Police searching white people to balance search statistics

White people are being unlawfully stopped and searched by British police in a bid to give "racial balance" to stop-and-search statistics, says the Government's watchdog on terror laws.

The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Alex Carlile, said he knew of cases where suspects were stopped even though there was no evidence or suspicion against them.

He warned that police were wasting money by carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" which were an invasion of civil liberties and "almost certainly unlawful".

Carlile, a QC and Liberal Democrat peer, condemned the wrongful use of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 in his annual report on anti-terror laws.

He said police were searching people they had no basis for suspecting so they could avoid accusations of prejudice.

As the terror threat against Britain was largely from Islamist extremists, the figures showed disproportionately more Muslims and therefore more Asians being searched than whites.

But the peer said police should stop trying to balance the figures, and it may be that an ethnic imbalance was a "proportional consequence" of policing.

Civil liberty lawyers and black and Asian groups reacted angrily.

The vice-chairman of the Society of Black Lawyers, Raj Joshi, accused the police of playing into the hands of far-right organisations like the British National Party.

"The latest statistics show exactly what black and Asian communities have been saying for years: that they are being unfairly treated from stop and search through to sentence and punishment in the criminal justice system," he said.

Officers in England and Wales used the powers to search 124,687 people in 2007-08. Only 1 per cent of searches led to arrests.

- INDEPENDENT