My Lords, with the leave of the House, I cannot let the opportunity go past without congratulating my noble friend Lord Sharkey on what is a phenomenal achievement. I am very grateful to the Government for the support that they have finally given to his amendment.
I turn to another contentious issue. Amendment 214Q stands in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. As we have just discussed, with government support my noble friend Lord Sharkey has moved amendments—and we have just passed those amendments—to grant pardons to those convicted of offences that only gay men could commit and that are no longer on the statute book because they were considered discriminatory. These offences are symbolic to the gay community and it is striving to ensure equality in law and in society as a whole.
There is another offence that is symbolic to another minority, which is no longer an offence on the statute book and is considered by many to be another example of what amounts to an historic injustice. Parliament repealed the offence because it was accepted that it was being used in a discriminatory manner by the police; it is the offence of being a suspected person loitering with the intent to commit what was originally an indictable, and later, an arrestable offence. Although
the term “sus” has recently been more widely used to describe the use of police “stop and search” powers, it was originally confined to the criminal offence of being a suspected person under Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824. The offence required the evidence of two witnesses, usually two police officers patrolling together. The usual evidence was of a suspected person being seen to try three car door handles, in an attempt to steal the car or from it, or the suspect putting his shoulder to the doors of three homes, with the intention of committing burglary.
The difficulty with the offence was the absence in almost every case of any corroboration, either from witnesses other than police officers, or any physical or forensic evidence. Both the police officers and, usually, young black men, who were almost exclusively the target under sus, knew that it was the word of two police officers against a young black man with no other witnesses or evidence or any other corroboration. This allowed unscrupulous police officers to invent evidence against those who had, at least on that occasion, done nothing wrong.
Of course, some will say that a miscarriage of justice did not occur on every occasion of someone being convicted of being a suspected person and, of course, I cannot say that that was the case. However, I can say—I hope that Members of this House agree with this—that thousands of innocent young black men were convicted, which caused huge pain and distress, destroying the trust and confidence between the community and the police.
I was a police officer—a bobby on the beat, a patrol officer—at the height of the use of that aspect of Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act. In 1975 and 1976, the year I joined the Metropolitan Police, more than 40% of those arrested for sus were black people, when at the time black people accounted for only 2% of the population. It was because by the end of the 1970s you were 15 times more likely to be arrested for sus if you were black than if you were white, far more than the disproportionality in stop and search, that in 1980 the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended the repeal of the legislation. It also threatened to introduce a Private Member’s Bill if the Government did not take action, but the Government did.
There was a great deal of concern, even among police officers at the time—me included—over the use of the offence, in that we knew about the claims of the black community that it was used as a tool to oppress black people. If there was evidence of another offence—for example, attempted theft of or from a motor vehicle or attempted burglary—not only were these offences less likely to be open to question but the penalties were more severe. In other words, if there had been substantive evidence, physical or forensic evidence, which in those days would have been simply fingerprints, then the much safer, more acceptable and far less contentious route was to arrest and charge for the substantive offence rather than sus.
My second comment is anecdotal. I was at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court with someone I had arrested. The stipendiary magistrate, Toby Springer, would want to hear from the arresting officer in every case except for those of being drunk and incapable. The case just before me was an arrest made by a colleague for whom
I had respect for his honesty and professionalism. He had arrested someone for sus, and the young black man who had been arrested pleaded guilty to the offence and was fined. Downstairs in the cells, where the young man had to pay his fine before being released, I spoke to my colleague, and I remember this very distinctly. I said to him that he had restored my faith in sus because here was a trusted colleague with someone who had pleaded guilty in court to the offence, so the criticisms made by the black community, at least in some cases of sus, were clearly unjustified. He told me what had happened. He and a colleague had turned a street corner and the person he had arrested looked at the police officers and ran away. The officers ran after the youth and caught him. The youth was given the ultimatum, “Do you want attempted burglary or sus?”. The youth said, “Sus”. Presumably realising that the odds were stacked against him, he then went through the whole process admitting to something that he had never done.
Sus is another example of an offence that should never have been on the statute book, or at least an offence that was designed to deal with soldiers coming home from the Napoleonic wars and making a nuisance of themselves should not still have been on the statute book 150 years later. Not every part of Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 was repealed by the Criminal Attempts Act 1981, but those other offences are, and should be, a debate for another time.
Bearing in mind how long it has taken my noble friend Lord Sharkey to achieve what he has achieved for the gay community through his long campaign for justice, and in the absence of the equivalent of an Alan Turing figure regularly to hand in the case of sus, I am not expecting instant agreement from the Government. However, I ask the Minister to think carefully about what has been a symbolic offence for the black community. It has created huge pain and distress for decades. To pardon those convicted under this legislation—repealed because of its acknowledged discriminatory application and potential for misuse—would be of immeasurable importance to the black community.
Not only did sus damage relations between the black community and the police, it damaged relationships between the generations in the black community. The first generation of migrants from the Caribbean had great faith in the police and when their sons were arrested they did not believe their tales of the police acting improperly in inventing evidence against them. It drove divisions between generations as well as between police and the subsequent generations. Granting pardons to those convicted of being suspected persons loitering with intent to commit an indictable or arrestable offence would be a huge step forward in healing the pain caused and the damage done to the trust and confidence the black community as a whole had in the police. It would also be a much-needed catalyst to dramatically improve those damaged relations as we work to create safer communities for all. I beg to move.