Police 'stop and accounts' rise by one-third

Alan Travis
The Guardian
Jul. 08, 2008

Police used their powers to stop nearly two million members of the public in the street and demand they account for their behaviour or actions, Ministry of Justice figures published today revealed.

The "stop and account" statistics, being published for the first time, reveal the scale of police use of the powers, and show that black people are two and a half times more likely than whites to be questioned on the street.

The use of these powers, and the need for police officers to complete a lengthy form on each occasion they are used, sparked political controversy earlier this year.

The row led the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to pledge that alternative ways of recording each stop would be found.

A Home Office green paper on the future of policing, to be published next week, will replace the forms with new radio technology allowing officers to transmit the details of each stop.

Today's figures showed that the number of times the police stopped members of the public had risen from 1.4m in 2005-2006 to 1.87m in 2006-2007 - an increase of one-third.

The decision to start recording police stops in April 2005 followed a recommendation by Sir William Macpherson's inquiry into the racist murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence.

The recent Flanagan inquiry into policing reported that recording such stops consumed more than 48,000 hours of police time.

While each encounter lasted for an average of only seven minutes, it usually led to suspicion of the police on the part of the member of the public involved.

The figures confirmed that such police stops disproportionately involve the black community.

However, there are variations around the country. Black people are five times more likely to be stopped by the Gwent and West Mercia police, but are less likely to be stopped in Durham and Lincolnshire.

The figures for Asian people do not show such differences with the general population.

The "stop and account" statistics were disclosed as part of the annual publication of ethnic monitoring data for the criminal justice system.

They revealed that, a decade after Jack Straw set up the Lawrence inquiry during his time as home secretary, black people are seven times more likely to be stopped and searched - as opposed to made to "stop and account" - three and half times more likely to be arrested, and five times more likely to be in prison.

The separate figures for "stop and search" show that 955,000 such on-street searches, mainly for drugs, were carried out in 2006-2007, the highest figure for seven years.

Today's data also revealed that the prison service has met its ethnic monitoring targets, employing 4.8% black and ethnic minority officers.

However, there has been less progress in the police, where there were 5,511 black or Asian officers by April 2007 - only 3.9% against an official target of 7%.

The Ministry of Justice said the figures were not indicative of the work going on to ensure the criminal justice system was representative of all sections of the community.

In April, all criminal justice agencies were set a new Whitehall target requiring them to have a strategy in place to address racial disparities that could not be explained or objectively justified.