Too many Black and Asian people are being stopped and searched by the police, the Lord Chancellor has warned.

The comments by Lord Falconer of Thoroton will add to growing concern that Muslim communities are being unfairly targeted by over-aggressive policing as part of the "war on terror". The Lord Chancellor told The Independent that the high numbers of stop and searches could not be explained by local, social or demographic conditions. He said: "It's absolutely critical that people believe that the law is enforced race blind. We have accepted that the disparity in numbers needs to be reduced because the disparity - between the black and ethnic minority groups that are stopped and the whites that are stopped - is much too high to be explained simply by different conditions in different places."