Society
Would the police dare to stop and search Max Hastings?
Published 24 January 2000
Stop and search is back. Well, not quite. We are three quarters of the way there. The police have invented something quite ridiculous - stop and talk. And then maybe, maybe not, the search.
Whenever I write or speak of stop and search it is from experience. As I understand it, the police must have reasonable grounds for stopping and searching any citizen, and being black is not one of them.
In the past ten years, I have been stopped and searched a total of eight times, including five times in the first week of 1981, when I was the editor of a national journal, Race Today. Some senior police officer, somewhere on high, had imported a batch of police officers into Brixton and ordered them to stop and search every black male. They operated morning, noon and night. It was a blitz, without regard to "reasonable grounds". The only reason for such a sweep was simply for police officers to establish some macho authority over black men.
On later occasions when I was stopped and searched, the motive, in my view, was the same. Very late one night, I was on my way to my brother's, who lived just around the corner in Brixton. A gang of officers jumped out of a police car, as though they had finally come upon a dangerous criminal. I was pushed around until I ended up spreadeagled against the car while they rubbed me down aggressively.
Another time I was returning home after a dinner date, with the former deputy editor of this journal. On my way down Coldharbour Lane, one of Brixton's main thoroughfares, a street hustler asked me for 50p. Immediately a couple of officers, black male and white female, shouted my name and, as I turned, pounced on me and demanded to search me. I refused. They handcuffed me, took me to the police station, and had a sergeant search me. He found nothing and I was on my way.
But it is not only in Brixton that I have been stopped and searched. I went to the West End to buy a pair of shoes for a funeral. On Oxford Street, a young officer approached me, saying that he had seen me dipping in to handbags, attempting to steal. His account was a bare-faced lie. "A pig with a false tongue" is how I once described him. I refused to be searched. He called for back-up on his radio, and they arrived, a van load of them, spoiling for a fight. Like a chunk of dead meat, I was slung into the van and driven to West End Central. A perceptive sergeant heard the pig's lies, listened to my story and set me free.
Multiply my experiences thousands of times and you have a history of the relationship between the police and black men. I can only describe it as a deep desire to dominate black men because there is absolutely no objective need for stopping and searching citizens at random.
Stop and search hardly produces results. Take robbery, a crime I frequently witness in my part of town. By and large, it takes place in areas close to where the assailant has a bolt hole. He/she snatches and darts away, in which case, if the police are about, it is a matter of hot pursuit. Not stop and search. If it is a question of drug-pushing and the police see an exchange, it is again a pursuit of the criminal. Not stop and search.
Stop and search is a fishing expedition and the laziest imaginable form of policing known to man. White men are hardly stopped and searched at all - if they were, officers might well come up against Max Hastings, whose London evening paper so brassily recommends the stopping and searching of negroes.
How can this stop and search be resisted? If the police break the law by hindering the citizen's free movement, the citizen is entitled to use reasonable force to resist. And this is perfectly legal. If the officer puts his hand on the citizen, let battle commence, but the force in self-defence has to be reasonable, that is to say, enough to extricate oneself. If the police officer ups the ante, it is perfectly in order legally to match it. As Malcolm X said: "By any means necessary."
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