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Hey @ITVMartha. Your piece on the @itvnews 10 tonight showed the statistic that black people are 9x more likely to be stopped & searched than white people. You even gave this statistic the apparent credibility of being labelled ‘Source: Home Office’. But what you have done...
...is apply the HO figures for total of black and white people stopped & searched to their respective proportions in the general population. This is misleading and wrong, since the vast majority of the population, whatever their ethnicity, will not be on the streets in the ...
...relevant locations and therefore available to be searched. The best study to illustrate this principle is to be found here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-stop-and-search-race-myth - but if that is too long or convoluted then I have a simple analogy which will demonstrate the point: Let us suppose that ...
... when compared to national population, cats were 9x more likely to be run over than dogs. Would you conclude drivers unfairly & disproportionally target cats, or understand that while most dogs are kept indoors, most cats roam the streets and so are there to be run over? ..
...If you and your colleagues would understand this rather simple but crucial fact then perhaps you would stop repeating this inaccurate and divisive misinformation. Thanks.
You will see from that study that, from the *available* population there appeared no significant bias, if anything white people were very, very slightly more likely to be stopped and searched.
