The Relationship Between Stop and Search, Community Safety, Procedural Justice and Police-Youth Relationships in Scotland
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Relationship between Stop and Search, Community Safety, Procedural Justice and Police-Youth Relationships in Scotland Conducted by: Professor Ross Deuchar Chief Investigator Dr Johanne Miller Research Assistant Report of a study funded by the British Academy June 2016 CONTENTS Page 1. Executive summary 3 2. Introduction to the background context and nature of the research study 8 3. Emerging themes: police officer interviews and participant observation 15 3.1 Proactive prevention, intelligence gathering and crime indicators 15 3.2 Stop and search, procedural justice and engagement with young people 18 3.3 Commonly searched groups and frequency of engagements 24 3.4 Changes to stop and search, political and media scrutiny and police morale 29 3.5 Police emotions, culture change and training 43 4. Emerging themes: interviews with young people and participant observation 48 4.1 Setting the context: a rights agenda 48 4.2 Changing perceptions of and changing relationships with police 49 4.3 Positive and negative experiences of stop and search 51 4.4 Impact of negative stop and searches 58 4.5 Moving forward: the impact of change and young people’s idealized views of stop and search 63 5. Discussion of findings 68 6. Conclusions and recommendations 73 7. References 84 2 1 Executive Summary Against the backdrop of an unprecedented level of scrutiny and policy change within Police Scotland in relation to the use of stop and search, the current research - funded by the British Academy between April 2015 and March 2016 - was focused on exploring the following key research questions: - To what extent do stop and search procedures help to prevent anti-social behaviour and violent crime through enabling officers to withdraw offensive weapons and/or alcohol and drugs from young people’s possession? - To what extent to – and in which ways – are stop and search procedures, street engagements and the police culture associated with proactive policing units underpinned by a focus on procedural justice values such as fairness, impartiality, respect, support, legitimacy and trust? - In light of the above, what impact do stop and search procedures and wider street engagements by proactive teams have on building or depleting positive relationships between officers and young people in local communities? Data was collected in both the east and west of Scotland, where the research team focused on neighbourhoods that had been identified as high risk in terms of increased levels of reported incidents of youth disorder and/or crime through careful data zone analysis conducted by the Licensing and Violence Reduction Division (LVRD) within Police Scotland. An ethnographic approach, drawing upon participant observation, was used. The research team firstly shadowed officers from flexible, proactive teams, observing over 50 interactions, engagements and interventions with young people and citizens out on the streets which included the implementation of stop and searches. Secondly, the team contacted a cross section of the patrol officers they worked with and their immediate superior officers as well as command-level officers at the National Stop and Search Unit (NSSU), and arranged to conduct semi-structured interviews with them. A total of 23 semi-structured interviews with officers were conducted, which explored their perceptions about the relationship between stop and search procedures and the prevention of violent crime / anti-social behaviour, as well as their views about the impact the procedures have on police/youth relationships and their perceptions about, and 3 reactions to, the intense levels of scrutiny and change that had recently taken place within Police Scotland in relation to stop and search. Thirdly, the research team also conducted semi- structured interviews and focus groups with young people in each of the focus communities who had had recent experience of engaging with the police and/or had been recently stopped and searched. In total, 46 young people took part, and all of the interviews explored the young people’s perceptions about the police, their experiences with officers and the implementation of stop and searches and the impact these had on their views about the police. Once fully transcribed, fieldnotes and interviews provided a rich data set that was analysed to detect salient patterns. Keywords that were prominent across all data sets were used as the basis of initial open coding, and emerging codes were then assimilated with the insights from earlier research and the resulting axial codes were ascribed to subsequent data as it was analysed. In summary, the following conclusions and recommendations emerged from the research: The phasing out of the use of non-statutory or ‘consensual’ stop and search in Scotland, although fully embraced as a strong policy priority within Police Scotland, was impacting negatively on officers in the west to a far greater extent than the east of Scotland. There was a strong feeling among some officers in some teams in the west of Scotland that non-statutory stop and search had had a very valuable part to play at a specific time and in a specific context, that context being the entrenched problem of violent crime, particularly knife crime, mainly in Glasgow (AGSS, 2015). However, it was evident these positions and perspectives had emerged against an unnatural and unhealthy backdrop whereby young people out on the street had grown accustomed to being stopped and searched due to a long-standing style of what was regarded as ‘robust’ policing and that had prioritised non-statutory approaches (AGSS, 2015). The beliefs that the officers in the west of Scotland had also did not appear to relate to statistics concerning young people and stop and search: as previous research has identified, although they are the most commonly stopped group, they also have the lowest detection rate (Murray, 2015). In addition, it was evident that the use of stop and search was not directly related to the detection of offensive weapons among young people, and that the use of the tactic for attempting to detect and withdraw the common trappings of youth leisure activities (most commonly alcohol and cigarettes) sometimes led to the increase (rather than prevention) of anti-social behaviour, violence and crime among Scottish young people. In the spirit of building community safety, any attempt to extend police powers to search children and young people for alcohol should therefore be resisted. 4 Recommendation 1: That any future targeted continuing professional development training for police officers should include direct reference to the low detection rates for young people and the lack of robust quantitative or qualitative evidence to prove a causal relationship between the level of stop search activity, the use of consensual searching and the prevalence of knife carrying and/or violent crime. Recommendation 2: That future targeted professional development training (particularly in the west of Scotland) should also focus on supporting officers to re-define the concept of ‘robust’ policing to be synonymous with the implementation of procedural justice. Recommendation 3: Given the evidence that suggests that stop and search does not act as a deterrent for carrying alcohol and drugs, combined with the inherent increased potential for anti-social behavior, violence and crime to emerge when officers withdraw the common trappings of youth leisure activities (most commonly alcohol and cigarettes) from young people, that any attempt to extend police powers to search children and young people for alcohol should be resisted. The observations of police practice confirmed the vastly reduced tendency to draw upon consensual searching and that the use of statutory procedures dominated. However, the tactic clearly encouraged officers to restrict the spatio-temporal freedom and behaviour of young people in accordance with the wishes of local authorities, housing associations and residents and enabled the law to be applied in ways that was sometimes predicated on individual police dispositions and attitudes (Chan, 1997) and devoid of a focus on human rights. Even although Police Scotland’s policy rhetoric focuses on ‘fairness, integrity and respect’ and the proactive unit officers who participated in interviews clearly had strong beliefs about the need for stop and search to be characterised by these principles and values, the young people who were interviewed (and particularly young men in the west of Scotland) clearly felt that their encounters with the police were far from being characterised by procedural justice values. However, the encouraging statements made by young people in the research in relation to the positive engagements they experienced with some isolated officers, including campus police officers, illustrates that sufficient reciprocal ground may often exist between disadvantaged 5 young people and the police that can be drawn upon to sow the seeds of a ‘more communicative future’ for police/youth relations (Loader, 1996: 145). However, promoting this sense of equity, justice and mutual trust in a wider sense will require a greater focus on officer training. Recommendation 4: That future approaches to police probationer training should include a specific focus on building discursive relationships with young people and should draw upon youth work ideology to ensure that officers are able to defuse, rather than accelerate, potentially volatile and confrontational situations with youth. Recommendation 5: That Police