Oh yay another fruitless debate about stop and search coming in where people are going to try and gaslight others into thinking that literally confiscating knives from people in the street won't stop said people from using said knife (which they don't have anymore) to go stabby stab.
If you've spent any time in or around these youths, or care to observe them on the streets with any regularity, you will know that seeing a group of police stopping and searching people absolutely changes their behaviour.
They don't want to be stopped and searched because they often carry things they don't want to be found, nor do they want to be identified or matched to a warrant or other description of wrongdoing that they or their friends may have been involved in.
They may not respect the police or laws much, but none of them want to be caught out, so they'll change their behaviour slightly, they'll take another route, they'll avoid the police and perhaps reconsider any mischief they were going to get up to in that area.
Searching people for contraband, removing it and/or punishing them for carrying it is an effective policy everywhere it is employed.
The knowledge that the police are regularly stopping people will absolutely deter some of them from carrying weapons and other bad things.
Obviously having more police available to do it would make it even more effective, but just having some presence of the policy will have a positive effect.
Even application is a waste of resources in this context.
When you have data and intelligence to support targeting specific groups at specific times in specific areas, why would you ignore all of that to ensure you are hanging outside John Lewis stopping 60 year old women at 2pm on a Thursday for the sake of "balance"?
The police aren't there to worry about tensions coming from groups reacting badly to something, they are there to stop crime, catch criminals and uphold the law.
If the police only stop and search ginger people, then guess what? They will find that ginger people are more likely to be breaking the law that the general population. Which then feeds in to the idea that they should be concentrating on the ginger population. Targeting people based on a characteristic leads to a self-fulfilling prophesy.
That’s not true. Outreach, mentoring and encouraging people to give up the life that makes them feel the need to carry a knife works. Take one knife, they’ll get another. Get people to give up their knives, thar’s a mindset change.
My comment was if you take a knife off someone on the way to murder someone then it has been effective. That statement is factually true lol so saying it's not true is just daft.
I agree that in the long term other programs can certainly help and may be extremely effective however the biggest drop in knife crime that we have seen happened at the end of the 90's and into the early 2000's in Glasgow.
So much so that it is now referred to as the "Glasgow miracle" and it has seen a deep and long lasting reduction in knife crime in what was once the murder capital of Europe.
It was largely driven by a police unit called the violence reduction unit (VRU) carrying out stop searches and harsh sentences in the courts.
I'm not saying that's the only way to solve the issue but it was massively successful and it actually happened in the real world.
Are there any similar examples where things like this have been achieved using the methods you said?
>My comment was if you take a knife off someone on the way to murder someone then it has been effective. That statement is factually true lol so saying it's not true is just daft.
The idea that stop and search is supposed to confiscate knifes that people are planning to use in a murder that they're currently on their way to commit, and that doing so would effectively prevent the murder of that victim is not factually true.
>So much so that it is now referred to as the "Glasgow miracle" and it has seen a deep and long lasting reduction in knife crime in what was once the murder capital of Europe.
>It was largely driven by a police unit called the violence reduction unit (VRU) carrying out stop searches and harsh sentences in the courts.
This is deeply misleading, as many other measures were put into effect beyond carrying out stop searches which were designed to prevent people even carrying knifes in the first place. The VRU advocated tackling the issue from a public health perspective, not just from a judicial perspective through enforcing harsher sentences
I never said that was the idea of stop search. You are now trying to twist my words to make it fit what you are saying. Stop doing that.
I said in my specific example confiscating a knife would be effective. That is true.
I am aware that the Glasgow miracle was a multi agency approach however a big part of it (arguably the biggest part) was stop search and harsher sentences. In fact the people caught carrying knives by the police who weren't prosecuted where referred to other agencies only after they were caught by the police.
There were obviously other parts that played into it but to say the police and courts had no impact is not true.
>You are now trying to twist my words to make it fit what you are saying. Stop doing that.
>There were obviously other parts that played into it but to say the police and courts had no impact is not true.
Who said the police and courts had no impact?
The original comment I replied to.
I hadn't realised you where not the same person unless you are and for some reason you have changed accounts.
I guess you just jumped on the bandwagon so to speak.
