Unprecedented Coalition of UK Black Groups Write to PM on #StopAndSearch

As the former Deputy Mayor for London and its first Director of Policing for a total of eight years (2000-2008) I have serious concerns about the recent announcements by the new Home Secretary, Priti Patel (on the 3rd and 11 August) granting police officers enhanced stop and search powers, as part of Government efforts to crack down on knife crime, and calling for a zero-tolerance approach to simple cannabis possession.




Thats why I've signed join letter alongside a coalition of national black organisations claiing on the PM and the Home secretary to think againg on the issue of ramping up stop and search.

At this point, it's worth recalling for a moment the principle basis on which Sir Robert Peel,  founder of modern policing, established Britain's police forces.

He said, and it remains true today, that all poling must be governed by the principle of "policing by consent"

Home Secretary Prtti Patel MP 

I say that in my own professional opinion, a view backed by the widely reported, and historic low levels of expressed public trust and confidence of Britain's black communities (and by that I mean specifically African, Caribbean and descendant Mixed race-ethnic groups) in the police as an institution. Relations are as bad now, as they were back in the early 1980s.




The Home Secretary has made it much simpler for all forces in England and Wales to use Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. This empowers police officers to stop and search anyone in a designated area, without needing reasonable grounds of suspicion. if the police believe serious violence may take place

In the Home Secretary's press release announcing these dangerous extended policing powers, she used that age-old political manoeuvre of justifying her actions, by engaging in what's known, in policing and political circles, as shroud waving.

That is the cynical use the dead to politically justify demands for either more money or greater policing powers. She siad...

Prime Minister Johnson

"We are experiencing a knife crime epidemic and I am determined to put a stop to it."

Using such florid and emotional lanuagiage to describe the current level of serious youth violence, as a "knife crime epidemic" is wholly inaccurate and entirely counterproductive. The real facts are that Britain's serious violent crime rate today is 70% less than it was, way back in 1995.

Such use of such language, as explained by Dr Stuart Hall, in his seminal work Policing The Crisis and published in 1978, is soley designed to create the political justification and manufacture of public consent, for increased racial profiling and the consequent, active criminalisation of black youth.

Today the socially constructed idea of dangerous "black drug gangs" is the new equivalent moral panic, first associated with the "black mugging gangs" of the 70/80s, a moral panic that gave rise to the use of the dreaded SUS law, where black people were sent to jail on the assumption that a police officer believed they were "about to commit a crime to a person or property unknown."

The courts needed no other evidence, other than a police officers opinion that a crime was about to take place, and as a result, thousands of black people went to jail.

What Saiq view will he reject as did
West Midlands Police Service? 

The use of SUS led to the civil uprisings of the 1980s and its eventual abolishment. It was replaced by the Police And Criminal Evidence Act, that required police officers to justify stop and searches on the grounds of demonstrable reasonable suspicion. Section 60 provides legit cover for police discrimination, that cannot be legally challenged in the courts or used to initiate police disciplinary procedures. In essence Section 60 represents the codification of institutional policing racism into British law.




When it comes to knife crime, I know how ineffective stop and search can be.

BBC Ten Charts that Show Knife Crime Is Rising. 

As Deputy Mayor for London in 2006/7 we employed 32,000 police officers, many more than today, and experienced vastly increased levels of stop and search, and tragically simultaneously suffered a much higher teenage homicide rate. Research shows that hospital admissions for knife assaults were higher in 2006/7 than they currently are today.



If more stop and search is the answer, then you're asking the wrong question.

As recently as 2017, College of Policing in-depth, a detailed research study found stop and search had very little effect on reducing serious violent crime. In fact they went to say that disproportionate use of these powers could increase violent crime.

“If contact with officers is felt to be unfair, analysis also suggests it can undermine young people’s perception that the police are ‘on their side’, reducing their willingness to comply with the law, and is associated with increased risk that they consider violence to be an option in achieving certain goals.”

Whilst I accept, that in general knife crime is rising, I do not believe this current increase constitutes an epidemic. In designating it as such, the Government appears to be abandoning, the only known successful method of reducing violence, a community-led, Public Health modeled on the early intervention prevention, rehabilitative approach  pioneered in Glasgow Scotland, that saw huge reductions in serious violence.

