Thread: Out in the Guardian, @matthabusby and I can reveal that people of colour were 54% more likely to receive coronavirus-related fines than white people. That's for the period 27 March to 11 May, the latest timeframe we have data for https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/bame-people-fined-more-than-white-population-under-coronavirus-laws

That's not all: 22% of English fines went to POC, despite us being 15.5% of the population. Further analysis I've done for Liberty Investigates finds that of the 13,445 fines, 2,957 could have gone to people of colour. The proportionate number? 1557 https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/bame-people-disproportionately-targeted-by-coronavirus-fines

Our analysis also contradicts an initial claim from the NPCC that the first set of fines were issued proportionately. They weren't. And the NPCC has since changed how it records the fines' ethnicity data

It's not just about the fines. Under lockdown, there have been several instances of people of colour having bad experiences with the police, from Marie Dinou to Desmond Ziggy Mombeyarara. And, of course, these problems existed prior to the pandemic

For data fans, all my calculations and explanations can be found in the Liberty Investigates piece, and I would love to hear your thoughts https://libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/bame-people-disproportionately-targeted-by-coronavirus-fines/

Big thanks to @guardian for publishing, @matthabusby for putting up with me, Mike Shiner for his incredible amount of help, and @copwatcher, @ffrenchkatrin and @jpormerod for talking to me. Especial thanks to Shazia Zahieer and Tayyba Arif, who you'll learn about in the article