Stop and Search - Are the Police too powerful?

Are the Police too powerful? Are the Police racist? Do they abuse their powers? These are the questions that immediately surface whenever the words "stop and search" are uttered, recalling memories of the infamous SUS laws and their application in Brixton prior to the explosion of the 1981 race riots. However, the issue has been re-ignited of late by the rise of Section 44 anti-terror powers which allow police officers to search anyone without the need for reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Yet stop and search held no real significance for me until I too was searched by police under Section 44, three years ago.

It was a hot Summer day in July 2006 and I was waiting for a friend of mine to arrive at my local tube station so we could go on together to another friend's house for a barbecue. I planned to stay the night there so had come prepared with my sleeping bag stuffed into a big rucksack on my back. My friend was late, unsurprisingly, but as he was coming in by tube and only needed to cross platforms to begin the second leg of the journey, I went through the ticket barriers and waited for him just behind them in anticipation of what turned out to be his not so imminent arrival.

Suddenly, two burly men, both over 6ft and kitted out entirely in leather (in 30 degree heat), approached me and showed me their police ID. They asked to search me and the contents of my rucksack under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act - I say asked, but it's not like I really had the option of saying no. Next, they asked if there was anything in my bag that could harm them if they opened it, which sounds as ludicrous a question today as it did then. After going through my rucksack, they made me turn around and put my hands up against the wall as they 'comprehensively' frisked me in front of other passing passengers, which now included my friend who had turned up just in time to catch the show. I even distinctly remember a man with a shaved head and several tattoos, dressed like a Hell's Angel, tutting at me disapprovingly as he walked through the ticket barriers. They then filled out a form taking down all my details: white, male, early twenties etc. It was a long list that also included my height, eye colour, description of the clothes I was wearing along with my home address. Finally, they gave me a copy of the form and headed off, sweating profusely in their Knightrider-esque attire.

Most of my friends that day reacted with horror when I told them this story. I chose to take a different perspective, however, mainly because I was technically loitering just behind the ticket barriers for about half an hour with a big rucksack on my back, almost exactly a year after a major terrorist attack was carried out on London Underground by guys wearing big rucksacks on their backs. More importantly though, I actually felt heartened that the police had stopped me because they were genuinely suspicious I might be a member of a secret Hampstead enclave of Al Qaeda, as opposed to singling me out for the colour of my skin or the length of my beard (which was short, albeit a tad unkept). This surely was progress since the days of the SUS laws with plain clothed officers on every street corner in some parts of London, regularly searching vast swathes of the black community without warning and often without reason.

Alas, an independent review of terrorism legislation in the UK, carried out by Lord Carlile QC in June of this year, found that the police have been carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" on thousands of people simply to give "racial balance" to their own stop and search statistics. In other words, it was far more likely that the reason I was subjected to an embarrassing search in broad daylight was so the police could report they were at least now searching as many whites as ethnic minorities. Furthermore, according to Home Office figures, the number of Section 44 searches carried out by Police in 2007/08 increased to 124,687 from 41,924 the year before, with less than 1% resulting in an arrest. Almost 9 out of 10 of those searches were carried out in London, with the entire capital designated a blanket Section 44 zone by the Metropolitan Police.

Perhaps they haven't made that much progress after all.