What sort of mojo do you want your police officer to bring with them the next time you’re stopped and searched? The Metropolitan police asked Londoners to help them use this procedure better: one quoted consultation response was to stop using ‘bad energy’ in such an encounter. Perhaps the answer to London’s awful street crime problem is more astrology than criminology. Such comments have influenced the creation of a new ‘charter’ eighteen months in the making, which signals the advent of kinder, gentler frisking in the nation’s capital.
Of course, most people reading this piece will never have reason to be approached by a police officer in the street, detained and subject to their possessions being examined. However polite or empathetic your chartered police officer is, it is plainly undignified. Unless, of course, you are carrying a bladed weapon or drugs, or often both, intent on committing one of the 15,859 knife-related crimes detected by the Met last year – up 24 per cent on 2023. Then it could literally be lifesaving.
Except in clearly defined and time-limited circumstances, police officers must have a reasonable suspicion that you are carrying weapons or drugs in order for them to use their powers to search you. This is a necessarily subjective judgment. Sometimes this is misplaced. On rare occasions, the power is misused. Most of us would expect this interaction between the state and the citizen to be respectful and for there to be no motive by the officer beyond using their skills and instincts to keep us safe.
The two-year training programme for a Met police officer starts with 16 weeks in a college followed by two months supervised beat work with a tutor constable. It’s surely not unreasonable to think that treating people without fear or favour might play some role in this transformation into civilian in uniform. Why do we need yet more time, more consultation and yet more windy covenants to satisfy bureaucrats while the streets grow ever more dangerous?
But then the Met has been on the naughty step for a long time. From 1999 to 2023, report after report has laid bare appalling failures in form and function. A consistent feature of the many reviews of awful misconduct from McPhearson to Casey is institutional racism. While successive police commissioners have been at pains to point out that this is not the same as all cops being racist, that’s a distinction that is lost or ignored by a strident activist minority. It sees stop and search as merely the instrumental outworking of prejudice against London’s minority communities, in particular its black citizens.
London’s black community makes up 13 per cent of the population yet it is victimised at a hugely disproportionate rate – 45 per cent of all knife murder deaths in data released by the London Assembly in 2022. Moreover, the ten child victims of homicides in the capital last year, all were boys and nine were stabbed to death. The majority of these children were black or from ethnic minorities. Is it possible that failing to robustly tackle this appalling death toll could be the most racist thing about it?
As well as being murdered at disproportionate rates, black people are stopped and searched at rates that outstrip any other ethnicity. At 38.2 stops per thousand people, they are nearly four times more likely to be stopped and searched and at significantly greater risk of having a more thorough search carried out. However, much of this disparity can be accounted for simply because of the location of high crime areas, the profile of offenders and offending, and the people available and appropriate to search when police are in the neighbourhoods trying to stop people dealing drugs and carrying weapons that have a horrific impact on local communities.
Close to half of the London probation caseload for managing those convicted of knife crimes are black offenders. It is one thing to argue that police officers must use their powers respectfully, but quite another to maintain that quoting facts is racist. Criminal impunity relies on institutional timidity. Bad actors repeatedly conflate aggressive and assertive tactics to protect all Londoners from being victimised. Confrontational behaviour is inevitable when police try to interdict criminality at street level. These encounters are recorded, edited, uploaded and consumed sometimes before the last pocket is emptied. We ought to be more worried about the reported reluctance of officers to use their street powers legitimately for fear of years-long disciplinary investigations than occasional misbehaviour. ‘Less stop and search’ as no bereaved parent ever said.
Comments