I HAD to read the Agenda contribution several times to try to understand exactly the point being made Kath Murray, research fellow at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, School of Law, the University of Edinburgh ("Problems with stop and search that go back more than a decade", The Herald, June 30).

It seems to me, broadly speaking, that concern expressed in the article was that police officers did not collect data or explain a person's rights when subjected to stop and search.

The lack of data-gathering by an already hard-pressed police service in this the very same week as terror attacks resulted in the deaths of many Muslims at prayer in a Kuwait mosque, the decapitation of a man in France and the deaths of so many of our fellow UK citizens on the beaches of Tunisia is something I can easily put with.

The article highlighted that "search rates in Scotland exceeded those in England and Wales seven times over" and that as such this was "a startling statistic that, in some respects can be related to a lack of data".

I say well done Police Scotland; keep it up.

Rather than academics worrying about relatively unimportant data-gathering I suggest that we support the Scottish Police Service in its efforts to protect each of us from all threats to our wellbeing.

John S Milligan,

86 Irvine Road,

Kilmarnock.