Talking about an epidemic of knife crime is grossly misleading. The term encompasses a wide range of offences including the crime of the perceived, or threatened use of a knife, possession of a blade or pointed article in a public place, possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and threatening with a knife or offensive weapon offences up to outright homicide.

The commonly accepted definition of an endemic, as defined by the World Health Organisation. is a disease that affects 15 in 100,000 people.

The current knife crime rate is nowhere near that level.

A recent BBC report stated the "…number of knife-related homicides went from 272 in 2007 to 186 in 2015. Since then it's risen every year, with a steep increase in 2017-18, when there were 285 killings, the highest figure since 1946." This is an increase of 13 deaths in over a decade. This is not an epidemic and it wholly disingenuous to describe it as such

The fact is the Home Secretary's "epidemic" comments were factually incorrect, misleading, potentially inflammatory and unhelpful.

The current Crime Survey for England and Wales records offences that aren't reported to police, and that indicates that overall levels of violence in Britain have fallen by about a quarter since 2013,

The Office of National Statistics figures on the most violent attacks in England and Wales over the12 month period ending in March 2018, show that only 6% of such attacks included the use of knives, whilst 79% of such attacks involved no weapon at all, whilst surprisingly glass or bottle injuries are a much more prevalent form of serious violent attack at 9% and yet there is no similar initiative to deal with this much more prevalent serious violent crime of both glass and bottle attacks? Is it because the predominant perpetrators of these glass attacks are white people?

I believe the Government is seeking to politicise violent crime, create fear and moral panic among the public in a cynical attempt to secure a short-term electoral political advantage in the run-up to a possible forthcoming election.

Section 60, is fast becoming the new SUS law and could see a return of the discredited swamp policing tactics of the past. These increase use of this intrusive power will place an unnecessary, additional and huge strain on police-community relations.


This was seen previously, we've been here before. When Boris was Mayor of London from 2008 to 2011 he massively ramped up stop and search by a whopping 300% creating the perfect hostile conditions for the August 2011 disturbances.

Fmr PM Thersea May and Sir Simon Wooley 

Also, the new Home Secretaries actions appear to discard all of the good work done by the former Prime Minister Theresa May in seeking to ensure a proportionate and effective use of this deeply intrusive power.

The former Prime Minister recognised the ‘burning injustice' of random stop and searches, and this lead to the publication of the Home Offices, Best Use of Stop and Search Scheme, as part her desire to see the racist and inappropriate use of this invasive power dramatically reduced. The current Home Secretary has now eviscerated this entirely sensible approach and the consequences for the county, in my view, will be devastating.


The proposed devolvement of the power authorising the use of Section 60 stop and search from, senior officer to an inspector, I believe, will see more indiscriminate, discriminatory and disproportionate use of this power that will negatively impact on Black, Asian and ethnic minority communities across the country. \

That's why I'm delighted and applaud the West Midlands Police Service for rejecting the Home Secretaries offer to use these extended police powers. One hopes, sensibly, other forces will follow suit.

These proposals, counter-intuitively, ignore the rich learning gained from the Government own pilot project, established to test the use of these powers, that saw authority levels, initially set at inspector level, in line with what the new Home Secretary is now demanding. Unsparingly, authority levels rose to that of senior officer level, midway through the pilot project, as a direct result of the abuse of the power by junior officers.

Further, I am deeply concerned more broadly, at the huge increases in the use of Section 60 and the on-going decline of the use of PACE governed stops and searches.

Figures obtained by Channel 4 News revealed that 7,328 Section 60 orders were used by Police in 2018, a 417% rise compared to the previous year. The most recent evidence, of the infective use these powers is the most compelling. According to the Office of National Statistics, from March to June 2019, stop and search increased from 19% - 22% rising simultaneously alongside recorded rises in knife crime and the number of knife-related homicides.

All the available research tells that the law of ever-diminishing returns governs optimum use of stop and search powers, the more indiscriminately you use it, the less effective it becomes.

And from April 2017 to March 2018, Home Office statistics revealed that only 2% of stop and searches carried out under Section 60 led to an arrest for an offensive weapon. Whilst conversely, stop and searches carried out under Section 1 PACE led to a 14% arrest rate for possession of an offensive weapon.

This drift toward the routine use of Section 60 as opposed to PACE, is a dangerous attempt to dilute police accountability and the important legal principle of reasonable suspicion.

