Top Think-Tank challenges minister over stop & search

Changes to police stop and search procedures would save only minutes and not hours of police time, a think tank argued today alleging inaccuracies in a recent speech by a government minister.

Police minister Nick Herbert recently announced that the police would save more than 300,000 hours if they reduced the time spent on the stop and search form by cutting some of the required information.

According to Herbert, reducing the recording requirements from 12 to 7 would create massive time savings for officers. However, the campaigning organisation StopWatch believes that the true figure is more likely to be 19,000 hours per year.

StopWatch - which is funded by The Runnymede Trust - a claim that Herbert’s figures are based on the assumption that the recording takes 16 minutes while they argue that it takes no more than one minute.

Herbert also says that 450,000 hours of police time would be saved by scrapping stop and account recording. This assumes it takes 12 minutes to fill in the form. In reality, recording stop and account rarely takes more than five minutes, leaving the actual time saving at 184,000 hours.

With individual officers carrying out an average of eight stop and searches and 15 stop and accounts per year, StopWatch said that the real time saving per officer will therefore be a matter of minutes per month.

The Conservatives pledged to reduce the amount of red tape holding back police officers in their duties and focused on the amount of detail required for stop and search procedures. They argued that by reducing some of the recording requirements, officers would spend less time on such procedures. However campaigners have warned that the reporting requirements introduced around stop and search were to address the discriminatory manner in which minority ethnic communities were being stopped. Black people are stopped and searched by the police at more than six times the rate of white people, while Asian people are stopped and searched at more than twice the rate of white people.

Dr Michael Shiner, an expert on stop and search from the London School of Economics, said: “Real time savings can be made by ensuring fewer, more effective stop and searches, but this cannot be achieved without rigorous oversight and scrutiny, which cannot, in turn, be achieved without recording stops and stop and search. In fact, real time savings could be made by stopping excess unfair and unproductive stops and stop and searches on black and Asian people.”

Chuka Umunna, Labour MP for Streatham in south London, said: “The changes the government is making to stop and search powers are drastically watering down the information collected when a search takes place.”