ATTITUDES TO THE POLICE OF ETHNIC MINORITIES IN A PROVINCIAL CITY

Abstract

A survey carried out in Leeds, in areas with more than 10 per cent non-white households, investigated the attitudes of blacks, Asians, and whiles to the police and their experiences of them. It was found that Asians had more favourable attitudes and fewer among them had unpleasant experiences of the police than was the case with both blacks and whites. The relationships between attitudes and experience were explored. Blacks and whites were found to be more similar to each other than had been found in other surveys where area of residence was not controlled for. The areas covered in the survey contained just over half the blacks and Asians in the city, but only 6 per cent of whites, so the sample was not representative of the whole city. The attitudes to the police of Afro-Caribbeans (hereafter called blacks), Asians (from the Indian subcontinent), and whites in Great Britain have been looked at in several studies. One of the earliest was the Survey of Londoners (Smith 1983) carried out by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI). This found that blacks (and to a lesser extent Asians) tended to be more hostile to the police than whites. However, the whites differed in many ways from the non-whites, so the interpretation is not straightforward. The whites were selected to be representative of the whole of London, whereas nearly all the non-whites were representative only of those living in areas with more than 2 per cent non-white inhabitants. Since whites tend to be of higher socio-economic status and generally live in areas with less social deprivation, they would probably have had less experience of crime and of the police than the non-whites. This may in part explain the considerably higher stop and arrest rates of blacks, and the different attitudes to the police of blacks and whites. Other studies, such as those in Islington (Jones et al. 1986; Crawford et al. 1990) and in Hammersmith and Fulham (Painter et al. 1989), although carried out in only parts of London, still involved large populations (of over 300,000) with heterogeneous social conditions, which again might make the experiences of crime and of the police of the three ethnic groups not comparable with each other. This might account for the finding, once again, that blacks and whites differed in their attitudes to the police. The most recent British Crime Survey (Mayhew et al. 1989)—which included a booster sample of non-whites—also found differences in attitude. The only study of blacks and whites living in the same small area was that by Tuck and Southgate (1981) in Moss Side, Manchester. This found few differences between them. As part of a larger study of ethnicity and crime a survey was carried out in Leeds in 1987; this also controlled for area of residence.1 The survey was carried out only in