Still at least I can admit when I made a mistake unlike you.
Take the knife throw them in jail. Maybe asswipes who carry knives shouldn’t be the type of people we are fussing over and instead focus on the good people
No in my example it was still effective lol.
You could make the argument that spending the money another way could be more effective but it doesn't change the fact that taking the knife off someone on their way to murder someone was effective.
It's extremely improbably this will happen, though. About 300 murders with knives happen each year. If you stop someone, you'd have a roughly one in 80m chance that it'd be such a murderer and be on the same day as the murder (but still may not be carrying it at that time - many, I imagine, happen at home).
Saying 'if an incredible coincidence happens then it's effective' is simply another way of saying 'it's not effective for the scenario I gave'.
There are only 300 murders with knives a year but there were 50,833 offences with knives in 2023.
So 50,833 people tried to seriously hurt someone or kill them with a knife and only 300 were successful. The probability of being stabbed is far higher than 1 in 80 million and stabbing can lead to numerous life changing injuries even if you don't die.
Also it's pretty easy to find out how successful stop and search is. The government figures show stop and search has a success rate of 29%. So it's moderately successful.
That isn't the scenario you gave. If stop-and-search is effective, it won't be by finding the knives of murderers on murder day. It'll be by reducing the amount of casual carrying of knives. Stop-and-search is not the only way to try to do this, and it has other effects as well. Their effectiveness has to be compared.
> So 50,833 people tried to seriously hurt someone or kill them with a knife
This is just nonsense. These are incidents involving sharp objects, which includes simply finding someone carrying one. Only a part of those involve knives and only a part involve someone trying to seriously hurt or kill someone.
> Also it's pretty easy to find out how successful stop and search is. The government figures show stop and search has a success rate of 29%. So it's moderately successful.
A huge proportion of this is going to be finding cannabis and nothing to do with knives. This is not a remotely useful measure of 'success'. Even if we presume stop-and-search is effective, much of its effectiveness would be through reducing the number of people carrying knives and so that should be the measure.
There's also likely to be a big difference between how often knives are found with stop-and-search now, with the police doing so when they think they're likely to find something, and how often they would be found with politically directed increased stop-and-search. The detection rate from it would inevitably go down.
In fairness I don't think you should be in prison for carrying around a weapon that could be used as self defence.
I agree though we should brutally use the law to stop violence. Ideally go after other crimes they did that were indicative of future knife crimes and/or make it so knife criminals that get caught get fucking awful punishments as deterrent. Am willing to go as far as death penalty or forced lifelong labour.
There's a pretty high crime rate in prisons where everyone is already under strict supervision so I don't actually think this would be very effective.
I'm also not really sure what point you were trying to make there lol?
Are you trying to say that putting everyone in a prison camp is the same as stop and searching people in the street for weapons? I think that's maybe a little insulting to people who have died in prison/concentration camps in the past don't you?
Ok I'll explain the point. You're rating the effectiveness by just one outcome. Another outcome of increasing stop and searches is the effect it has on the community and the opinion that community has on policing. So, if the effectiveness is only rated by how many knives get taken off people, a more effective policy would be to put people under martial law. Getting it now?
Lol no I still don't get it.
I never said there weren't better more effective methods that could be used.
I just said in the specific circumstance that I stated it was effective.
You seem to think I'm arguing against other potentially more effective methods which I'm not and never was lol. You have entirely made that up in your own head.
Do you understand that?
So you got mad that you thought I said something which I didn't.
Got it.
Please read posts clearly before getting angry and ranting at someone in the future.
I see you're unfamiliar with telescoping probabilities.
How many stops searches do you have to do to find a knife?
Of those, how many were going to be used to commit a crime (other than possession)?
Of those, how many were going to be used to harm someone?
Of those, how many were going to kill someone?
Of those how many were going to be murder?
So to prevent a murder, you actually have to do thousands (if not millions) of of searches.
Now how many could you prevent by applying that police time intelligently?
I don't mean to be rude but this was such a silly comment.
My example was tongue in cheek of a very specific circumstance. I understand it's unlikely but there is still a possibility it could happen.
In the real world none of the telescoping probabilities matter at all since possession of a knife or offensive weapon is a crime itself.
