We Are Under Siege From Racism, Say Ethnic Youths

Most young ethnic minority people in Scotland see the police as racist, according to the first independent study of their attitudes to law and order.

Academics found youths from minority backgrounds felt “under siege” from staring white neighbours and unfairly targeted by police officers who lacked “cultural sensitivity”.

The findings, commissioned by the country’s two biggest police forces and published today, come just as senior officers seek to reach out to third generation Scots, the grandchildren of the nation’s first post-war migrants.

Researchers from Glasgow Caledonian University spent months cataloguing the views of people aged between 16 and 25 from a variety of ethnic minorities, including Scotland’s largest, Pakistanis.

What they discovered was a huge gulf between how the police saw themselves and how young people saw the police.

“There are strong perceptions among most participants that some actions of the police amounted to racism and reflected cultural insensitivity,” the researchers said in one of their main findings.

“Many lacked confidence in the judgment of the police.”

Many young people also told researchers that they would not bother reporting racist incidents to the police, despite their perception of racism as part of their everyday lives, and something they were not prepared to tolerate.

However, the team from Glasgow Caledonian University also found that young people who reported “positive encounters” with the police, especially community officers.

Young ethnic minority people also said they felt police attitudes north of the border were far better than in England.

Senior officers at Lothian and Borders and Strathclyde Police, who commissioned the report, last night welcomed its findings, and not just because of some positive feedback about their policing.

They see the research as a “springboard” to broaden their contacts with ethnic minority communities, which were previously often restricted to elders who rarely share the views of younger people.

John Neilson, the assistant chief constable at Strathclyde Police in charge of community relations, said: “Although there has been a great deal of positive feedback, it was felt that the good relationship that we have with the black and minority ethnic community has generally been with the older generation.

“We needed to widen our engagement with young people and make it more meaningful and responsive.

“What is also significant about this research is that it is a truly independent assessment untainted by any bias or misconceptions. It allowed views to be made which might not otherwise have been made to police directly.”

The research was based on extensive interviews with young people of Chinese, Pakistani, Indian, Somali and mixed backgrounds, most early this year and all before the Glasgow Airport attacks and the brief spike in racist attacks that followed.

Police statistics, meanwhile, do not support the perceptions from black and ethnic minority youth.

Response times to racist incidents, for example, are faster than the average. And young people from an ethnic minority are less likely than average to be stopped and searched, despite the widespread view of young people that they are constantly “pulled up” by the police.

Many young people, especially Muslims, also made perfectly clear that they saw themselves as Scottish. They described racism as part of their everyday lives, but stressed that they did not see all Scots as racist.