A few years ago, a leading judge, chairing a judiciary committee on race matters, was comparing notes with his deputy chair, who unlike him was black. Both were middle-aged, law-abiding men. The white judge remarked that, in the preceding ten years, he had been stopped by the police once. His colleague calculated that, in the same period, he had been stopped 34 times.
Yes, you’ve heard it before, or something like it. The idea that ethnic minority people feel the weight of policing on the streets far more than white people is such a fixture of British life now, such a political cliche, that for the most part it seems scarcely worthy of comment. The complaints about stop and search are taken as read. So it comes as a surprise to learn that something is finally being done about it. The Home Office is publishing a rash of research papers; a conference of experts and interested parties is being held on 4 October; and, before Christmas, the government is due to announce an action plan.
A bright new dawn? We’ll see. For all its grim familiarity, there is nothing resembling a consensus on this issue and, as so often, the more research people have done, the more confused and obscure the arguments have become. Yet the broad lines of the new Home Office approach can be guessed at with some confidence, and it is possible to discern some of its advantages and shortcomings.
Before we come to those, however, it is worth noting that two courses of action that might have brought about dramatic change were ruled out, even before discussion of the new action plan. These were the abolition of stop and search powers and the reform of the approach to possession of cannabis for personal use.
Withdrawing the power of stop and search from the police altogether may seem extreme, but has its adherents. Professor Lee Bridges of the law department at Warwick University, for one, believes the process is beyond redemption: “The more we understand how the police use stop and search, and the operational imperatives and working assumptions behind it, the less likely it appears that it will ever function in a non-racist manner.”
And, to the suggestion that outright abolition would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater – stripping the police of a useful power merely because it doesn’t work in some conditions – Bridges replies that there is no convincing evidence that this baby exists.
He has a point. Any efficiency-minded manager who judged stop and search on the figures alone would have to wonder whether the police might be more usefully employed doing something else. One recent study, by Marian FitzGerald for the Metropolitan Police, suggested that an arrest rate of 25 per cent was the best that could ever be hoped for, while in practice such levels are rarely achieved and figures of 15 or even 10 per cent are much more common. This, despite the law requiring officers to have “reasonable grounds for suspicion” before they initiate a search.
The overwhelming majority of people who are searched, therefore, are doing nothing wrong, and no amount of reform will change that. Bear in mind, too, that many of them are left affronted or upset by the experience – scarcely what the police want. To make matters worse (and here we come to the matter of drugs), among those who are arrested, at least a quarter are held for carrying small amounts of cannabis for personal use, a crime that, all the evidence shows, the public does not give a damn about.
So what is stop and search good for? It has a middling record in catching people carrying stolen property, but a good record in finding weapons (although the latter account for just 10 per cent of search arrests, and most of these could probably be made under other legislation). And, contrary to popular belief, very, very few arrests from searches relate to what we call street crime.
Even the Home Office’s own research makes clear that civilisation would probably survive if the power was withdrawn, so at the very least, given the proven record of stop and search in damaging police relations with ethnic minorities, abolition looks like an option worth exploring. But no.
Sir William Macpherson, the Lawrence inquiry chairman, declared in his report that the power to stop and search was “required for the prevention and detection of crime, and should remain unchanged”, a finding welcomed by the government with relief. Both Tony Blair and Jack Straw subsequently gave the power their personal endorsements, the Prime Minister declaring it “a vital weapon in the police armoury”.
The explanations for this view, not necessarily in order of priority, are these. First, for all its faults, stop and search undoubtedly solves some crimes that would not otherwise be solved. Second, it yields intangible benefits, notably in the areas of intelligence and deterrence. Third, rightly or wrongly, it is perceived by the public as valuable in the fight against crime, and crime worries the public more than anything else. And fourth, the police themselves regard it as indispensable.
On this last point, Fred Broughton, the national chairman of the powerful rank-and-file union the Police Federation, expresses himself in the starkest terms. “It’s about authority,” he says. “If you take away those powers, you take away our authority; and if the police are not the authority on the streets, you have anarchy.”
