ABSTRACT
The preceding chapter described how police stops, because they are often experienced as procedurally unfair, have a net negative effect on public trust and the legitimacy of the police. Yet procedural (in)justice is also linked to social identity, and research has suggested that negative encounters with the police can affect people’s identities in relation to groups the police represent (Bradford 2014; Bradford et al. 2014) and, perhaps, push them toward alternate ‘providers’ of group membership and belonging or into a state of anomie. Moreover, police stops, searches and cognate practices can be important sites of police intelligence gathering and data collection – processes that can ascribe quite different forms of identity onto those caught up in them. The extent to which (a) stop and search ‘outcomes’ feed into police intelligence systems (HMIC 2013) and (b) the initiation of stop/searches is based on intelligence (Chainey and Macdonald 2012) is often unclear. Yet there can be little doubt that in a general sense people who are stopped and particularly searched, either on foot or in a vehicle, register on the ‘radar’ of the police, and once registered remain on it, potentially for some time. Their details may be entered into local or national databases, but perhaps more importantly they ‘become known’ to local officers. Above all, police stops can be sites for the collation of data on ‘the usual suspects’ (McAra and McVie 2005), with significant implications for the people so coded, in relation, for example, to the extent they subsequently enter into the criminal justice system Police stop activity can thus be argued to having subjective (or affective) and objective (or material) effects on people’s lives. At stake during such encounters is not only the way individuals think and feel about police as a result of their experiences of the activity of officers – as discussed in Chapter 7 – but also the way they think about themselves, about others around them and, in the final analysis, about their willingness and ability to participate fully in society. Moreover, while the discussion has thus far focused the extent to which police attention is focused on marginal social categories as if these simply pre-existed such attention, it is clear marginality is also the product of institutional processes and that the police play a key role in its production. People’s life chances can be altered and diminished as a result of the classificatory aspects of policing, as Manning (2010: 187) insists:
policing is an allocative and reallocative agency in the sense that it shifts the burdens of those encountered, altering their life chances, opportunities for work, and attachment to society and, by inaction or tolerance, adding to the success of others.
