Lawyers at the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre have called for police to give receipts to prevent arbitrary or racially discriminatory stops and searches.

Lawyers admit details of the receipts protocol would need to be refined. They put forward the proposal with commercial law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler at a legal matters round-table discussion last month. The legal centre wants residents to be given a receipt outlining the reasons they were stopped.

Inspector Byrt said there was no need for it.

"There are boundaries around police and their powers already. When it comes to approaching and speaking to people on the street we have to have legal grounds to do so and these are already enshrined in legislation.

"We don't see any benefit whatsoever in issuing receipts."

The call from the legal centre comes after the publication of its Race or Reason study in July,

which found that 43per cent of African-born youths in the Flemington area said they were not given a reason for being stopped by police.

It also found that of African-born youths, 48per cent believed that police stopped them because of their race.

Thirty per cent were always worried they would be stopped by the police whenever they walked down the street. "There is no issue with racial targeting or profiling," Inspector Byrt said.

"We don't target African youths. We simply respond to crimes as they occur and stop people if they fit the description of suspects. It's what we do irrespective of race."