Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2014
I think that we agree that we all want crime to be tackled and our communities to be made safer. It is to be welcomed that recorded crime is at a 39-year low. The fact that violent crime has halved and crime involving knives and other weapons has fallen by more than 60 per cent shows that we must be doing something right.
Stop and search is an important tool that the police use in detecting and preventing crime. The cabinet secretary mentioned Robert Brown, who was a justice spokesperson for the Lib Dems, and we should remember that he said that stop and search carried out by the police had been very effective.
The Liberal Democrat motion mentions children, and Alison McInnes and Margaret Mitchell also mentioned children in their speeches. I will give an example of what I saw, first hand, when I was out with the police in Glasgow city centre during a very busy weekend.
We wandered down to the waterfront, where the police stopped and searched a number of kids, finding really cheap alcohol on them. A couple of sips of that would have made them very ill and vulnerable not just to committing crime but to having crime committed against them. Some of them were under the influence of alcohol. They were taken into the police van, where we were, sat down, talked to, and asked where they lived. They ended up being taken home, which was very positive. It meant that they were not taken to a police station and did not get a criminal record. Their parents were phoned and they were taken home. Those children were very vulnerable, and stop and search protected them against crime.