Policing minister Chris Philp’s call for officers to conduct more stop and searches to address knife crime confirms two core beliefs among the political establishment today. First, the assumption that doing more of it will lead to improved outcomes, chiefly taking more knives off the streets. Second, that many politicians and police chiefs seem allergic to evidence that doesn’t suit their law-and-order agenda.
Even Philp’s token caveat – that the controversial tactic should be used ‘lawfully and respectfully’ – is eclipsed by the obsession with volume. But there is nothing in the data to suggest that this is ‘the best foot forward’. While we hear that the number of searches fell by 23% since the pandemic, and by 44% in London, less attention is paid to the fact that the arrest rate for offensive weapons searches remained the same during that period, at 15-16%. Home Office data also show that 82% of searches specifically intended to find weapons instead found nothing. In fact, a weapon was found in only 3% of all searches in the year to 31 March 2023. Much like lesser-known methods, such as bin amnesties and weapons sweeps, police efforts to recover knives safely within densely populated areas is reminiscent of the act of looking for a needle in a haystack. Perhaps this is why two-thirds of police searches are for drugs (often small quantities of cannabis), compared with one-sixth for offensive weapons. Or why nothing is found to warrant any further action in just over 70% of police searches in England and Wales, every year.
Does the justice system deal with dangerous knife carriers, though? The Police National Computer records show that possession accounted for 97% knife and offensive weapon offences dealt with in the courts over the last decade.
Knife and offensive weapon offences data (Source: Table 1a, Knife and Offensive Weapon Sentencing Quarterly, England and Wales, Ministry of Justice)
Problem solved, you might think. However, when young people who carry knives are asked why they carry weapons, many routinely claim that they do so for their own protection. The threat of punishment is no deterrent, and the government knows this. The 2019 British Youth Council Youth Select Committee report on knife crime quotes them recognising that ‘short custodial sentences are associated with high levels of reoffending’, so they are ‘unlikely to deter young people who feel scared for their lives from carrying a knife out of protection’.
The government would also do well to heed established research demonstrating the limited capacity of stop and search to affect the occurrence of violence. The long and growing body of academic literature includes a decade-long study which ‘struggled to find evidence’ of stop and search’s impact on violent crime in London, and a Home Office evaluation of the Met’s Operation BLUNT 2, which found ‘no statistically significant crime-reducing effect from the large increase in weapons searches’ during the course of the trial.
Then there is persistent racial disparity in stop and searches towards Black people, justified on the grounds that ‘young Black men are disproportionately victims of knife crime’. Of course, no one doubts that there is a problem with violence among young people in hyperlocalised areas of cities such as London, some of which involves young Black boys and men. But this does not explain why there should be more stop and search per se. The results of a BBC Politics London investigation released in 2020 found that as a sixth of the capital’s population, Black people made up 47% of firearms searches and 55% of weapons searches, despite the police being less likely on average to find a blade or firearm on them. So Black Londoners could be forgiven for wondering why the Met cannot adequately explain away this racial disproportionality any more than academics can prove a causal link between stop and search volumes and violent crime.
If this government believed in non-punitive approaches to serious violence, then we would see a lot more worthwhile investment in the appropriate policy remedies that deal with young people with knives who are often vulnerable and in need of safeguarding. Instead, senior ministers speak of ‘ramping up’ stop and search, as though there are no downsides to doing so. Their memories may be short, but many of them have been in power long enough to have witnessed the days when forces conducted over one million searches annually in England and Wales, one of which resulted in the death of Mark Duggan, sparking a nationwide backlash. No one wants a repeat of that. No one needs to ‘bring back stop and search’ either. It never left. The police need to do it better.
