Children’s commissioner finds wide disparity with white counterparts in year to June 2023, with 88% of searches aimed at finding drugs

Black children are four times more likely to be strip-searched by police officers across England and Wales than their white counterparts, according to the latest nationwide figures disclosed by a watchdog.

The children’s commissioner also found that children under the age of 15 are a bigger proportion of those subjected to intimate searches, official figures from the year to June 2023 showed. Fewer than half of all searches of children in that year (45%) were conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult.

A report released on Monday also found that nearly nine out of every 10 of searches [88%] conducted by England and Wales’s 44 forces were trying to find drugs.

  • Five@slrpnk.net
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    4 months ago

    Dave Van Zandt’s site, Media Bias Fact Check puts The Guardian and Breitbart in the same (Factual Reporting: MIXED) category of credibility. Apparently this is because they both have articles where the facts are contested. This ignores the difference in size of the two news sources’ publication rate, the number of articles contested, and the seriousness and type of errors.

    MBFC is a fundamentally flawed credibility gatekeeper. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      “B-but then how will I poison the well for anything that challenges a center-right status quo by introducing it as biased (relative to the US’ center) and questionable without using an armchair analyst whose methodology is in no way scientific?

      Edit: to clarify what MBFC considers “MIXED”:

      Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

      They list like five fact checks, while The Guardian puts out basically quintuple that every day. And moreover, this is the sort of asinine nitpick that they classify as a “fact check”.

      “Private renting is making people ill.” “Private renting is making people ill, but maybe this happens with other housing situations too, we don’t know, so we rate this as false.”

    • OccamsTeapot@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      MBFC is a fundamentally flawed credibility gatekeeper. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.

      Absolutely. It’s hilarious that people care about fact checking enough to want to rate sources but apparently extend no skepticism whatsoever to these ratings. “Let’s just ask that one dude and go with whatever he says, I’m sure it’ll be fine”

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        “Bloody newspapers spreading Propaganda to control what people think!”

        “On the other hand this one guy with no oversight and no established brand name to defend, telling us all who to trust or not for all the news media in the whole World is absolutelly trustworthy and couldn’t possibly be a way to control which Propaganda people trust the most. I mean even the !world@lemmy.world moderators tell us he’s honest and these people have been selected by the impeccably meritocratic, fair and honest criteria of being the first to create the sub or being brough in by their mates”

        “The whole thing looks like a perfect chain of trust to me”.

    • Lime66@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      While that does show how unreliable mbfc can be, that isn’t quite the full picture. They do rate breitbart significantly lower in the credibility category compared to the guardian, as well as tagging them as propaganda, extreme right, and conspiracy theorists, which is an accurate takeaway for breitbart. Factual reporting is not all that mbfc covers

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Nope, nope, back it up a step. If your organization claiming to quantify “Factual Reporting” calls Breitbart “MIXED” in that respect (let alone puts it on the same level as The Guardian), you have absolutely failed at your job and do not deserve to be taken seriously by anybody.

        • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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          4 months ago

          MBFC rating for Breitbart -

          QUESTIONABLE SOURCE

          A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence (Learn More). Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source. See all Questionable sources.

          Overall, we rate Breitbart Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, the publication of conspiracy theories and propaganda, as well as numerous false claims.
          

          Detailed Report

          Reasoning: Extreme Right, Propaganda, Conspiracy, Failed Fact Checks Bias Rating: RIGHT Factual Reporting: MIXED Country: USA Press Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Website Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: LOW CREDIBILITY

          And MBFC rating for the Guardian -

          LEFT-CENTER BIAS

          These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation. See all Left-Center sources.

          Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on story selection that moderately favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks over the last five years.
          

          Detailed Report

          Bias Rating: LEFT-CENTER Factual Reporting: MIXED Country: United Kingdom MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Newspaper Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY History

          I think they’re doing their job reasonably well. It’s up to you whether you read the actual links or not

          • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I like how despite copy-pasting these large excerpts as a Gish gallop, you cut it off right before:

            Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

            That’s not at all what mixed is?? If you fail like five fact checks in five years while you put out more than quintuple that amount of articles per day, that’s not “MIXED”, and it’s literal orders of magnitude different than the disinformation factory that Breitbart is.

            Moreover, the fact checks don’t even seem to be accurate. “Private renting is making people ill.” “Private renting is making people ill, but maybe this happens with other housing situations too, we don’t know, so we rate this as false.”

            Absolutely asinine.

            • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
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              4 months ago

              So you can find all this information out by reading a bit more of the MBFC report?

              Cool, I’ll do that, and get a slightly more objective opinion than I would’ve got, and make my own decisions about the source.

              You continue barking at the moon like a leaded-petrol-huffing yank 😂

              Strange person!