The growing use of stop-and-search by the police in Scotland has been causing concern for some time, inside and outside the force.
Some ordinary officers are worried that the strategy, and the targets associated with it, risk distracting them from more important priorities. Academics at Edinburgh University have added their voices to the concern in a new report which raises the prospect of civil disorder.
The idea of disorder caused by stop-and-search should not be dismissed lightly. As the report points out, riots seen in England, most recently in 2011, demonstrate the potential of police search tactics to spark trouble. To date, nothing similar has happened in Scotland, but this should not lead us to believe it could never happen here, particularly as the rate of stop-and-search in Scotland is much greater than it is in England.
Even if there is no civil disorder in Scotland, there is still legitimate concern about the effects the repeated, and growing, use of stop-and-search could have on the relationship between the police and the public. Police Scotland relies on the concept of policing by consent - as the forces it replaced once did - but that consent is at risk if innocent individuals are repeatedly searched.
In response, Police Scotland insists it does all it can to avoid this happening and that searches are targeted and intelligence-led. However, the report from Edinburgh University found that, in some areas, officers made extensive use of stop-and-search without reasonable suspicion and that this impacts disproportionately on younger age groups.
Such non-statutory searches officially happen with consent but the police are under no obligation to inform the person being searched that they have the right to refuse that consent. And in the case of children and young teenagers, there is another concern. In the first three months of Police Scotland alone, 23,000 children under the age of 15 were stopped and searched, but to what extent were they really giving informed consent to the process?
All these reservations have to be balanced against the proven effectiveness of stop-and-search in preventing crime. A large proportion of searches yield a positive result, including weapons and drugs, and among victims of crime such as Mary Stark, whose son Sean was murdered in Fife in 2009, there is support for stop-and-search as a way of reducing the number of knives on the street.
However, the dangers of using stop-and-search over-enthusiastically remain, particularly when it is not intelligence-led and the person involved is under no reasonable suspicion. Serious mistakes were made with the policy in England and Wales and, even though Police Scotland's support for stop-and-search appears undimmed, the force must be careful not to go too far down the same path.
Stop-and-search, used with restraint, can be an effective tool in crime prevention; used with too much enthusiasm, it risks undermining the morale of officers and alienating the people they police.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article