Black people in the Six Counties are almost four times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the PSNI.
According to recently released PSNI statistics, black people are stopped and searched at a rate of 37 people per 1,000 population, 3.7x the rate at which white people are stopped and searched (10 per 1,000). Despite this, almost 90% of searches ended without arrest.
At the point these statistics conclude (30 June), hundreds of families were still picking up the pieces of their lives, many still terrified to return home after coordinated loyalist attacks on minority communities across Belfast. Many will remember well that during the pogroms the PSNI stood idly by and allowed fascist mobs to burn people out of their homes. Now their own statistics show that, while Loyalists were left to roam free, black people were being disproportionately targeted for harassment.
In August 2025, the PSNI launched a “Race & Ethnicity Action Plan” which supposedly aimed to eliminate racism and sectarianism from the PSNI. Instead they spent the next year stopping and searching black people more than they previously did – 37% more, almost twice the increase of any other ethnicity.
Stop and searches, which increased by almost 10% overall in the year to June, have long been used by the PSNI as a blunt weapon to target and harass communities of those who have drawn the ire of Loyalism. Other figures show that Section 43 of the terrorism act was used more 1,300 times, an increase of nearly 200%. At the same time, Section 43A of the terrorism act was utilised nearly 650 times – an increase of almost 600% in just a year. These are the highest levels recorded, by some margin for these particular pieces of legislation.
The common theme is that regardless of how many stop and searches are conducted the amount of arrests are miniscule. They are used only as a tool of harassment by an armed wing of Loyalism and the British State to oppose any who counter the Orange dream.
