Thread by @IRR_News

As criticisms grow of Trevor Phillips involvement in the government’s inquiry into the disproportionate impact of #Covid19 on BAME communities, @PHE_uk has said that a consultancy run by Phillips and Prof Richard Webber have the right skills and experience to aid the inquiry 1/14

This thread is aimed at testing this claim through the lens of Webber and Phillips' previous work in creating ‘coding’ systems marketed to police forces. 2/14

The research consultancy Webber Phillips is the UK distributor of ‘Origins’, a postcode-based classification system which allows the police to infer the cultural background of people involved in incidents by examining their names. 3/14

Origins claims to be a better way of identifying ethnicity than other methods, such as self-reported ethnicity. 4/14

In this Webber Phillips report for @alertmessages, Webber suggest that just as ‘members of different communities’ specialise ‘in different sectors of the formal economy, there could be ‘a similar degree in specialisation in different forms of crime’ 5/14
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Webber adds, 'The ability of Origins to profile perpetrators and victims of these crimes does provide the evidence on which to justify the targeting of members of particular types of crime to ensure that investigations are not based on stereotyping but on hard evidence.' 6/14

In this article for @PoliceP, Webber goes further explaining that ‘the minority population most likely to run petrol stations is also the one that is most proficient in ATM fraud’ and that ‘those who run taxi services have the best opportunities to engage in abuse of young girls’

Webber also problematizes issues of ‘diversity’ within ‘melting pot’ neighbourhoods such as Haringey, Waltham Forest & Newham. Neighbourhoods like this, he writes, are a ‘Tower of Babel where it is particularly difficult to find anyone who can speak for any community as a whole.’

‘The challenge of policing new and emerging communities is that it is not obvious who the leaders of any minority community are – or who might be controlling criminal networks’ he suggests. 9/14

So what is Webber’s conclusion?

His answer is that ‘different patterns of immigrant settlement also call for different forms of policing’.

10/14

This call for targeting diverse neighbourhoods for different forms of policing is justified by the postcode classification system, supposedly a more accurate name-based method of identifying ethnicity. But this needs to be challenged. 11/14

Only a minority of criminal events ever come to the notice of the police who have no means of tracing the ethnicity of the majority of those involved, whether in ATM fraud, sexual abuse or most other types of crime. 12/14

All this does is to lend a further gloss of seemingly scientifically based legitimacy to what remains little more than racial stereotypes about different ethnic minorities and their propensity for crime. 13/14

Surely, such generalisations and racial stereotypes, bodes ill for the credibility of the government / @PHE_uk inquiry. 14/14 ENDS