Correction- I used to be a copper but I'm alright now
I don't know what (if any) individuals or groups are being targetted at the moment.
To use stop and search effectively, you have to target the individuals or groups that the information/ intelligence suggest are responsible for the offences you are trying to combat.
The link you quoted above carries a lot of data but, this strand of the thread was instigated by a stabbing. The data in your link relating to knife crime was extrapolated from information from The Met-
In relation to knife crime, a 2018 report entitled ‘Justice Matters: Disproportionality’[footnote 11] references data collected by the Metropolitan Police Service. This work showed that in London in 2017, 50% of knife crime offenders were BAME (up from 44% in 2008). In this total, 50% were under the age of 25 and the majority (90%) were male. 50% of knife crime victims were BAME. A similar pattern emerged when examining knife crime with injury. In 2017, 83% of offenders were male, 35% were aged between 17 to 24, and 69% were BAME. Victims of knife injuries shared a similar profile with offenders. 78% of victims were male, 32% were aged between 17 to 24, and 55% were BAME. Ethnic disparities were also evidenced when looking at knife possession. In 2017, 53% of possession of knife suspects were Black, and 37% of all suspects were Black men under the age of 25. This resonates with the arrest data on stop and search which showed that 56% of all people arrested for offensive weapons following a stop and search were Black.The Met is a very different and totally fucked up organisation compared to Wiltshire Police or my old employer- Thames Valley Police. Extrapolating the stats for the whole of England and Wales on figures from The Met is like basing information about Swindon Town FC's performance against figures produced by Manchester City FC- not singing from the same song sheet. Granted as I said before, every force has officers whose motives are suspect. Once identified, these officers should be dismissed and barred form policing for life.
So, to further answer your question about who is being targetted- if the intelligence and information for Swindon suggests that a particular crime category is being commited by a particular section of the community, be they white, black, asian, eastern european, whatever, then they should be the ones subjected to more stop and searches.
The thing that the people defending blatantly racist policing by quoting that "50% of knife crime" figure never mention is that a significant chunk of that figure is possession charges.
Unsurprisingly if you focus your stop and searches disproportionately on young black men you find more knives on young black men. Where policing chooses to focus its attention has massive impact on crime statistics.
I can't think of a single policing initiative of targeted harassment of a particular community, ethnic group of age group that hasn't been aimed at a relatively powerless section of society, or that has had any degree of success that isn't completely outweighed by its negative impacts.
We know that pretty much 100% of corporate fraud is committed by corporations but the fraud squad aren't empowered to get RBS to turn their metaphorical pockets out, because "they match the description" of an organisation that helped to fuck the world economy 15 years ago.
anyway you'd think from the tabloids and tv that London was the only city with a knife crime problem. Glasgow's was proportionately worse (and pretty much all white incidentally) but it adopted a multi agency approach using a public health model, which has been massively more effective than the Mets approach.
