The Bianca Williams stop and search verdict did not support her claims of 'racial profiling'

Video footage corroborates police claims of Ricardo Dos Santo's "erratic driving"

Some of you may remember the righteous indignation that flooded our social media networks back in July 2020 when the stop and search of Team GB athlete Bianca Williams and her partner Ricardo Dos Santo made headlines.

The police claimed that a car with tinted windows took off at speed and drove erratically, failing to stop and driving on the wrong side of the road. Video footage provided by the police corroborated these claims in full:

Video footage also documents that an irate Williams and Dos Santo were not exactly shining examples of co-operation when they finally did decide to stop for the police:

After a sustained period of belligerence and shouting, a policeman had to ask Dos Santo “Are you going to be an adult and behave?”. To which the answer continued to be “no”.

Williams and Dos Santo would publicly claim that they were stopped and treated the way they were solely because they are black. Williams would go on to assert that “the UK is very racist” and demand that the police commissioner step down.

Claims of ‘racial profiling’ were taken as statements of fact by the chattering classes and the UK found itself embroiled in another race row before a single bit of due diligence had been carried out in the direction of the incident.

Well, after a near 4 year investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, a panel has found two of the five officers involved guilty of ‘gross misconduct’. This piece of information without the proper context is already being celebrated as proof Williams’s and Dos Santo’s claims of ‘racial profiling’ were substantiated.

However, when you look at the actual details of the verdict, you will discover no such claims about racial profiling were found to be true. In fact, three of the five officers facing allegations for ‘gross misconduct’ were completely cleared of any wrongdoing.

So, what of the two officers that were found guilty of gross misconduct?

Their guilt appears to relate to something entirely different. From the BBC:

PC Jonathan Clapham and PC Sam Franks - lied about smelling cannabis in Mr Dos Santos' car and so had breached professional standards of police behaviour in relation to honesty and integrity.

The panel said it was likely the smell had emanated from another area.

The hearing was told those officers were "not seen to attempt to verify the smell", which led to them becoming "trapped in a lie" when they gave evidence.

Panel chairwoman Chiew Yin Jones said their behaviour amounted to gross misconduct.

This is a tad confusing as it implies there was a smell of cannabis present at some point, but the officers failed to ascertain whether it was coming from the car—and therefore claiming that it was coming from the car amounted to a lie. Both these officers have now been sacked.

After the verdict, Dos Santo would say the allegations from the police about his “bad driving” (amongst other things) were “false” and based on “racist stereotypes”. He went on to link his treatment to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. Dos Santo also said “If we can’t trust the police to be honest when they have stereotyped black people, what hope is there?” This was said despite a near four year long investigation concluding none of the officers were guilty of racial profiling, or breaching ‘police standards over equality and diversity’. And in light of video evidence showing Dos Santo driving in precisely the manner he had been accused of. In short, the stop and search was entirely justified.

Despite these facts, this whole sorry episode will be re-written as another data point for how racist the UK police are, thus making policing more difficult, many people irrationally afraid and all of us less safe.