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Stop and search looks set for a revival in the UK. The problem? As an end to itself, there is no evidence such a push will work.

Last week, home secretary Sajid Javid called for new powers to search for acid, drones and laser pointers. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has also promised significant increases in targeted stop and search. These seem sensible proposals: new types of crimes need to be addressed by the police, and some level of stop and search will often be part of the mix. But evidence as to the efficacy of stop and search for the sake of stop and search suggests something quite different.


Use of stop and search in England and Wales fell from a peak of 1.5 million in 2008/09 to around 304,000 in 2016/17. Initially, that reduction mirrored a more general decline in crime. That downward trend is now partly reversing: homicides and other serious violent crimes have recently increased, hitting London particularly hard – nearly 100 people have been murdered in the capital so far this year. Although the Office for National Statistics reports that violent crime as a whole is still falling, there is growing political pressure to address this issue.

Stop and search looks like an obvious answer. There is an appealing “common sense” logic here. As Merseyside Police chief constable Andy Cooke put it: “because there are less police officers, and because they know they’re more reluctant to engage in stop-search, criminals feel safe carrying knives and guns around”. But will increasing the use of stop and search really help to reduce crime?

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Studying the effect of stop and search on crime rates is notoriously complicated – partly because the two variables tend to influence each other – but there is almost no research demonstrating a clear, strong effect.

Two well-known studies identified few meaningful effects whatsoever. An evaluation of New York's Operation Impact, which ran from 2004 to 2012, found that most searches had no discernible impact on crime. In 2008, in London, Operation BLUNT 2 involved high levels of stop and search targeted to specific areas; a Home Office evaluation later found that the policy had no effect on crime. In fact, ambulance calls for violent incidents fell faster in areas with smaller increases in searches.


Other research returns similarly mixed results. Some studies in New York have found extremely small effects when considering specific types of crime, or when targeting hot spots; others looking at the same data found no effects at all. Our own research, which assessed the relationship between stop and search and crime using ten years’ worth of data about London, found only inconsistent and often negligible effects on crime in general – and no clear evidence that stop and search had a significant effect on violent crime.

Overall existing research shows that increasing stop and search is unlikely to have any meaningful impact on levels of violent crime. At best, it would take massive increases in use of the power to have any effect whatsoever. And those massive increases would come with costs.

Among those costs is the fact that stop and search disproportionately targets ethnic minorities. In the UK, black people are eight times more likely to be searched than white people, and Asian people are twice as likely. Marginalised groups are also more likely to report bad treatment by the police once they are stopped. And when people have negative stop and search encounters, this damages trust in police, which in turn further promotes marginalisation, and likely accentuates the problem.

The testimonies collected for Stop Watch's Viewed with Suspicion report make this abundantly clear. One person stated that "the impact it had on me was huge... I felt that I needed a shower after. I felt really inadequate, I felt dirty"; another said that "being stopped three times in the same day, [is] bound to mess up your psyche... For my entire childhood I would never have turned to the police for any assistance".


There are few reasons to think that stop and search will ever help reduce violence. But there are alternative strategies which are supported by evidence and which have worked in practice. One is focussed deterrence, pioneered in Boston in the 1990s. One strand of the strategy involves identifying and contacting key groups of offenders. Through continual dialogue, the police then try to change their perceptions of the risks they're running, enforce a sense of collective responsibility, and give them routes out of their current, violent, lifestyles. The other strand is mobilising local communities to build trust in the police and allow the communities themselves to disrupt the dynamics which lead to violence.

There are also examples from closer to home. Glasgow used to be the UK’s knife crime capital, until, in 2005, its adoption of a public health approach – incorporating elements of the focussed deterrence strategy, but also working with schools, hospitals, mental health services and local authorities– turned thing around. Last year, there were zero deaths from stabbings in the city. That is a good starting point for policymakers looking for effective ways to tackle violence; stop and search is not.

Ben Bradford is a professor of global city policing at University College London, and Matteo Tiratelli is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Manchester