A new Care Quality Commission report into mental health care in England has found a doubling of crisis referrals in a year. The report also raises concerns about the overrepresentation of black people being detained under the Mental Health Act act, finding they are 3.5 times more likely to be detained than white people.

This article tells the stories of Devon and Tiwa who both believe their race influenced the shortcomings in the care they received, in Devon's case 40 years ago. He said: “Nothing has changed. Everything is still the same – only it’s more covered up now by clauses in the Mental Health Act that make it look fair but the equality and justice are not there.”

The chief executive of Mind, Dr Sarah Hughes, said: “The common threads between Devon and Tiwa’s stories, which span several decades and transcend generations and genders, show how far we still have to go on stamping out racism in mental health care.”
While Hughes welcomes the CQC report, saying it shows some positive early progress on implementing the Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework, “it is ultimately more damning evidence of the barriers that people from racialised communities face while trying to get help and recover”.

​Read more here.

London's Metropolitan Police has published a “charter” for stop and search, two years after it was severely criticised in an independent review for “over-policing and under-protecting” Black Londoners. The report by Baroness Casey demanded a “fundamental reset” of stop and search, which has long been considered to be used in a discriminatory way against members of ethnic minorities.

The charter follows 18 months of engagement with overan 8,500 Londoners of all ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. It includes commitments that officers should use respectful communication and tone when carrying out stop and search, that they will be given improved training and supervision, and that complaints will be handled more effectively.

Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, said the charter was not about reducing the use of stop and search, but about “doing it better by improving the quality of encounters, informed by the views of the public it is intended to protect”.

The power to stop and search was introduced as part of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 following the Brixton riots in 1981, if the police had “reasonable grounds” for doing so. The Macpherson report of 1999, which found that the Met was “institutionally racist”, accepted that stop and search was necessary but called for all stops to be recorded and monitored.

Researchers have commented that evidence of stop and search's effectiveness is "mixed" with little to suggest if provides an "effective deterrent to offending". Stop and search is "more effective at detection", but still most searches result in officers finding nothing.

​Read more here.