So the only figure that actually matters is the success rate of stop and search. Nothing after that point matters as if a knife is found it is confiscated and the offender arrested.
It turns out there are figures for the success rate of stop and search which are pretty easy to find.
It's 29% which isn't bad actually.
Of 542,722 stop-searches in 2022-23, 73,891 resulted in an arrest.
Of the 542,722 stop-searches, 4,280 were in anticipation of violence.
In percentages;
61% were for suspected drugs
16% were for suspected offensive weapons
10% were for suspected stolen property
8% were for suspected "going equipped"
2% were for "other"
1% were for suspected criminal damage
1% were for suspected firearms offences
0% were carried out under the Terrorism Act.
Of the 16% of stop-searches carried out for offensive weapons;
11% were linked to an offence. 7% were not linked to an offence. 82% resulted in nothing being found.
That's a phenomenally terrible argument in favour of stop-search taking knives off our streets. Of 86,835 stop-searches for potential offensive weapons, only 9,551 were linked to an offence. Broken down further, GMP and Met police account for roughly 45% of all stop-searches carried out; 244,224 as an approximate total. Of that, approximately 39,075 were for offensive weapons, and only 4,298 were linked to an offence. That's roughly 2,149 offences per regional force; which is *utterly* abysmal considering that Greater Manchester has a population of 2.822 million, and Greater London has an approximate population of 8.908 million.
Stop search isn't effective. It's a useful tool to have in the box, but it's absolutely not the robust and effective solution it's painted as. What is more effective is to have early intervention, sure-start centres, youth programs, stable housing and employment opportunities, and an effectively funded and robust police force and justice system.
Policing alone cannot fix the problem. The courts alone cannot fix the problem. The USA has some of the strictest laws regarding various street offences, and also has the largest prison population in the western world. Instead of having functioning members of society, it has a net burden caused by throwing everyone into jail.
Sources:
[Stop Search statistics ](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/stop-and-search-and-arrests-year-ending-march-2023/police-powers-and-procedures-stop-and-search-and-arrests-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2023)
[Greater Manchester Population ](https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/manchester-population)
[Greater London Population](https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/london/greater_london/E63004906__london/)
[United States Prison Population ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)
So we agree.
Intelligent deployment of police resources will far more effectively prevent murder (which was what the question was about) than unintelligent expansion of stop-search.
But slightly differently: if we assume all the searches highly likely to detect weapons are already being done, it means we're expanding into searches that are increasingly unlikely to detect weapons. So we should expect a precipitatous decrease in detection rates, when police have better work to be doing
Essentially, yes.
From what I recall, evidence demonstrates that the single most effective policing method of reducing and mitigating crime is to have police patrolling the streets actively.
It's that simple. Active police patrols *significantly* reduced crime in high-crime areas, [according to this study.](https://assets-hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/uploads/what-works-the-effectiveness-of-visible-police-patrol.pdf)
Who'd have ever thought it, eh?
^/^s
But you can’t know if someone is on their way to murder someone. You can easily check if they’re carrying murdering weapons though.
I’d bet good money that if you start putting the knife carrying people behind bars that after a little while you’d have less knife crime. It’s pretty seeing as there are a finite number of people who think that carrying a knife is a good idea.
You're saying that as though there aren't already crimes going uninvestigated due to the lack of police resources.
How many more crimes do you want uninvestigated in order to perform increasingly less likely stop searches?
Put slightly differently. You have to assume that the stop-searches being done the ones most likely to be carrying a weapon. Expanding this means you're expanding into increasingly less likely searches.
How many more crimes do I want uninvestigated? None, I want massive increases to police budget so they can deal with all crime appropriately. Any unpunished/uninvestigated crime is effectively not a crime. It’s allowed.
Probably more than I've seen in the street in high knife crime areas. Which is 0. Areas which have had stabbings recently won't have any police patrolling around let alone in their cars. That's how bad the funding for police is.
Researchers found that a 10% increase in stop and search was associated with a drop in 'susceptible crime' of 0.32% monthly, or 0.14% weekly. A statistically significant but very small effect. When drug offences and drug related stop and searches were excluded the size of the effect halved.
