Stop and search figures suggest officer bias in the Met

Exclusive figures obtained by Channel 4 News reveal just over 200 Metropolitan police officers carried out over 19,000 searches in a six-month period.

Our analysis suggests racial bias and a huge variation in how effectively officers use their powers on the beat.

Individual performances are now under scrutiny as part of the Met’s new drive to bring down the rate of stop-search.

The force, along with 34 others this week, signed up to a Home Office voluntary scheme to revolutionise the entire stop and search process.

Senior officers believe the key is to monitor individual performance.

Adrian Hanstock, formerly a Met Commander leading stop and search, said the figures on individual officers “reveal the journey that we are on”, but said the Met “haven’t found evidence of cultural bias, and it’s not an easy thing to understand”.

Using data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Channel 4 News has examined those officers who use their powers of stop and search most often and what the outcomes of those stops were.

Our data detail over 19,000 stop and searches conducted over six months from October 2013 to March 2014 and reveal:

- Nearly one in four of those officers using stop and searches under the reasonable suspicion laws arrested less than 10 per cent of the people they stop and searched
- Nine officers, responsible for 312 stop and searches, made no arrest whatsoever. Just under half (44 per cent) targeted for those stops were black while another 44 per cent were black, minority or ethnic race. 

For people stopped and searched on suspicion of drugs, under Section 23 of the Misuse of Drugs Act:

- Nearly one in three officers arrested less than 10 per cent of the people that they stopped

- Six officers made a total of 248 stop and searches with no arrest. Of the total, 22 per cent of stop and searches were on black people, and 54 per cent were on people of black, minority or ethnic race.

Some officers went way beyond the national disproportionality figures.

According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, you are at least six times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black and than if you are white, and twice as likely if you are Asian that if you are white.

Examples we found in the Metropolitan Police include:

- One officer who made 54 stop and searches, almost all of them on young black men aged 10-19 years, yet none led to arrest

- Another officer made 33 stop and searches, with 29 on young black men, 29 were aged 10-19, but made no arrests.

Today the Home Secretary Theresa May is expected to announce the first changes for 30 years to the code of practice governing stop and search and what constitutes “reasonable grounds” for suspicion.

One proposal during the eight week consultation was to discount “the smell of cannabis” as justification to stop and search.

Inspector Nick Glynn, lead officer on stop and search at the College of Policing, described an exercise he uses to train officers in effective stop and search – asking officers to stand up, and then sit down if they have been stopped and searched fewer than five times.

“There’s always a very similar picture there of people from ethnic minorities being the ones who are still standing,” he said.

“It’s a stark visualisation of there is something going on here. Whether it is conscious or unconscious, there is definitely something going on there.”

Adrian Hanstock, formerly a Met Commander leading stop and search, and now Deputy Chief Constable for the British Transport Police, said the Met “haven’t found evidence of cultural bias, and it’s not an easy thing to understand”.

“What we have to do is work with those officers and make sure that they have received the appropriate training to understand that may be a factor,’ he added.

On the performance of individual officers in stop and search, he said the figures “reveal the journey that we are on”.

“As we take time we have moved the enormous volume of searches from half a million two years ago, to now 260,000, and there is still some way to go to make sure officers fully understand why they are using those powers and how they are using them.”â??