true) in the civil law world. What is true is that the latter, while probably the
more efficient, gives the court, and thus the state, far more power in the trial
procedure. Thus the common law situation where a jury deliberately acquits
an obviously guilty person to show disapproval for the law broken could not
happen under the inquisitorial system. Furthermore, the keenness of a prose-
cutor, and the police, to produce the ‘better argument’ can lead to a conviction
being secured with unreliable, or even false, evidence. Occasionally there have
been demands for the English system to be modified in the direction of
inquisitorial justice because of such failures in the common law trial system,
and indeed the Scottish criminal law system does have elements of this. The
point has recently been made that situations where one country tries citizens of
another for international terrorism, as with the trial (conducted in the
Netherlands under Scottish law) of two Libyan citizens accused of the
destruction in 1988 of an airliner over Scotland, require an inquisitorial system
to allay international public doubts about the prosecutions.
Institutional Racism
Institutional racism as a term entered everyday political and journalistic
language in the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 21st century. It
was used by a public inquiry into police mishandling of the investigation into
the murder, allegedly by white youths, of a black youth. The report claimed
that the investigating police force were ‘institutionally racist’; by this was meant
not that individual police officers were racist, but that there was a culture of
racism which the police force had inadequate mechanisms for combating.
Although this conclusion was sternly refuted by many, several chief police
officers of other forces bravely admitted publicly that they thought their own
forces equally guilty of such institutionalized tolerance for racist attitudes.
Since then the concept has been applied to several other public institutions in
the UK, including both the Crown Prosecution Service and aspects of the
National Health Service.
The introduction of the concept is important for two different interacting
reasons. First, there had been a tendency to say of the police that some degree
of racism was inevitable, because they were bound to reflect the attitudes of the
part of society from which junior officers were predominantly recruited, that
is, the white, urban working class. Acceptance of the institutional character of
this racism makes the point that, especially for services like the police, although
also more generally, there is a public duty to transcend the limitations of
recruitment bases. Secondly, it involved accepting that public institutions
should be aware that a minority of aggressive bigots can make the entire
atmosphere of an institution intolerant, even when the other officers do not
necessarily expound racist attitudes. In order to remove this perception from
Institutional Racism