ABSTRACT
It is entirely uncontroversial, writing in the spring of 2016, to state that stop and search as currently practiced in England and Wales presents challenges for public trust in the police and the legitimacy the service can command. Whether one thinks about recent events, such as the Mark Duggan case and the 2011 riots, or on a much longer time frame stretching back to the ‘sus’ laws and the 1981 Brixton riots (Scarman 1981) and beyond (Hall et al. 1978), the idea that stop and search can undermine the legitimacy of the police is well-evidenced, indeed almost self-evident. I certainly do not wish to resile from such a position here. As described in Chapter 7, and in many other places besides (e.g. Bradford et al. 2009; Brunson and Miller 2006; Carr et al. 2007; Delsol and Shiner 2006; Fitzgerald et al. 2002; Miller et al. 2000; Sharp and Atherton 2007), stop/search activity does undermine public trust and police legitimacy, at least among those who experience such encounters and possibly more widely, as vicarious experience of police activity (Rosenbaum et al. 2005) spreads out among families, friendship networks and communities. What has often been missing from discussions of these issues, however, is elucidation of a detailed understanding of how police stops affect and are affected by legitimacy and processes of legitimation at both the conceptual level and at the level of beliefs and practices embedded in everyday life. Too often overly simplistic formulae (such as more stop and search equals less legitimacy) have obscured important questions concerning why, for example, police continue to use the tactic in the face of the problems it seems to create (Bradford and Loader 2016), or why public support for stop and search, at least in a general sense, remains relatively high (Fitzgerald 1999, although see also Stone and Pettigrew 2000). Moreover, few studies have used a robust definition of legitimacy (see Jackson et al. 2012, Mazerolle et al. 2012 and Van Damme 2015 for exceptions), or considered the importance of countercurrents in public opinion which express rather different views on this element of police practice. Some members of the public, for example, are likely to respond positively to evidence of ‘aggressive’ policing aimed at ‘criminals’ and the socially undesirable (Harkin 2014). The importance of a broad level of public support for visible, proactive policing that engages in ‘the fight against crime’ should not be underestimated.
