DORSET Police are to be questioned over why stop and search figures for black people remain high in the county.

The latest nationally produced figures show police officers across Dorset continuing to stop a higher percentage of black people, compared to the county’s population, than almost anywhere else.

In Dorset a black person is almost 20 times more likely to be subject to a stop and search while the national average chance of that happening if you are black is seven times more likely than a white person.

The last time the figures were produced the multiplier was 25 times with the county said to have been a national outlier on the measurement for at least a decade.

Dorset’s police and crime panel were noticeably silent on the issue when it was raised at Thursday’s meeting, all but three declining to ask any questions, or make a comment.

One of those who did speak, Cllr Sherry Jespersen, asked whether the time had now come for some answers on the reasons why the force figures were so high.

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“It seems to me that this has drifted on for a decade – is this the time when we say enough is enough?” she said.

Chief executive of the police and crime commissioner’s office, Simon Bullock, spoke about ‘elephants in the room’ over the issue.

He said the key points were whether the Dorset stop and search figures represented a stand-alone anomaly or were symptomatic of a wider problem within the force. The second question was whether the force use to stop and search was having an impact on crime.

He said that over the years the Dorset force and the police and crime commissioner’s office had found themselves in “an unhelpful loop where positions have become entrenched” and no understanding had been reached over disproportionate stop and search figures.

When the issue was last raised in September 2020 it led to the resignation from the panel of a councillor who made what was perceived by some as an inappropriate remark over stopping and searching black people. The panel later disassociated themselves from the comment.

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A new panel to look into the issue has now been set up, meeting for the first time next week and reporting back towards the end of next year.

Police and Crime Commissioner David Sidwick told an online meeting on Thursday he was determined to tackle the reasons for the disproportionate number of stop and searches involving non-white people, but needed some additional data and to ask further questions of the Chief Constable.

He said the new panel would be expected to review the existing statistics, look at bodycam images and shadow police officers on duty: “I am going to treat this as a priority improvement area and I will keep challenging it until we get there,” he said.

For the year ending 31 March 2021 there were 2,678 stop and searches in Dorset – 2,032 of these involved white people, 178 black people, 62 Asian people, 126  people from other ethnic minorities, with the remaining 280 being unknown.

Based on 2011 Census population data, this gives three stop and searches for every 1,000 white people, compared to 55 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people, giving a disproportionality ratio of 19.5 to 1.