ABSTRACT

There were, on average, about one million stop/searches under PACE and associated legislation per year in England and Wales over the period 2001/2002 to 2014/2015. However this figure represents only a fraction of the total number of people who experience some sort of police stop in a given year. Not only are there those that occur under other pieces of legislation – most notably traffic stops – but there are other forms of contact between police and public that might be said to be police stops in a sociological but not a legal sense. This chapter and the next are concerned with the question of who experiences these stops (and searches): what is the social and geographic distribution of experiences of this aspect of policing, and how might this distribution be explained? Answers to these questions have tended to rely on the police recorded data, meaning they are limited to both stop and search and the data recorded in the stop forms, and by definition they miss the broader context (for exceptions see Bradford and Loader 2016; Fitzgerald et al. 2002; Ariza 2014). Data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW, previously the British Crime Survey) are therefore used in order to widen the angle of view to take in the whole range of police stops. This survey data also brings some additional benefits. First, it allows consideration of some of the factors beyond race and ethnicity that may predict experiencing this type of contact with the police. Second, it provides the opportunity to investigate how the interplay between different variables affects the distribution of police stop activity across geographical and social space. The CSEW data are presented, described and explored in Chapter 5 below. The purpose of the current discussion is to develop a theoretical account of the social and spatial distribution of police stop activity. This is achieved first by examining the issue of ethnic disproportionality in stop and search activity, and second by expanding the discussion to consider other forms of stop activity and other possible predictors the odds of being stopped. At the threshold it is worth reiterating that the experience of being stopped by the police is relatively common, or at least more common that the police recorded stop and search statistics would seem to suggest. Around 10 per cent of the population experience some form of police stop each year. To be sure, many of the stops reported in the CSEW would not necessarily be considered as such by the police officers

involved, in a legal sense, or even from the subjective viewpoint of others watching the encounters. Yet this might often mean little to the individuals concerned, who must, in most cases, experience them as the application of the power of the police to impinge on their freedom – to literally stop them – otherwise they would not feel they had been ‘stopped’ and responded accordingly when prompted by, in this case, the CSEW survey instrument. When considering this type of police activity it is important to bear in mind that it is relatively common and, in some ways, widespread.