The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)

Last updated on October 16th, 2023 at 07:46 pm

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The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London) – Now that isn’t a headline you expected to see from me I’m sure.

Don’t panic, normal service will be resumed. It’s more a question than a statement, and I hope to be able to answer it for London at least.

I have heard more than I’m really comfortable with about how Stop and Search is disproportionate. We shouldn’t stop so many BAME persons. We shouldn’t stop so many children and young persons. Poor luvvies wouldn’t hurt anybody. Wouldn’t they?

I recently found an MPS dataset that I wouldn’t normally have looked at, but it contained anonymised data of every instance where a person has been CHARGED with an offence of Murder between 2003 and January of this year.. For my non-Police reader that means that the Crown Prosecution Service (not the Met Police) have been satisfied that there is a better than 50% chance of securing a conviction against those individuals on the evidence available at the time that decision was taken.

It also means that it is based on long-term trends and not a sudden blip in the stats.

As the data is so simple that even I can understand it, I have converted it to charts to save me having to describe the facts, and I present them to you below without comment. After viewing them I’m sure that the famous man on the Clapham Omnibus will be able to form a reasonable opinion of what is happening in London and whether, or not, the Metropolitan Police should be scaling back on Stop and Search for weapons, particularly against certain groups of the population.

The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)
Fig 1
The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)
Fig 2
The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)
Fig 3
The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)
Fig 4

Finally, whilst it doesn’t coincide totally with the data above, I had previously obtained the stats for the use of knives in the commission of offences of murder in London. Fair to say that they outnumbered EVERY other method of killing someone.

The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)
Fig 5

Ladies and gents, I leave the decision and opinions up to you. I really don’t think I can add much more.

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2 thoughts on “The Disproportionate Use of Stop And Search (In London)”

  1. I wonder if similar data is held by the other metropolitan county police forces (including Northumbria)? Plus, location – which I expect for London is mainly in public places. After all isn’t ‘evidence-based policing’ what we have now?

    1. RetiredAndAngry

      I would think that every Force in the UK holds the identical data, the main difference being that the Met routinely publishes it if you know where to look. I can’t think of any valid reason why any given Force couldn’t, or shouldn’t, release it if presented with an FOIA request.

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