For all these reasons, abolition is a political impossibility. And, for at least some of the same reasons, so is any change in the drugs regime. Although a simple direction to officers to ignore small amounts of cannabis would eliminate needless arrests and prevent many young people acquiring criminal records for no good reason, we have to accept that it is not going to happen.
So what is going to happen? Delivering his report in February last year, Macpherson made one substantial recommendation for change to stop and search.
At present, only searches are recorded, a form being filled in afterwards by the police officer and made available later, on request at the police station, to the person searched. Macpherson, however, urged that all stops should be recorded, no matter under what legislation they were made, and that the record should be written on the spot and a copy given, then and there, to the person stopped.
The intention was clearly not only to tighten up recording generally and give a better picture of what was happening (the records include details of ethnicity), but also to increase accountability. Officers who have to give records to people they are dealing with face to face will be under greater pressure to be objective about what has just happened, and they may also be more cautious about initiating a stop and search procedure.
While scarcely revolutionary, this implies a considerable change in procedure – so considerable that it was one of the Macpherson recommendations that the Home Office, while accepting it in principle, put on hold pending some road testing.
In this interval, much has happened. First, there was a dramatic fall in the use of the stop and search power by the police, followed swiftly by a rise in crime. Police officers and Conservatives claimed a link. Others denied it. The statistics prove nothing either way. This debate, though furious, was essentially barren. Much more important to the practical question of reforming stop and search were FitzGerald’s research findings, which appeared last December. Her study was the fruit of a pilot programme in seven areas of London, studying the use of stop and search and, at the same time, testing new approaches of tighter management based on the principle of “quality not quantity”. The results were complex, because of huge variations between the pilot sites, but yielded striking insights.
They pointed to a serious problem of under-recording by the police, and also indicated that many searches failed to meet the requirements of the law – those “reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Perhaps most striking of all, they provided compelling evidence of a lack of consistency in the use of the power. Just as the national figures show big variations between police forces in their use of stop and search, so there were dramatic differences between the seven sites in London. There were even big differences between the approaches taken by individual officers.
In the words of Peter Jordan, the author of a thoughtful study for the Police Foundation: “The police do not use the power strategically.” He goes on: “This means that they cannot, when pressed, give a coherent account of how the power is used in principle.” In short, close examination appears to show that stop and search has been chronically under- managed, and FitzGerald’s findings on the “quality not quantity” initiatives certainly seemed to confirm that things could be tightened up.
All of which suggests that the Home Office proposals will embrace a range of measures to improve supervision of officers and monitoring of results, and that there will also be preliminary steps towards meeting the Macpherson recommendation on recording incidents, along with measures to educate the public about stop and search. Such a package may well produce positive results, but one problem remains.
Stop and search happens on the street, out of sight of sergeants and inspectors. Officers act on their own initiative, using their judgement, very often in confrontational circumstances. Suspects can be surly, abusive, even violent, and sometimes so can police officers. Even under the proposed Macpherson procedures, it will inevitably be officers involved in these events who record them.
But while the reforms described above are essentially managerial, much of this street stuff is beyond the reach of management: it is out there. And “out there” is where the main difficulties arise, particularly those that most worry ethnic minority communities.
Can we, should we, trust officers to do this job fairly? And can the government really ask black and Asian people to trust officers, when we know that no one can supervise them where it counts?
Macpherson made 70 recommendations in his report, not just one, and most, if not all, were designed to increase trust over time, across a broad front. Let us hope they work.
Time, too, will test any managerial changes to stop and search. But in the meantime, in the interests of building trust, it will be a pity if the Home Office does not take clear steps to ensure that this power – so vulnerable to abuse and so questionable in its usefulness – is exercised in future only to the minimum.
Brian Cathcart is the author of The Case of Stephen Lawrence (Penguin, £8.99)
Content from our partners
Related
