STOPPING STOPS

New Proposals Will Make Police Work Far More Difficult

The facts are simple and have been reported everywhere. Since the
Macpherson report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence the police have been
nervous about stopping suspicious individuals for fear of being accused of
being racist. As a result there has been a vast increase in street crime.
Now the Home Secretary wishes to increase the use of "stop and search", so
he has changed the rules to make it easier. The facts are simple, except
that each of them is either highly questionable or completely wrong.

It is true that since the publication of the Lawrence report in February
1999 the number of times the police have stopped and searched individuals
has fallen dramatically. In the first year after the report there was a
drop of 21 per cent and in the next year a further fall of 17.1 per cent.
It is not, however, clear that this decline was due to fear of being
accused of racism. The proportion of black and Asian people among those
stopped and searched rose sharply in London as the overall number fell. The
lack of police on the street provides an alternative explanation for the
reduction.

It is also true that the decline in the number of those stopped and
searched has taken place at the same time as a worrying rise in street
crime. Over the same period that the number stopped and searched fell by
17.1 per cent, the number of robberies rose by 12.9 per cent. It is easy to
leap to the conclusion that this is cause and effect. It may not be. Surrey
and Nottinghamshire bucked the trend in the year ending in April 2001, with
increases in "stop and search" of 28 per cent and 36 per cent respectively.
Yet both reported increases in robbery well above the national average.

The statistics, then, tell a complex and interesting story deserving more
research. The Home Secretary's claim to be assisting police to stop and
search people is in a different category. It is a quite extraordinary
distortion. His proposals to change the way stop and search is recorded and
reported will, instead, make life for Britains police far more difficult.

When an individual is stopped and required to turn out their pockets,
details of the encounter are recorded and provided to the individual
concerned. Prompted by the Macpherson report this procedure will now be
extended to cover situations where the search is voluntary. This is
perfectly sensible. But the proposals go much further. In future, when
officers stop members of the public without searching them they will still
have to provide them with a record of the incident. David Blunkett suggests
this will make police feel more relaxed about stopping people, since they
are better protected from the accusation of racism. This claim is nonsense.

A police officer stopping a group of youths leaving a nightclub at 2am in
order to ask them whether they have witnessed a knife attack will now have
to provide each of them with a completed form. Pilot studies indicate that
the form might take as much as seven minutes to complete for each
individual. The officer must also ask the individual their ethnic origin
and provide his or her own assessment, making tense confrontation highly
likely. Police time will then be spent collecting together the data and
providing statistics that indicate the ethnicity of those stopped. The
question of whether the stops were necessary or useful will remain unanswered.

Mr Blunkett has not acted to make "stop and search" easier. Instead he is
following a recommendation of Macpherson that he should have had the
courage to ignore. His willingess to obscure the truth when it suits him is
beginning to undermine his high reputation. He should stop and think.