ABSTRACT
The analysis presented in Chapter 5 demonstrated that even controlling for potential confounders such as age, place of residence, social class, drug use and routine activities, people from some ethnic minority groups were still more likely than their white counterparts to have experienced police stops. Evidence for ethnic disproportionality in the experience – and use – of this police power therefore remains strong. There was evidence, too, of other forms of disproportionality. People from socially disadvantaged or marginalized groups were consistently more likely to have been stopped by police: most notably, victims of crime, the unemployed, those living in socially rented accommodation and those in poor health. It seems that the uneven social distribution of police stop activity is not limited to an emphasis on young men and people from minority ethnic groups, but rather extends to other types of individuals and groups as well. A complicating factor was that car ownership, hardly a marker of social disadvantage, strongly predicts experience of police stops, because so many of these are traffic stops. The basic underlying issue seems to be that stop and search is used as a controlling, disciplinary tool as much as, if not more than, a crime-fighting tool, and is correspondingly focused on groups thought to be in need of such interventions. Overall, the suggestion might be that it is not the fact that this power exists that is necessarily the problem, but rather the extent and unevenness of its application. Thus far the emphasis has been on the experience of the broad category of police stops at the individual level, albeit that area-level factors were also examined. In this chapter the discussion moves on to consider data at a very different level of aggregation – the Police Force Area (PFA) – and the specific power to stop and search as laid out in PACE and other legislation. PFAs are the major unit of police organization in England and Wales. They generally correspond with local political boundaries such as counties (as in Devon and Cornwall, or Norfolk) and/or with metropolitan areas (as in Greater Manchester, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and West Midlands Police). Police forces in England and Wales have significant operational autonomy and different cultures; they report quite widely varying ‘policing outcomes’, for example in terms of arrest and conviction rates (Home Office 2015), and serve areas with varying populations and levels of socio-economic deprivation.
