A ‘stop and search’ is an encounter instigated by a police officer if they suspect a persons behaviour or actions, they will use their power to stop and search to either confirm or not confirm their suspicions. The police have several varieties of stop and search powers under a various laws. The standard is Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which demands that officers have reasonable suspicion that the person they are stopping and searching is guilty of committing a crime. The police are not supposed to stop and search on basis of appearance or ethnicity, however, this is far from the reality. Under this power, black people are stopped and searched at 7 times the rate of white people, and Asian people at twice the rate, which suggests that race is a consideration when police officers decide who to stop and search.
Under Section 1, there are controls and regulations meant to ensure that every stop and search encounter is conducted for legitimate legal reasons and in an appropriately sensitive manner. However, police are progressively using other forms of legislation that give them more power and less accountability. For example, Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 allows police to stop and search people without reasonable suspicion. It has been said that these powers allow ‘arbitrariness, abuse, lack of monitoring and safeguards, and a disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities’ (StopWatch 2010). As Ben Bowling mentioned: Wherever officers have the most discretion is where you find the most substantial disproportionality and prejudice. Under Section 60, police have the broadest discretion, using their own opinions about the type of people who are associated with crime and their own ideas about who’s worth stopping. This is where the issues in police culture affect the decisions that are taken (Dodd, 2003).
It is indisputable that minority ethnic groups are vastly over-represented in stop and searches compared to their numbers in the population. There are no conclusive answers as to why this occurs, as the attitudes of police officers when deciding who to stop and search can not be determined. A study by the Ministry of Justice in 2010 showed that out of all stop and searches in England and Wales in 2008/2009, 14.8 per cent were conducted on black people, 8.8 percent on Asian people, and 2.8 per cent on people of mixed race. This is a vast over-representation as the black, Asian and mixed race population aged 10 and over in 2007 were only 2.6 per cent, 5.2 per cent, and 1.3 per cent, respectively. The same study showed that black people, Asians and people of mixed race were being stopped and searched at a rate of 108.5, 33.5 and 42.5 per 1000 population, compared to white people, with a mere 16.5 per 1000 population. This puts the proportionality ratio of stop and searches conducted on ethnic minorities to those conducted on white people at 8.51 : 0.76. These are strange figures, considering the fact that white people make up 89 per cent of the population in England and Wales.
There has not been a notable change in these patterns over the last 30 years, and ethnic minorities are as marked among young people as they are among the adult population (Ministry of Justice, 2010; Phillips and Bowling, 2007). A recent concern is the evident increase in stop and searches of ethnic minorities compared to white people. Between 2004/2005 and 2008/2009 the number of black and Asian people being stopped and searched increased by over 70 per cent (Ministry of Justice, 2010).
Self-report offending studies have invariably shown over a substantial period of time that black and white rates and patterns of offending have always been and continue to be very alike, although offending rates reported by Asians were considerably lower. These studies suggest that white people offend more than any other ethnic group. For example, young white males communicated notably higher drug use than black young males, yet white people were significantly under-represented for drugs offences whilst black young males were greatly over-represented in the justice system (Feilitzer and Hood, 2004; Flood-Page et al., 2000; Graham and Bowling, 1995; Sharp and Budd, 2005; Webster, 2007). That is to say that the over-representation of ethnic minorities cannot be explained by differences in types of offending between groups or between their offending rates. Clearly, this kind of evidence assumes that there is contrasting treatment of ethnic minority groups by the police and criminal justice system.
It could be argued that the over-representation of ethnic minorities is influenced by socio-economic and demographic factors, rather than cultural ones. For example, Walker et al. (1989) established how environmental and geographical factors can outweigh or equal other determinants such as ethnicity. The evident connection here is disadvantage. The police have a tendency to disproportionately target young males whose profile is often of a lower class, who live in metropolitan areas of high crime and general poverty, who are redundant and lack education and who as a result form a key part of the community available for policing. Jefferson highlighted that ‘if blacks are disproportionately involved in known offending behaviour, they also have much higher rates of social disadvantage, being more likely to live in poorer housing in deprived areas, attend worse-off schools and, in the job market, to find manual (rather than non-manual) jobs or be unemployed.’ (Jefferson, 1991). Therefore, it is most probably that those growing up in a disadvantaged area will be susceptible to other kinds of deprivation and social exclusion as well. A study of the court disposal of young males in London, by ethnicity, deduced that since the police are most likely to deal with people of lower social class, and black people tend to be of lower social class, it is to be expected that black people are over-represented in the criminal justice system compared to the general population of London (Walker, 1988).
Geographic differences in policing may be especially noticeable in regard to police deployment and targeting. MVA and Miller’s (2000) study of stops and searches found higher police deployment in at least one of the areas studied. The area had predominately larger black populations but crime levels did not seem to account for this greater police attention. If ‘the traditional link between disadvantage and crime’ (Jefferson, 1991) is accurate, then this implies that the over-representation of ethnic minorities in stop and search has economical and structural reasons, rather than cultural.
However, the culturally supported views and principles of police officers are a crucial factor in explaining their practices towards minority suspects. Beliefs and values differ between and within jurisdictions and institutions. For example, London appears to be quite different to many cities in respect of the policing of minority groups (Jefferson et al., 2008; Newburn and Reiner, 2007; Walker, 1988). Local studies have illustrated that different forms of discrimination by the police could be closely linked to differences in ethnic composition and social classes within and between jurisdictions and neighbourhoods. This composition then influences police beliefs and values, meaning that some areas experience discrimination more than others based on local police cultures and the ethnic composition of local populations. A study in Leeds of dissimilarities in treatment of different ethnic groups in the criminal justice system compared stop and search and arrest rates, and arrest outcomes of different ethnic groups living in the same areas which generally shared similar economic and social conditions. They found that overall, black males had a higher stop and search rate than comparable Asians and white people, but white people living in more ‘black areas’ had a higher stop and search rate than black people and vice versa.