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Minister skews facts on stop and search, says action group
20 December 2010
A government minister skewed his facts when defending the recent proposals to scrap the stop and account form and reduce the monitoring of stop and search, reports influential action group StopWatch.
Police minister Nick Herbert MP claimed at a Westminster debate on 1 December 2010 that reducing time spent on the stop and search form by cutting crucial information – from 12 recording requirements to 7 – will save more than 300,000 hours of officer time a year. However, StopWatch has recalculated the time saving from Ministry of Justice statistics, and the real figure is closer to 19,000 hours per year.
Herbert’s original claim assumes that it takes 16 minutes to record the five pieces of information the government plans to cut; in fact it rarely takes more than one minute.
Chuka Umunna, Labour MP for Streatham in south London, said:
“The changes the government is making to stop and search powers are drastically watering down the information collected when a search takes place.
“This will prevent a proper evaluation being conducted into the use of these police powers, in particular an assessment of whether they are being used in a proportionate and a non-discriminatory way.”
Equally misleading was Herbert’s claim that 450,000 hours of police time would be saved by scrapping stop and account recording. This assumes it takes 12 minutes to fill in the form. In reality, recording stop and account rarely takes more than five minutes, leaving the actual time saving at 184,000 hours.
To contextualise, individual officers carry out an average of eight stop and searches and 15 stop and accounts per year. The real time saving per officer will therefore be a matter of minutes per month.
Recent calls to cut red tape in the police force have focused almost exclusively on the form that police officers are legally obliged to fill in each time they stop someone. But by reducing monitoring, law enforcement agencies are seriously curbing their ability to serve and answer to the public.
At the moment, black people are stopped and searched by the police at more than six times the rate of white people. Meanwhile, Asian people are stopped and searched at more than twice the rate of white people. Targeting stop and search tactics on ethnic minority communities continues to drive a wedge between the police and sections of the public they serve.
Read the full press release here
For more information on the action group, of which Runnymede is a member, visit the StopWatch website
