Cumbria Police disproportionately stops and searches black people – Cumbria News and Star

Cumbria police officers disproportionately stop-and-search black people, according to newly released police data – which Cumbria Police said is partly due to traffic stops of non-residents on the M6.
Figures from Police.uk show that, per 1,000 Cumbrian residents, black people have been stopped and searched by Cumbria Police more than any other group between December 2024 and May 2025.
According to the data, 75.993 out of every 1,000 black or black British residents were subjected to a stop and search while only 7.013 out of 1,000 white people were given the same treatment.
The number of searches of white residents was 3,452 while it was 44 for black residents.
Cumbria Police attributed the figures partly due to traffic stops on the M6.
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The next largest group is ‘Asian or Asian British’. Cumbria Constabulary carried out 33.642 stop and searches per 1,000 residents, less than half of the amount performed on black residents.
Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Cumbria Constabulary Chief Superintendent Matt Kennerly said stop and search “is never used lightly”, and that “internally [the police force] review our stop searches and work hard to understand any disproportionality”.
Chief Supt. Kennerly said that all members of the force aim to treat both residents and visitors with “respect” and be “free of bias, racism and discrimination of any kind”.
“Cumbria has a small settled black community and when comparing stop search data, which also includes people out of our force area per 1,000 population, it can inflate the proportion of stop search figures and can be misleading, basing around small numbers and older census data, not representative of our communities,” he added.
Police analysis, according to the chief superintendent, “shows us that a substantial proportion of the minority ethnic group stop searches conducted were on our major arterial routes of the M6 and A66 through Cumbria, which are based on intelligence in combatting criminality and the supply of drugs”.
“Many of the individuals stopped were not residents of the county,” he said.
Cumbria Police said it is committed to the national police race action plan, a set of objectives to improve outcomes for black people acting in or with police, and aims to “act fairly and actively root out bias and discrimination from our organisation”.
It has also implemented an independent community scrutiny panel to challenge and improve police behaviour.
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