Post Office used racist term for Black people, documents show

theguardian.com:

Lawyers investigating post office operators in the Horizon computer scandal used a racist term to categorise Black workers, according to documents released to campaigners.

Investigators were asked to group suspects based on racial features, the results of a freedom of information request found.

The document, which was published between 2008 and 2011, included the term “negroid types”, along with “Chinese/Japanese types” and “dark skinned European types”.

The Horizon scandal, described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history”, resulted in more than 700 post office operators being prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting because of faulty accounting software installed in the late 1990s.

The operators were filing shortfalls in their returns, which led to the Post Office suing them for the difference. Some spent time in prison, and it has been linked to four suicides, the Daily Mail reported.

Of the language used on the document, one former operator, Teju Adedayo, who was given a one-year suspended sentence for false accounting in 2006, told the Times: “It’s absolutely disgusting. I cried when I saw this document, they were collecting this data to obviously distinguish how they were going to treat people. It’s unbelievable.”

Responding to the freedom of information request by Eleanor Shaikh, a campaigner on the issue, the Post Office said it was a “historic document” but that it did not tolerate racism. “The racist language used in this document was unacceptable,” it added.

A spokesperson said: “We fully support investigations into Post Office’s past wrongdoings and believe the Horizon IT inquiry will help ensure today’s Post Office has the confidence of its postmasters and the