Reducing Ethnic Profiling in the European Union - Open Society ...

for their suspicion, reducing their tendency to rely on “suspicious behavior or attitude”as grounds and “other” as the type of stop. These demands, combined withthe scrutiny of the ethnic data, required officers to think much more carefully aboutwho they were stopping and why. It led to a significant reduction in officers’ use ofstops (by roughly half) and a tripling of the hit rate.Police managers also used the stop data to assess the productivity of specific operations.In the case of a counter-terrorism operation that consisted primarily of stoppingindividuals at the train station, they found that the identity controls and stopsand searches were producing highly disproportionate stops of Moroccans and nopositive results in terms of arrests or citations. During the operation, persons ofMoroccan origin were being stopped 9.6 times more often than white Spaniards;once it was ended, this ratio went down to 3.4 to 1.Where using stop forms to collect ethnic data is a routine practice, officers becomeaccustomed to it and, arguably, the impact on their behavior may diminish over time.Such habituation can be addressed by a continued emphasis on non-discriminationand continued scrutiny of possible ethnic profiling. In the United Kingdom, the Policeand Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act Code of Practice places a statutory duty on supervisoryofficers to monitor the use of stop and search powers, considering in particular:“whether there is any evidence that they are being exercised on the basis of stereotypedimages or inappropriate generalisations.” 192 The code recommends that supervisory officersexamine the stop records to identify any trends or patterns that give cause for concern;it calls for such monitoring to be supported through the compilation of statisticalrecords of stops and searches by every police service. In practice, British police servicesvary considerably in the degree and spirit in which they implement these requirements.The case studies below show that stop forms not only provide a key measure ofethnic profiling, but also have added value in the supervision of individual officers,management of teams and areas, and decisions about operational tactics. The mannerin which stop data are gathered also has a bearing on its ease of use for managementpurposes. When officers are required to use paper forms, it is common practice for theforms to be checked at the end of each shift by supervisors who will assure that stopsare being recorded fully and have been conducted within the law; this supports closesupervision. However, supervisors also need regular statistical information to highlightpatterns and trends within their teams; such statistics should be broken down by individual,team, and area to allow comparison. Computer programs generating regularstatistical analysis provide objective evidence of patterns that must be explained orcorrected if they demonstrate disproportionality.110 STRATEGIES FOR REDUCING ETHNIC DISPROPORTIONALITY