Afternoon:
10°c
Because I am white and middle-class, I have been stopped and searched by the police only once in my whole life. Someone I know, who is neither, was last year stopped and searched five times in just over a month.
"You feel less of a person," says my friend. "You're standing there in the middle of the street with them poking through your bags and all the passersby looking at you." None of the officers has ever been violent, or abusive, but my friend still feels humiliated. He has missed trains and been late for appointments.
Once, two years ago, when he was walking in a mixed-race group, the officers picked him out and let his white companions go on. Once, when he answered back, he was arrested, had his DNA and fingerprints taken and spent six hours in a cell. Nothing has ever been found in any of his searches and he has never been charged with anything.
One of the things that annoys me most about the people who currently run London is the way they spend so much time congratulating themselves on their diversity and inclusiveness, while in practice pursuing policies that amount to straightforward racial discrimination.
My friend is an example of the statistical fact that if you are black, you are four times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than if you are white. That is the Met average: if you are black and live in Richmond, you are 13 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police of that borough. My friend lives in Richmond, and he sometimes feels that the police are telling him: you don't belong around here, get back to Brixton.
Now, however, as politicians of all parties - and colours - call for a stepping-up of stop and search, including a sweeping away of the requirement for "reasonable suspicion", many will say to my friend: tough titty. Kids are killing each other every week now. The two crimes that frighten Londoners most are gun crime and street robbery.
Both, unlike most other offences, are rising.
And though blacks are no more criminal overall than whites, they are statistically more likely to be involved in gun crime and street robbery - both as perpetrators and, more importantly, as victims. So the targeting of blacks is justified, and being stopped more often is something black Londoners need to put up with for their own safety, as well as everyone else's.
That, at least, is the argument of the stop-and-search lobby. Unfortunately, it is wrong. The racial disproportionality of stop-and-search is massive: far greater than anything which might be explained by blacks' somewhat greater likelihood of being involved in gun and street crime. Richmond police should not be singling out blacks for search; their borough has very low levels of gun crime and mugging. Its problems are drink-related disorder, car theft and burglary - all disproportionately white crimes.
But the more important difficulty with making stop-and-search one of your key tools is that it doesn't really work. After falling for some time, the number of stops in London went up again last year, amid the panic about teenage murders. So, unfortunately, did the teenage murder rate.
Only 11 per cent of stops under the current "standard" stop-and-search powers result in arrests for any offence at all, however minor. Only about three per cent of stops result in an arrest for possession of an offensive weapon, and fewer than one per cent of stops finds any sort of firearm.
The chances of the average gun or knife-toting teenager being caught by stop-and-search are, therefore, pretty low. This is a tactic that overwhelmingly affects the innocent. (And the fact that it does so suggests that for all the complaints about the current system, police officers' discretion is not unduly constrained.)
To make any significant difference to the circulation of knives and guns on the streets, you would have to flood an area with hundreds of officers, carrying out thousands of searches. You would have to place entire neighbourhoods pretty much under siege. You couldn't keep that up for more than a few days, and you'd probably cause a riot.
And if the requirement for " reasonable suspicion" was dropped, even the current 11 per cent arrest rate would collapse. The police would spend a lot more time searching a lot more innocent people. We already, in fact, have a preview of what that world would look like, because section 44 of the Terrorism Act already allows the Met to search anyone without needing a reason.
Since section 44 came into operation, there have been around 150,000 searches under it. The number of terrorist convictions as a result is believed to be nil, or at the very best low single figures. With section 44, we are pursuing - at immense cost - a tactic with a failure rate of almost 100 per cent, a tactic the police themselves say causes " significant tension" among ethnic minority Londoners.
I can already hear the cry: "If it prevents even one terrorist attack, or saves one teenage life, unrestricted stop-andsearch is worth it." That is seductive, but completely illogical.
The right question is not whether unrestricted stop-and-search saves lives, but whether it costs more lives than it saves. The right question is whether its crime-fighting effect is sufficient to justify the massive manpower resources it would consume, and sufficient to outweigh the massive damage in police-community relations that it would cause.
Effective policing depends on information from, and co-operation with, local people. If as a teenager your first encounter with the police is being stopped and searched without just cause, you won't feel particularly keen to help them in the future. Targeted, intelligence-led stop-and-search can be useful, but that's the precise opposite of what the politicians seem to want.
There are things we can do about teenage violence: tackling school exclusion, funding youth groups, offering support for parents. But those are boring, unglamorous and take a long time. Instead, we're going for the usual quick fix, the burst of policing theatre to reassure the TV audience - whether or not it can withstand searching examination.
Reader views (3)
An excellent, well-argued column. Why alienate the very citizens whose help the police most urgently need?
- Dave Hill, Hackney, East London, 01/02/2008 05:31
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What is hard to measure is the deterrent value. A low number of arrests could be good news. It's viewed as good news when applied to the percentage of positive breath tests.
If we start from the sensible position that those who carry drugs, guns weapons or stolen goods already have a propensity to commit those crimes then the only way they will stop if they think there is a risk of them being caught. If they think they may be stopped then that fear must increase.
- Vincent Philpott, United Kingdom, 01/02/2008 01:42
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What makes Andrew Gilligan an expert on policing London's streets and inter-racial relations. Police officers will tell you stop-and-search is one of the most effective tools they have for fighting crime. The fact that it doesn't result in an arrest every time is immaterial, it's main power is as a detterent and intelligence gathering tool. In any case, I would say an 11 per cent arrest rate is actually fairly high. I am not denying that stop-and-search creates significant problems, not least alienating disaffected black youths, but Gilligan's claim that it doesn't work is simply not true. Doing away with stop-and-search may be the right thing to do, but not for the reasons put forward by Gilligan.
- Charlie, London, 31/01/2008 14:22
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