Stop and search: What are its problems?

National World - LocalTV

Campaigners say stop and search can leave people feeling singled out and contributes to poor community-police relations, but the government says it is a "common sense policing tactic"

Transcript

00:00 While our concerns are rooted in the way that they conduct it, we accept that for the time

00:09 being, stop and search is something that the police need to do in some cases. Our great

00:16 concern and our persistent concern is that it is done too often in a way that suggests

00:23 that it's not above board.

00:26 In the last year, there have been more than 160 searches which allow police officers to

00:30 stop and search them without the need for reasonable suspicion. Black people are seven

00:35 times more likely to be searched under that power compared to their white counterparts,

00:41 with the find rate for offensive weapons being less than 1%.

00:45 Stopwatch is a charity advocating for fair and accountable policing. They say while the

00:50 public tend to support stop and search as a concept, hearing about when it goes wrong

00:54 can reduce community trust in the police.

00:57 Thoughts are increasingly trending negatively over time, especially since the pandemic,

01:02 lockdown periods when a lot of people actually experienced policing as well in public for

01:07 the first time. They realise that actually the ideal of how police should conduct themselves,

01:14 especially during stop and searches and the manner in which they are stopped themselves

01:19 is quite different.

01:21 Researchers at the Runnymede Trust, which campaigns for racial justice, found a slew

01:24 of mental and even physical health impacts can come along with the disproportionate use

01:29 of stop and search. They say the problem isn't just a policing one though, and needs to be

01:34 addressed more widely.

01:35 We've had years of austerity that's driven public and social services into the ground.

01:40 This creates the fertile ground for crime and harm. And so we need to reverse those

01:45 trends and invest in people, communities, in conflict mediation, in mental health support.

01:52 We need to stop excluding children from schools because policing our way out of these problems

01:58 is the wrong solution.

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