Tag Archives: casey report

If we want to cut violent crime, we need to cut stop and search

By Rob Blackie | Tue 20th June 2023 - 8:58 am

Yesterday Suella Bravermen wrote to police forces across England and Wales to encourage them to use stop and search powers more. She says that this will help tackle violent crime.

In fact, it will waste police time on trivialities instead of catching dangerous criminals.

Stop and search isn’t well focussed on finding criminals. Only just over one in ten stops leads to an arrest. In fact a 2019 study found that ‘Overall, our analysis of ten years’ worth of London-wide data suggests that although stop and search had a weak association with some forms of crime, this effect was at the outer margins of statistical and social significance.’ In fact, Braverman’s policy of increasing stop and search had no effect on violent crime trends.