This long-read article was written by lower-sixth former Zion Kim, and shortlisted for the 2020 Fifth Form Transitional Research Project. The following provides a short abstract to his full essay, which can be found at the bottom.
Estimated read time of abstract: 2 minutes
Estimated read time of essay: 12 minutes
When I was writing this FTRP project, it was during a time when every social media platform, every news site was flooded with ‘facts’ or posts about racial injustice, and racism in the police force. There was especially a huge outrage due to the death due to police brutality of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Eliah McClain. However all these cases being American, I wanted to find out how serious of a problem this issue was in the UK. I had watched John Boyega’s speech and thought that if I was going to do an FTRP that I was interested in, I should do it on how ethnicity and financial backgrounds effect crime rates in the UK.
The moment I started my research, there was already a clear indication that there were more minorities being arrested in comparison to those of white ethnicity, the most ethnicity that was being arrested the most often being black. Not only this, but although it may seem as if the problem of racial prejudice has started to improve, data showed that whereas the proportion of white inmates in youth offender institutions overall decreased in the past decade, the proportion of black inmates had been experiencing an increase. This was not the only problem, as I also found out that those who were earning very low wages in comparison to the average, were much more likely to be victims of crime. So what could be the reason to all this imbalance?
Upon further research, I realised that this was not an easy question to answer. There was no straightforward answer, there were many causes and many problems that led to a simple answer. One of the main causes was the fact that households with lower income were often underfunded by the government, and that most minority ethnicities had a lower income in comparison to the white ethnicity. My research indicated that poor funding, poor education and many other factors eventually led to many financially struggling individuals, many of a minority ethnicity committing crimes and being charged. This was made no better with the police force being predominantly white, which could lead to more tensions due to difference in race.
However, what would be really useful would be to look at what can be done to improve the situation, as feeling down about the problem would not make anyone feel better. Although I wasn’t able to find the best solution to this problem, some things that the government could try to do would be to encourage higher employment rates in the education sector and the police force.
To conclude, I would say that my project showed that there is a grave problem that needs to be addressed: ethnic minorities are at a disadvantage in face of the UK’s law enforcement and system. There are many causes to this, however what we can do to help solve this is something that everyone can have a think about.
To view Zion’s full article, follow this link below.
The Unchained Library 