The public should be increasingly concerned about the use of Section 60, as the increasingly preferred, operational policing method of choice, in preference to the use of legally accountable, PACE stop and searches.

I think this is an insidious attempt at the reframing of Section 60 stop and searches as the preferred policing option, in terms of its increasingly routine adoption as the preferred policing operational policing methodology for tackling serious violence,

What were witnessing, in my view both is a dilution of the important legal principle of reasonable suspicion and the return, at least in part, to the bad old days of the dreaded SUS law.

This culture of racial profiling in policing is leading to the mass criminalisation of Black Asian and ethnic minority communities, as outlined in David Lammy MP's recent excellent report, the Lammy Review, that highlighted racism in policing and criminal justice process, that demonstrated massively racist outcomes for black people. When the general stop and search figures are analysed, they show the vast majority of PACE stop and search arrests of black youth relate to simple low-level Cannabis possession.



The principle of policing by consent, is a fundamental principle of modern-day policing.

Disproportionate use of stop and search powers has eroded that consent and has poisoned the well of police-community relations, with Black ethnic minority communities (and here I'm speaking specifically about African, Caribbean and mixed-race communities) recording some of the lowest levels of trust and confidence of any ethnic communities in London. Alarmingly, current trust levels are at the lowest recorded levels, ever seen in the entire history of British policing.

British Black people have consistently, the lowest trust and confidence in their respective police forces of any ethnic group in the UK.

Worryingly, at the recent Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick told MP's reported to MP's, that the recorded levels of London's Black, Asian and ethnic minorities, trust and confidence in policing had fallen by an additional 13% over the last 12 months. According to Metropolitan Police figures, highest levels of trust of any major London Black neighbourhood is shockingly recorded, as being at 50% at its highest point, and 30% and at it's lowest. That includes inner London from Broadwater Farm to Brixton

The Governments own "Confidence in the local police" national research, published on the 7th December 2018, recorded that Black and Mixed ethnic young people aged 16 to 24 years had just a 61% approval rating, again reflecting London, and recording the lowest levels of trust and confidence in their local police force, of any single ethnic group in the UK.

What is unique and somewhat surprising, is that Black professionals record the same levels of mistrust in the police, as do black youth. 

Both are recorded at 61% This is deeply significant and demonstrative the broad consensus that exists within Britain's Black communities concerning policing.


Other available research demonstrates that the vast majority of stop and searches, as initiated and reported by police officers, are officially recorded as searching for weapons, however of these weapon stop and searches, 60% end up with arrests for low-level drug possession.  And as research has demonstrated the police treats black and white people differently, when it comes to drug possession.

Black first time offenders are much more likely to be charged for low-level drug possession of cannabis and white first-time offenders, arrested for exact same drug amounts, are still much more likely to be cautioned. What this means in effect is the police in tandem with the Crown Persecution Service operates an informal apartheid
like charging regime that punishes black people,
simply for being black.

Recently published Home Office statistics demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Section 60 in tackling violent crime. Nationally, from April 2017 to March 2018 only 2% of all those stopped and searched were found to have an offensive weapon. In contrast to the 14% detection figures for offensive weapons using PACE legislation.

The central premises of the Home Secretary's announcements on the nature of the violence problem we face and the effectiveness of stop and search as an effective policing response is fundamentally flawed, disingenuous and could potentially trigger civil disturbances across the country.

I see these extensions of police power as a real and present danger to the Queen's peace.

So today many of us have joined together and are calling on the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to think again, in regards to their efforts to reduce violent crime. They must stick to a community-led Public Health approach to tackling violent crime or continue of this disastrous, zero-tolerance policing course and risk major civil disturbances.

They must and Police Crime Commissioners must act now to urgently restore and prioritise the critically important principle of policing with consent,

Additional, much-needed police officers, would be better deployed to restore, replenish and re-establish local Safer Neighbourhood Policing teams and rebalance any additional Government funding, away from a strictly punitive and counterproductive, heavy-handed enforcement approach, to a public health early intervention, prevention and rehabilitation approach.

We say it is vital, on these matters. that changes to policing policy rely on and are informed by, evidence-based policy, rather than the ideological preferences of a hard right-wing Home Secretary and Prime Minister

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but if Britain doesn't learn it will burn.

End.