One of London’s top judges has criticised Met Police officers for using an “offensive” code to refer to black people.
Judge Alistair McCreath QC, the Recorder of Westminster, said officers should stop using the term IC3 in their reports.
British police have used seven IC codes to describe the ethnicity of suspects since the late Seventies, including IC1 for white people. But Judge McCreath, overseeing a pre-trial hearing at Southwark crown court yesterday, said “only black people” are now routinely referred to using the system.
He hit out when reading an undercover officer’s witness statement of a black man allegedly buying drugs from a crack cocaine dealer. “He’s described as selling it to an IC3 male, I’m astonished,” said the judge.
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“It’s only black people that get called by this offensive sort of description, white people never do.”