POLICE officers have been issued with guidance after equality chiefs took action over “discriminatory” use of stop and search powers with ethnic minorities.

Thames Valley’s Chief Constable Sara Thornton has sent officers eight “instructions” to be followed when using the powers.

She took action after the Equality and Human Rights Commission deemed the force had failed to eliminate the risk that there would be “acts of racial discrimination by members of the police force in using the stop and search powers in the future”.

The commission said this “amounted to a practice of unlawful indirect racial discrimination”.

In an email to all frontline officers, Mrs Thornton said: “This is a very serious matter.

“The commission thinks that we are using the power in a discriminatory way and that the force has not given sufficient guidance to prevent this from happening.

“The EHRC are particularly concerned that officers are making decisions based on someone’s ethnicity. This is unlawful and completely unacceptable.”

An agreement was being worked out with the commission but she listed eight immediate points for frontline officers to follow.

These include officers being sure there are “clear grounds” to stop and search someone.

She wrote: “The mere fact that a person is in such an area will never be enough to search them without additional grounds.”

Stop and search must never be used to gather intelligence, only to find evidence of an offence, she said.

Rory Campbell, 27, of Mole Place, Greater Leys, who works with disaffected youngsters and has been stopped by police, said: “It makes you feel like a criminal. They had no reason to stop me.

“I guess it’s down to the personal views police have and the prejudices they have. They are not necessarily racist but they might have an image of a black or Asian person and they bring that to work.”

Andrew Viney, secretary of the Thames Valley Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file police, said: “There’s certainly no evidence that any officer or groups of officers have been discriminatory in their use of powers.”

He said: “We fully support any officer that uses stop and search in a manner that is lawful, proportionate, reasonable and necessary on persons regardless of their ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, religion or gender.”

Between February 2009 and April last year, 1,302 black and minority ethnic people (BME), were stopped and searched in Oxford, compared with 3,128 non-BME people.

About 17 per cent of Oxford residents are from ethnic minorities, but about 29 per cent of those stopped were from this group.

In the Thames Valley, officers stopped 6.3 members of the black population and three members of the Asian population for every one member of the white population.

Roy Probert, the force’s community relations manager, said: “It’s important to note that the EHRC found no evidence of discrimination in Thames Valley Police’s use of stop and search, but did find the ratio of searches to be disproportionate.

“We would like to reiterate our strong commitment to using stop and search powers in a lawful and proportionate way.”