NEARLY five per cent of the subjects of police stop and search in Cumbria are black and ethnic minority people, despite the group making up less than two per cent of the county’s population.

Data released by Cumbria Constabulary shows that 1,420 stop and searches were carried out between August 2017 and July this year, the most recent 12 months for which data is available.

The figures show that in the cases where the ethnicity of the suspect was recorded by officers, 4.1 per cent were BME. Just 1.5 per cent of the population in Cumbria identify as BME, according to 2017 population estimates.

No ethnicity data was recorded in seven per cent of cases.

Cumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Peter McCall said people should not “jump to conclusions” about officers racially profiling subjects.

“I suspect that of the black and ethnic minority people we have in Cumbria, which indeed is a very small number, there will be a significant number of people in that community who are younger people who might be the sort of folk who are on the street and might be stopped and searched,” he said.

“The police don’t target any ethnic or gender group. There’s no such thing as racial profiling. The rules are very tight and police officers need to have good reasons to stop and search people. It’s about behaviour profiling and crime profiling and that’s exactly how it should be.”

Chief Constable Andy Cooke, who is the National Police Chiefs Council's lead on organised crime, said stop and search was about “criminality not race”.

He said: "It is about disruption and putting the fear back on criminals: that visible approach to stop-searching those individuals who our communities know are causing the most harm, damage or violence.

"Those people should regularly be getting stopped and searched on our streets."

Across England and Wales, there were fewer than 270,000 stop and searches conducted by police over the last year. Use of the powers peaked in 2008 and 2009, when 1.5 million were carried out each year.