UK Police have been accused of stopping and searching innocent white people in an effort to balance racial quotes, a UK watchdog head has claimed.

Head of the antiterroism watchdog Lord Carlile of Berriew said in the organizations annual report that the searches were “almost certainly” illegal and that police were wasting time and money by carrying out “self-evidently unmerited searches”, which were also an invasion of civil liberties.

The Times noted that the searches came in response to a “backdrop of complaints from rights groups that the number of black and Muslim people being stopped and searched by police was disproportionate.”

Lord Carlile said that a racial imbalance in the numbers of people stopped because they fitted a terrorism profile was fine “as long as it is not racist.”