ABSTRACT
As a multi-purpose tool that can respond to almost any circumstance and be turned to almost any purpose, police stops in general and stop and search in particular are important ways in which police exercise power. They can serve as the first – and in many cases the primary or even sole – step in asserting or reasserting order, control and/or discipline. In Chapter 5 we saw that a number of different theoretical paradigms seemed to have something to offer in terms of explaining the empirical distribution of police stop activity – conflict theory, implicit bias and stereotyping, and, to the extent that it is indeed also directed toward crime, consensus theory. But none achieved primacy. Given the diversity of uses to which this power will inevitably be put, and the scale of its use, it is perhaps hardly surprising that none of these paradigms could on their own account for its distribution. What is needed to explain this phenomenon is an understanding of the way policing as a formative social practice is constituted and enacted.
