London, Aug.6 (ANI): British police are reluctant to probe crimes committed by the country's ethnic minorities due to fears of being branded 'racist', a report has claimed.ccording to the think tank, Civitas, pressure to show racial sensitivity may have been behind the initial failure to properly investigate Asian street grooming gangs in the North of England.

Jon Gower Davies, a former academic, linked the failure to police being branded 'institutionally racist' by the Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, which he says left police 'shackled' by the bureaucracy.

According to the Daily Mail, a pamphlet released by Civitas finds Macpherson lacked evidence for the charge of institutional racism, which he says 'lacks substance'.

The paper also quoted former Labour MP, Ann Cryer, as saying that the police failed to investigate properly because they were 'petrified' of being branded racist.

His remarks came in the wake of recent incident in which a gang of Asian men, mostly of Pakistani-origin, was jailed for plying teenage girls with alcohol before raping them.

According to the paper, Davies, a former Labour councillor, described the lack of investigation into sex crimes as a case of 'reverse' institutional racism in which the views of victims, vulnerable white girls, were not taken seriously. (ANI)