large numbers of ethnic minorities and this again could be potentially motivated by racism in 1999 report to into the Stephen Lawrence case found evidence of professional and competence institutional racism and a failure of leadership in this regard that's it thank you very much