The police must have power to stop and search ethnic groups



Bring back a bit of common sense: Brian Paddick

Suppose two Asian gangs from different parts of the country have agreed over the internet to settle their differences in a street fight. Armed with knives and baseball bats, they make their way to your high street only to find that the police have organised a blanket ‘stop and search’ operation in order to disarm them.

So why are the officers telling white passers-by to open their bags and empty their pockets?

Such a state of affairs might seem bizarre, but it is all too common. Police officers fear they will be accused of discrimination if they target people on the basis of their appearance, a form of political correctness which can only damage their ability to uphold the law.

Why, then, has there been such an outcry at Government proposals to bring back a bit of common sense and allow officers to stop some suspects rather than others?



It has been claimed that the proposals – draft guidance from the Home Office – are a return to the ‘sus laws’. They are setting the clock back, it is said, and will allow the police to directly discriminate on grounds of race.

I am a firm believer in civil liberties and a great admirer of the Liberty campaign group. However, as a former police officer, I believe such criticisms are entirely misguided, in partic­ular the claim that the proposals amount to a return of ‘sus’.

‘Sus’ – or being a suspected person loitering with intent to commit an indictable offence – is discredited legislation from 1824 that has long since been repealed. It was a criminal offence, not a power to stop and search, and it was at the heart of poor relations between the police and black people in Britain for good reason.

The usual evidence given in court in a ‘sus’ case was no more impressive than ‘three car door handles, your worship’.

If a police officer saw – or said they saw – a suspect looking for an unlocked car door in order to steal, this would be sufficient to prove they were up to no good.

Practical policing: Officers should be free to stop and question anyone, regardless of their ethnic origin

Regrettably, some police officers would invent evidence in order to secure a conviction. In 1978 I was at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court when one of my colleagues put a young black man in the dock.



The accused man pleaded guilty to ‘sus’. Yet when I spoke to the arresting officer he told me in hushed tones that the ‘guilty’ man had done nothing. ‘He just ran away when we came around the corner and when we caught him we said he could either have an attempted burglary or ‘sus’ and he went for ‘sus’.’

As there was no need for any corroborative evidence, it was a law open to abuse, which is why it has been consigned to the legislative dustbin.

These new Home Office guidelines are nothing to do with ‘sus’ and every­thing to do with practical policing. Of course it is wrong to pick on black people simply because an officer might associate being black with criminality.

That is a matter of straight­forward prejudice. The overwhelming majority of black people are law-abiding. It is equally wrong for the police to target Muslims in the crude and misguided belief that Muslims are likely to be terrorists.

What does a Muslim look like, anyway? The ‘shoe bomber’, Richard Reid, was born in the London suburb of Bromley to a white British mother and a Caribbean father. He looked neither Middle Eastern nor South Asian.

So, yes, I have sympathy for the civil libertarians. But in this case they are wrong, as a matter of principle and of detail.

The new Home Office guidance suggests no more than a modest rewording of Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, a piece of legislation originally aimed at gangs of rival football supporters but which is now used to counter violence of all sorts.

Before Section 60 can be used, a senior police officer must reasonably believe that there is going to be serious violence or that people are carrying weapons. Only then are the police authorised to stop and search anyone. The powers come with strong safeguards. They can be used only within a specific area and for only a limited time, initially no longer than 24 hours.

When I was the police ­commander in Wimbledon, South London, in the late Nineties, we sometimes received intell­igence that rival Asian gangs from different parts of London were preparing to fight on the streets.

If we had specific information about where and when the fight was going to take place, we could use Section 60 to prevent it. The new Home Office guidance is saying no more than this: that if the police believe the fight will take place between two Asian gangs, it makes sense to stop and search Asian people.

In 1999, the white supremacist and nail-bomber David Copeland was targeting busy shopping areas at weekends. In the absence of anti-terrorism legislation at that time, we used Section 60 to try to catch him. Officers were given authority to stop and search and were told that we were looking for a white man carrying a sports holdall. Copeland had been caught on poor-quality CCTV but we could still make out his ethnic origin, if not his identity.

Police at that time did not racially stereotype all white people as terrorists. They did, however, target their stop and search on a particular ethnic group and in this case the people of interest happened to be white.

Any reasonable person can see the merits of the police having such powers.

The proposed new guidelines state that officers should take care not to discriminate, but say: ‘There may be circumstances...where it is appropriate for officers to take account of an individual’s ethnic origin in selecting persons and vehicles to be stopped in response to a specific threat or incident...’

Bear in mind, too, that some potential crimes, such as a fight between neo-Nazis, would probably exclude people from min­ority ethnic backgrounds from suspicion. Far from jeopardising race relations, such a commonsense approach could actually promote them.

If serious violence can be prevented, then police officers must be empowered to conduct blanket stop-and-search operations which target the most likely individuals. Yes, it is a draconian power; yes, its use should be limited. But there are circumstances where such powers are absolutely necessary.