Are the police still racist?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2019

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1993, an 18 year old black teenager, Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racist attack in East London. The police messed up the investigation into his killers. The inquiry that followed led by the judge Sir William Macpherson was one of the most damning documents to emerge about the police – describing it as “institutionally racist”. Twenty years on the barrister and broadcaster Hashi Mohamed has made a documentary about what has happened since for Radio 4. We speak to him about the legacy of Macpherson, about stop and search, and whether the police still have more to do to tackle racism. Producer: Philly Beaumont Mixed by: Nicolas Raufast Edited by: John Shields And you can get Hashi’s documentary. Macpherson: What happened next - is on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003741

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.6	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:08.2	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:10.9	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today are the police still racist?
0:27.0	We're asking this today because of knife crime and some of the solutions being proposed to tackle it.
0:37.0	I just did a quick search online. I typed in stabbing and I got the main headline today which is the 20 year old man in court accused of murdering
0:45.0	Jody Chesney, who was stabbed to death in a park in East London.
0:48.8	But I also found the funeral of a 16 year old stabbed in Birmingham. There's a man in his 20s stabbed over the weekend in
0:55.4	Bogner Regis on the south coast, there's a 19 year old stabbed on a bus in London who's
1:00.0	in a critical condition. Now there are long-term solutions which seek to address the root
1:06.2	causes and there are immediate answers as well and among those is stop and search. The police literally stop people who might be carrying a knife
1:15.9	and they search them. Disproportionately, the people being searched are black and for anyone who thinks
1:21.9	that the police are racist, they often point to stop and search as evidence of that.
1:29.5	The person we wanted to talk to about all of this is a barrister. He came to this country in 1993 as an unaccompanied
1:36.1	child refugee from Somalia. When he arrived he didn't speak any English. Now, along with his legal
1:42.3	work, he makes documentaries.
1:44.0	He's called Hashi Mohammed and his latest documentary is about the judge who first said the police were racist
1:52.0	in a report that focused on the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
1:56.0	When Hashi Mohammed came in this morning, he wanted me to find the newspaper because he's in it.
2:01.0	There's an article about him and that judge, Sir William McPherson, making the documentary.
2:06.0	How cool is that? That's his ancestors. That's his wife, late wife Sheila.
	...

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