ABSTRACT
Claims that the police misuse their powers of stop and search and disproportionately target minority ethnic communities have been a consistent feature of wider debates about the problematic nature of police ‘race relations’ for several decades in Britain. As with many of the other issues covered in this book, such concerns can be traced back much further than the post-Second World War era. Indeed, analysis of police relations with minority communities is complicated by the fact that associations between criminal behaviour and ethnic or ‘racial’ origin appear to pre-date the establishment of professional policing institutions along modern lines. Prior to the foundation of the Metropolitan Police service in 1829, English society had become familiar with the notion that some forms of crime were somehow linked with particular groups. Media claims that various types of offending were associated with certain ethnic groups were a feature of eighteenth-century England. For example, during this time an apparent rise in ‘footpad crime’ was blamed on migrant Irish workers who were also held to cause problems for the authorities as they ‘brought with them the foreign habit of resistance to street arrest’ (Pearson, 1983: 236).
