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Why do we have these?

For many years people who ran the police and other services used by the public did not bother to check whether people of different ethnic backgrounds were treated unfairly because they believed that their staff were not racist.

After some clear evidence (eg Stephen Lawrence case)that people and whole services could be racist sometimes without even realising it, the police and most other services are now required to monitor the use of their services by people from ethnic minorities.

To do this there has to be someway of describing the ethnic background of people.

Although this list (on the right) seems far from perfect it is the best we have at the moment and is standard across all services.

The police use this on their Stop & Search forms to allow them to prove that they do not unfairly "pick on" people from ethnic minorities.

Asian or Asian British