Once again we are having a discussion about #StopAndSearch

I mentioned some of this earlier in the year but if we’re ever going to get to the causes of the disproportionate stop & search rates, we need to be honest about how and why it is used.

Stop and search predominantly targets street level gang crime; drug dealing and weapons. With cannabis having such a strong smell and cannabis residue and paraphernalia so easy to identify it naturally follows that drug searches make up the majority of searches.

Officers are on patrols targeting crime, they smell cannabis, they investigate, they discover further drug paraphernalia, they engage and their grounds are formed.

The gangs - These gangs mostly stick to their ‘turf’ to conduct their criminal activity. They are usually the economically poor estates around London.

Let’s just be honest here, these estates aren’t your economically rich Surrey streets, or the leafy university campuses our academic critics operate in. They are mostly inhabited by decent families, just regular people working hard for their children.

However, they also house hardened criminals who use violence and intimidation to maintain control of the drug market and power in the area.

That ten year old boy who gets robbed of his AirPods every time he walks to school? He either accepts it, fights back, or joins a gang.

Or, just maybe, the police intervene and stop his attacker.

According to the gang matrix these gangs are 75% black African Caribbean and 99% male. The average age is 18 years. Let’s be honest again, this is not because of single mothers or kids who are just bad.

It is likely due to various social and economic reasons. The recent review into serious youth violence was quite clear - cuts to community services for our most vulnerable has led to the rise in violent crime.
http://yvcommission.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/YVC-Final-Report-July-2020.pdf

The police must also accept some blame here. Laws, policies and even racism in the police over previous generations has ensured some of the parents of these young men grew up with a distrust of the police, some were even falsely imprisoned by laws that were used to target them.

Back to the gangs -
Between 2008-2018 the Met proceeded against 30486 people for knife crimes. Of these the majority (14,527) were African Caribbean. 9744 were white, with Asian people coming in third at 3443.

Last year around 11000 weapons were seized. So while we know stop and search is controversial, it does work at taking weapons off the streets. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1353094/police-stop-and-search-UK-weapons-seized/amp

Another cause of the disproportionate rates is demographics. With officers being tasked to tackle these gangs, they will patrol the estates where they operate. They will target the right age group, with 15-19 year olds making up the largest proportion of searches.

In some areas, such as Lambeth, nearly 50% of 15-19 year olds are black. While these statistic don’t show the whole picture and there are numerous other factors that come into play, for the police officer in the street, this is their daily experience.

Policing isn’t perfect and if we must listen to our communities and strive to be better. We don’t want to search the wrong people, we don’t want to alienate parts of our communities, but we don’t want another dead child in London either.

As a society must work to tackle gang crime at every level, from early years education, to post education opportunities and of course, on the street through stop and search.