Officials who abuse their powers of stop-and-search to further a racist agenda should be charged for wasting police time, a member of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry panel has said.
Dr Richard Stone, one of the four men whose damning conclusions in the 1999 Macpherson report that looked into the killing of the black teenager, led to major changes in UK race relations, said that officers who targeted suspects on grounds of their skin colour alone should be charged with misusing public resources.
While sentencing two of the killers of the black teenager last week, Stone said such a move would improve public confidence in stop and search, a police power that is under increasing scrutiny over claims of 'racial profiling'.
"It is a crime to waste police time in this country. A racist officer is an incompetent officer, and if they're wasting police time they should be charged," The Guardian quoted Stone, as saying.
"One black lad said to me, 'They're chasing after me, having a bit of fun because I'm a black boy, but they should be following intelligence," he said.
"That's wasting police time. Why aren't they charging these officers with a crime?" he added.
The recent sentencing of Gary Dobson, 36, and David Norris, 35, to a minimum of 15 years and two months and 14 years and three months respectively for the 1993 killing of Lawrence in Eltham, has renewed the focus on stop and search, a policing tool criticised during the public inquiry into the teenager's murder.
According to the paper, Macpherson's report identified stop and search as an issue, highlighting disparities in its use, including unrecorded and temporary stops of vehicles driven by black or Asian people.
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