Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2014
At the outset, I confirm that I very much support the ability of police officers to stop and search suspects. It is an important power in the fight against crime and a useful tool in tackling knife, alcohol and drug offences.
The good news is that, according to police statistics, 100,000 of the stop and searches carried out by Police Scotland last year resulted in officers finding and confiscating weapons, drugs, alcohol and stolen property. However, the bad and decidedly alarming news is the chief constable’s admission that statistics on stop and search are being made up.
Calum Steele of the Scottish Police Federation was right when he recently pointed out that, if more than 500,000 people were stopped last year, that would equate to roughly 10 per cent of the population. No one can seriously believe that 10 per cent of Scots were stopped last year; if that were true, we would all know several people who had been stopped. The logical conclusion is that either police officers are being coerced into meeting stop and search targets or that some police officers have a relaxed approach to the accuracy of police statistics. Given the extent to which the Government relies on police statistics on recorded crime, the fact that there are questions about their accuracy is deeply worrying.
Alison McInnes’s motion and Graeme Pearson’s amendment are right to highlight those concerns and others about the manner and circumstances in which stop and search is currently carried out in Scotland. It is clear that reform is needed, but it must be undertaken in a way that ensures that public safety is not jeopardised.
Stop and search can be classified as legislative, where the power derives from specific law and does not require the consent of the person to be searched, or, under common law, consensual, where the member of the public consents—or at least in theory consents—to be searched. Despite guidelines that state that refusal to agree to a search should not be treated as suspicious, research has shown that officers treat refusal as a reason to move on to a statutory search.
Furthermore, in January 2014, the Scottish centre for crime and justice research carried out an evaluation of the use of stop and search until 2010 and found that
“Neither Police Scotland, the Scottish Government nor the Scottish Police Authority routinely publish stop and search statistics, as such”.
The evaluation went on to say that therefore
“it is difficult to assess”
how stop and search is being carried out
“either comparatively across Scotland, or at the national level.”
More rigorous and transparent recording of stop and search statistics is essential to ensure that transparency and accountability are achieved.
A key conclusion of that evaluation was that non-statutory stop and search lacked safeguards and accountability. Due to the lack of “key procedural protections”, it was
“unlikely to meet basic standards of consent”,
as there is no duty on officers to inform people of their right to refuse searches.
We know that young people are significantly more likely to be searched on a non-statutory basis and that, in 2010, 500 children under the age of 10 were stopped and searched.
In England and Wales, the vast majority of stop and searches require reasonable suspicion, and non-statutory stop and search has effectively been ruled out since 2003. That approach works well, and there is no great concern that police officers do not have sufficient powers.
By contrast, Scotland seeks to deter offenders through high-volume search activity, although, as the research confirmed, there is no evidence that that approach reduces crime. Instead, it is likely to
“damage people’s trust and confidence in the police, and undermine public support for policing”,
especially among young people, whom we know to be the likely subjects of stop and search.
It is clear that those issues must be addressed. If hundreds of thousands of stop and searches are carried out and no crimes are detected, that is a waste of police time; even worse, it may be counterproductive. The approach that has been adopted in England and Wales proves that it is possible to make changes to stop and search without jeopardising public safety. The cabinet secretary should take note.