The brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer has brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets across the world, including in Europe. They demand justice, and an end to police abuses. Politicians must heed these requests.
The reform of the police is a long-standing issue in many European countries. Discriminatory police checks and excessive use of force are often the top layer of the daily lived experience of racism for many Europeans. Structural discrimination still keeps millions of our citizens belonging to ethnic minorities on the margins of our societies, in particular in employment, health, education, housing, and the criminal justice system.
Ethnic profiling by the police illustrates this problem well. A 2017 EU-wide survey by the Fundamental Rights Agency shows that of over 25,000 respondents with different ethnic minority and immigrant backgrounds,14% had been stopped by the police in the 12 months preceding the survey. In France a national survey showed in 2017 that young men of Arab and African descent were twenty times more likely to be stopped and searched than any other male group. In the UK – where the law requires police to collect and publish disaggregated data on police stop-and-search practices – official statistics for 2017-2018 show that Black people were nine and a half times more likely to be stopped than white people in England and Wales.
