Discovering disparages: Using the Resource Centre to uncover BME experiences in the criminal justice system

The final post in our Race and Crime series comes from Shu Chee: A guideline for students researching disparages in sentencing, and how the Race Relations Resource Centre’s Criminal Justice collection can help.

Your task: Write an essay on the racial disparities in trial and sentencing.

So it’s assessment time again; you have organised your lecture notes, exploited Google Scholar and the Westlaw database, gone through dozens of journal articles…and yet you just can’t seem to begin writing. Why are all my readings all over the place? Do I have sufficient evidence supporting claims of ‘lighter skin, lighter sentence’? Are my sources reliable and relevant?

Have you been stopped and searched?

In the third installment of our Race and Crime series Teeah Blake introduces the issues around disproportionate stop and search practices in the UK.

Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice. Recognise these names? Perhaps you would recognise their faces. They are just a few of the unarmed Black men who have been killed by police in the USA in recent years, and with the help of camera phones and Facebook live, we have been able to see these shootings as and when they happen. The media coverage of these events has been extensive and received by many, leading to the re-ignition of the Black Lives Matter Campaign (#BLM) with protests all over the USA, as well as here in the UK.

Courtesy of Imgur

This most violent type of racial discrimination is rarely seen in the UK. However, there is evidence of a persistent and damaging form of discrimination against ethnic minorities by police officers in the form of disproportionate stop and search.

Image courtesy Chris White (www.flickr.com/photos/76345608@N00)

10 things you didn’t know about the stop and search of minority ethnic groups

The next post in our Race and Crime series comes from Holly Khambatta-Higgins and Robyn Moor.

Although most of us are aware that the police carry out stop and searches, few of us will have first-hand experience of the process. This means we’re basing our understanding of stop and search on television, newspapers and other pieces of media, which don’t always give the full picture. Luckily, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre has a great selection of resources, making it easy to learn more about the nature of stop and searches on minority ethnic groups.

Image courtesy Darren Johnson http://www.flickr.com/photos/idarrenj/

Based on our research at the Resource Centre we’ve created a list of the top 10 things you didn’t know about stop and search:

The O.J. Simpson case: The racial divide underlying the ‘trial of the century’

For the first post in our Race and Crime series, Shu Chee provides a short commentary and personal afterthought on Walter L. Hixson’s Black and White: The O. J. Simpson Case (1995) found in Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘Race on Trial’.

In Harper’s well-acclaimed To Kill A Mockingbird, Tom was treated as a second-class citizen and received an unfair trial after being accused of raping a white woman. Despite significant evidence proving his innocence, he was convicted, based largely on his skin colour. Although it is an overstatement to say that Tom is the fictional equivalent of the average, working-class African American defendant, it is undeniable that some institutionalised racism and disparities in sentencing do exist in real life.

Introducing the Race and Crime series

In this post Dr Claire Fox, our Academic Director here at the Resource Centre and Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University’s School of Law, introduces a recent student engagement project and the Race and Crime blog post series.

Courtesy of Tandana Archive

The Resource Centre has a wealth of resources that are regularly accessed by members of the public, community groups and professionals, as well as staff and students from across the University of Manchester and beyond. However, we recently identified a bit of gap in our user groups – that of undergraduate students from some sections of our own university. Our collections are highly relevant to undergraduate study across a wide range of humanities disciplines, but facilitating students to come down from campus to our location in Manchester Central Library is an ongoing challenge.

One for the Crime…

Next in her series of library indepth posts, cataloguer and book reviewer Jo takes a look at our Criminal Justice section.

Analysis of the section title ‘Criminal Justice’ brings me to wonder whether the two concepts (crime and justice) are exact opposites of each other. Are they mutually exclusive? Why not simply ‘Crime and Justice’?

Just as in the well-known phrase, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so one man’s crime can be another man’s justice, and indeed vice versa. How else could you explain miscarriages of justice, judicial decisions based on prejudiced information or opinion, vigilantism, or the ramifications of political protest, whether violent or non-violent?