The use of stop and search by the police, particularly in London, has often come under criticism. Most often it’s been about ridiculous cases where someone has been stopped or, more seriously, the deeply held suspicion amongst many communities that their members are irrationally singled out by the police for far more searches than their numbers or crime rates justify. This argument about what is sometimes called disproportionality should not only be of concern in terms of wanting to see the police free of discrimination, but also of concern in terms of wanting the police to be using their time effectively to catch criminals. If the police are wasting time irrationally persecuting particular communities, it’s not just those communities who suffer. We also suffer from the waste of police time that could have gone on better things.
So when I was recently reading various committee papers from the Met Police, as you do, my eye was caught by a document about stop and search in London.
Ah, I wondered: so how do patterns of stop and search match up with crime hotspots?
Alas, the police don’t know as a matter of course:
The MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] is unable to ‘hotspot’ where stops are taking place or overlay them against crime hotspots or taskings because there is no field on the current Form 5090 – used to record stop and search – to record a Geo-code, and the database that stores the data does not Geo-code the location. The Personal Digital Assistants – palm-top computers – recently introduced by the MPS do have GPS capability, however, they are not GPS enabled and therefore it is not possible to Geo-code stops recorded on the PDA.
The police do go on to say they’ve done some individual research, but it’s a pretty damning indictment of their IT set-up that fundamentally the police can’t match up the work they do to stop crime with records of where crime takes place. It’s not even that they are struggling with antiquated IT equipment, kept in use to cut costs. It even applies with the “recently introduced” new equipment.
So then I wondered: but surely at least the police know the outcome of their stop and searches, e.g. how many convictions occur per 1,000 stop and searches?
Alas, once again the police doesn’t know:
The MPS is unable to provide any data relating to persons charged or cautioned subsequent to a stop and search because this information is recorded separately on two different databases which are incompatible. Arrests and subsequent case disposals are recorded on the national NSPIS custody computer system, stops and searches are recorded on the MPS Crimint Plus ‘Stops’ database.
Once again, quite underwhelming. Quite how the police are managing their work when they don’t know if an activity actually results in people being charged or cautioned is a real puzzler, but given the police don’t match up stop and search with crimes, charges or cautions it’s a tactic that almost certainly isn’t being used in the most effective and appropriate way.
The Met go on to say, “The Next Steps Project involves a number of activities intended to demonstrate the effective and efficient ‘intelligence led’ use of stop and search”. With a bit of luck (or even some prodding from London Assembly members, hint hint) that may involve taking rather more seriously the need for proper data to answer the questions “are we doing this in the right places?” and “do we end up catching criminals?”.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
The Joy of Six 1590
What is Christian nationalism?
Latest PollBase is out, with all the British voting intention polls since the 1930s
David Allen
David Warren
Tim Rogers
Peter Wrigley
Cassie
4 Comments
They’re useless. They’re also a bunch of inveterate liars (“wearing a bulky coat, jumped over the barrier”), so when they say they can’t match the data, it doesn’t actually tell you very much.
A few years ago Belgium disbanded its police force and started again. We should do the same.
In the U.S., it’s a long-drawn-out struggle to get police to fill out stop cards at all; then to enter actual or apparent details of race, age, gender, etc.; then to have the police aggregate the data, and then to have the results released in usable form to the public so there’s some way of judging whether racial (or other non-germane) profiling has taken place.
Part of the difficulty stems from American litigiousness (a characteristic inherited from 17th-century British society, but also from the American bias towards private action over government regulation), where there’s an understandable fear that evidence of racial profiling will lead not only to unwelcome administrative, political, budgetary and personnel actions, but also to costly and exhausting civil rights lawsuits. There’s also tension over the issue of collecting data between city councils, municipal administrations, police commands, the police unions and individual officers.
See, for example, the decades-long struggles between the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the police departments of Providence (where I live) and other cities or towns.
They don’t have geocoding?
Surely they record a street name? I would assume that their GIS system would be using OS MasterMap.
With some free data from OS Code Point (this was made available as OS OpenData last April) this could be done relatively easily and cheaply (OS Code Point gives a point to a street and postcode).
The Met seriously need to learn how to use the resources they already have!
Ladies and gents,
Just a quick line from someone in the job.
Whilst IT is something we street coppers do not have to worry about, I can see the incompetencies you are highlighting in simple statistics gathering.
Stop & Search is a valuable tool, and whilst it figures may (one day when they’re successfully collated) show that only 25% of searches result in arrest (that is an estimation from my experience as a neighbourhood officer in the East End) the majority of the other 75% of searches are good for gathering evidence. We find drug paraphernalia that we don’t arrest for, we find empty paint aerosols that we don’t arrest for, we find copious amounts of cash we don’t arrest for, and so on. And not all S&S detections result in arrest – people can be street bailed, warned, fined, or returned home. Part of that is to free up court time, part of that is because cells are full and you therefore can’t arrest, another part because you need grounds and a reason to arrest (PaCE Act 1984) and another part due to us using discretion.
When we enter information onto the Stops Database on CrimInt+ we do enter a location, but that information field does not ‘talk’ to the gazeteer, hence no geo-coding.
And the point raised about knowing how effective S&S is when we can’t look at figures… Ask any street copper, custody sergeant or inspector – they will tell you that we don’t need figures to tell us where to look and who to look for, we KNOW S&S helps deter and detect crime.
And as for disbanding and restarting… The job is skint!