Labour MP accuses police of racial profiling after being pulled over in her car

Dawn Butler was stopped by Metropolitan Police officers while driving in London.

Labour MP Dawn Butler has accused police of racially profiling her after she was stopped by officers while in a car.

Labour MP Dawn Butler has accused police of racially profiling her and called on officers to “stop associating being black and driving a nice car with crime” after a vehicle she was travelling in was pulled over for questioning.

The former shadow equalities secretary described being the passenger in a BMW driven by a friend, who like her is black, in the streets of Hackney, east London, when they were stopped by Metropolitan Police officers on blue lights.

Ms Butler, a vocal critic of stop and search, recorded a video of the incident at around midday on Sunday, with police under heightened scrutiny over incidents of alleged racial profiling.

Scotland Yard said the stop was a result of an officer having “incorrectly entered” the car’s registration plate into a computer to wrongly identify it as a vehicle registered to Yorkshire, but did not explain why the search was carried out in the first place.

The MP for Brent Central, in north-west London, broadcast the incident on Twitter, posting: “I just got stopped by police driving through Hackney… more details to follow.”

Having filmed the incident, the MP’s footage of the stop showed an officer saying police were carrying out searches because of “gang and knife crime”.

Ms Butler told the officers: “It is really quite irritating. It’s like you cannot drive around and enjoy a Sunday afternoon whilst black, because you’re going to be stopped by police.”

Later, Scotland Yard’s statement said: “Prior to stopping the vehicle, an officer incorrectly entered the registration into a police computer which identified the car as registered to an address in Yorkshire.

“Upon stopping the vehicle and speaking with the driver, it quickly became apparent that the registration had been entered incorrectly and was registered to the driver in London.

“Once the mistake was realised the officer sought to explain this to the occupants, they were then allowed on their way.”

Speaking to Channel 4, the MP said there was “no other reason” for the stop, other than racism.

She said: “I asked them categorically why have you stopped us? I said if you are stopping us because we are driving a nice car then there is something wrong, if you are stopping us because the car is registered to North Yorkshire then there is something wrong, and if you are stopping us because of the colour of our skin then there is something wrong.

"You can scratch your head of think about this any way you like, I can’t really figure it out, but at the end of the day if you are North Yorkshire you are very welcome to come to Hackney or Brent or anywhere else as far as I am concerned because we live in a free country.

"So there was no other reason why we were stopped by the police apart from the colour of our skin and it is a fairly nice car.

She added: "We know that the police is institutionally racist and what we have to do is weed that out. We have to stop seeing black with crime. We have to stop associating being black and driving a nice car with crime.”

Additional reporting by the Press Association

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