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

individual and community confidence in policing.” The exercise of stop-and-searchpowers should not only be “within the law,” but should also be demonstrably fair,effective, and inspire public confidence in the police.The report placed the onus on police forces to demonstrate through regular monitoringthat their powers are being properly, taking into account the volume ofcomplaints; the number of fines (fixed penalty notices), cautions, arrests and chargesarising from stops; the impact on crime profiles; and the level and quality of localintelligence-gathering. The policy note identified several elements critical to publicconfidence, including the quality of local complaint resolution and the willingness ofthe police to provide an explanation or apology (where appropriate) and to learn fromcomplaints. It recommended that investigations emerging from complaints shouldfocus on the intelligence and authorizations that led to the stops and searches, aswell as the individual officer’s knowledge of the powers and proper procedure, ratherthan just on the alleged misconduct.The depth and detail of the IPCC’s investigations and recommendations reflectboth the longer history of concern with ethnic profiling and the availability of ethnically-disaggregatedstatistics in the UK, which facilitate inquiries of the sort describedabove. Elsewhere in Europe, scrutiny of ethnic profiling is less common and more challenging.This is due to factors including oversight bodies’ common focus on individualcomplaints rather than patterns of law enforcement practice, the lack of ethnic data, andthe challenges of proving discrimination in individual cases of abuse by law enforcement.Ethnic profiling may not readily arise from individual complaints, as profilingoften involves actions such as identity checks and stops and searches that individualsview as relatively routine annoyances and frequently do not see as serious enough towarrant the effort of making a complaint. Where complaints do appear to reveal patternsof ethnic profiling, additional research may be necessary to develop a clear pictureof the prevalence and severity of allegations of ethnic profiling.A final challenge lies in the substantiation of complaints. In complaints of discrimination,as in many other complaints of abuse, adjudication frequently must bemade on the basis of the account given by each individual—the officer and the civiliancomplainant. Complaints investigations frequently find little or no material evidence orwitnesses and have great difficulty in finding against an officer’s account of the reasonfor their action. Such incidents do not generally provide a reliable means of capturingethnic profiling practices. (This is not the case in serious abuse incidents where theremay be medical evidence of physical abuse.) The difficulty of substantiating individualcomplaints further highlights the importance of broader investigations into patterns ofpractice by oversight bodies.REDUCING ETHNIC PROFILING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION 59