Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2014
Not at the moment.
We will, therefore, introduce amendments to the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill and present Parliament with an opportunity to improve the regulatory regime and ensure that every search has a robust legal basis.
Let me be clear: we do not intend to confiscate statutory powers. As the motion notes, if it is applied properly, the tactic is an appropriate and legitimate part of the policing toolkit. However, the extensive use of unregulated stop and search powers threatens civil liberties. It threatens to alienate whole sections of our communities and to erode the trust, relationships and public respect on which the police depend. It also threatens Scotland’s model of policing by consent.
Statistics from the Scottish centre for crime and justice research show that statutory searches are far more successful and proportionate because they are based on robust suspicion, targeting suspicious behaviour rather than types of people. If detection is the aim, that is the only commonsense option—and from a civil liberties perspective it is the only tolerable option.
I remind the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, who has asserted in his amendment that stop and search is “an operational matter”, that police independence does not equate to allowing them the freedom to do what they want; rather, it is our responsibility as legislators to provide the framework within which we expect the police to operate. A legal framework that ensures that the use of the tactic is transparent, fair, consistent and evidence-led is the least that the public would expect. Failing to respond to the problems that have been identified, illiberal and arbitrary intrusions and a system open to all manner of abuse would reflect badly on the police and this Parliament.
I move,
That the Parliament notes that Police Scotland carried out 519,213 stop and searches across Scotland between April and December 2013; understands that the use of this tactic in Scotland has increased dramatically under the current administration and that, in 2010, the comparable rate per capita was approximately four times higher than in England and Wales; notes that, in the same year, 500 children aged 10 and under were stopped and searched, and that three quarters of all searches were conducted on a non-statutory basis, without any suspicion that the subject was involved in criminal activity and therefore dependent on acquiring verbal consent; understands that, in these cases, subjects are told little, or nothing, about their rights; believes that transparent and rigorous recording procedures are not in place to measure basic information, such as how many times any one person is stopped; notes that such shortcomings have led to Alan Miller, the Chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, to describe the practice as “largely unregulated and unaccountable”; considers that this must be rectified to ensure that the system of stop and search is transparent and not open to abuses, including harassment and the falsification of figures; recognises that the repeated targeting of individuals based on broad criteria such as age can lead to a negative relationship with the police that is damaging to community relations, and further believes that it is essential that recording best practice is used for stop and search in Scotland to enable public scrutiny of whether the use of the tactic, which is a useful part of the policing toolkit if applied properly, is effective, appropriate and fair.