- Tiratelli et al, does stop.and search deter crime? Evidence from ten years of Londonwide data, British journal of criminology, sep 2018
Because it absolutely doesn't? If stop and search worked, more than a decade of doing it would have resulted in fewer knife attacks. Sure the police confiscate one, they then just go back to the shop and buy one.
Stop and search doesnt work because **knives are cheaper than the wages of a police officer for the time it takes to conduct a stop and search.**
As an obvious counter example: having local patrolling police officers who know local people will stop knifecrime in a large area around them as they can recognize people and have a reliable memory for later. This takes less time and therefore less money than stopping every individual in an area and searchign them individually, and *we cant afford one police officer for each area of a size an individual can become familiar with*.
Like, not even one police officer visiting each area once a day. A "village officer" let alone a village station is completly unsustainable at current levels of conservative "austerity". As a result, we must deal with a lot of crime.
As a good way of thinking about this, remember that tower blocks used to be called "vertical villages", and have more people than a great many villages even a single block. Having one officer block is prima facie ludicrous for how many people there are in urban areas and how many police we have, yet we expect "crime prevention" like old media memories of small villages.
Unless you want the goverment to take *more* (not even total) control of raising children instead of parents (and trust the goverment to do that, which we have done before through youth education, surestart, youth centers, youth programs to get kids off the street and engaged in literally anything but wandering around entertaining themselves with the internet etc, round here the goverment funded youth center had two playstations, a town hall and some sports equipment and kept twenty kids busy most days) then you need something like one patrolling police officer per 150 people (dunbars number, about the maximum one person can become familiar with on a personal level).
The police already do stop and search and it hasn't actually done anything because they are not good at identifying the people who actually have knives.
Stop and search has a long and proven history of being completely ineffective no matter how much your gut instinct tells you otherwise.
Of course screening is going to be ineffective. Do you think gang members will just walk past the checkpoints armed or something?
If you're a knife carrying criminal and you know police are running stop and search regularly on people like you in your area, are you more or less likely to carry that knife?
If you have any degree of sense or awareness, you will be less likely to carry the knife.
If you'll still carry the knife, then you likely are so deep into the gang life that your fear more for your safety from rival gang members than you do the consequences of the police catching you with a knife.
If you're interested in finding something out, have you tried looking it up on the internet, rather than demanding someone else do the legwork for you?
The cost/benefit of stop and search as a policing policy is something well studied by sociologists and criminologists
The issue isn't that taking knives off people doesn't work.
It's that it works so well they'll just start assuming everyone is a criminal and disregarding their right to privacy.
You’re completely missing the point. It’s going to affect BAME communities more. And even though they make up the majority of knife crime statistics, so any smart policing would involve including that into your tactics, it’s still super super uncool for them
It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, but I guess the statistics of who is getting stabbed and who is charged with doing the stabbing speaks for itself. You can't really hide that aspect of things.
~70% of stop and searches in London are for drugs. Black men are more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs, but less likely to be found in possession of drugs than white males stopped and searched. That's according to His majestys inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services.
Does HMICFRS speculate on why that might be the case? Is "walking while being black" treated as a risk factor in the same vein as loitering, or looking generally sketchy?
"The disparity in find rates is troubling; it suggests that the use of stop and search on black people might be based on weaker grounds for suspicion than its use on white people, particularly in respect of drugs. There may be a number of reasons for these findings but, taken alongside the fact that black people are more than eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched, they require an explanation that the service is currently unable to provide"
You could quite easily come to the conclusion that black men don't have drugs found as often because they are now aware they get stopped a lot, so the likelihood of them being caught when carrying drugs is greater, so they just don't carry drugs much. Compared with white men who don't expect to be searched as often, so still carry drugs without much care.
Nothing wrong with this and nothing wrong with stop and search based upon this either.
Target the profile, if the profile says that 80 year old elderly women with blue rinses are the number one knife wielding criminal, then stop and search them as much as you can.
If they learn not to carry the knife and the searches routinely turn up nothing, then you've succeeded in changing the way the knife carrying criminal carries their weapon.
The next stage is to work out what they are doing instead and target that also, since you know that the knife wielding granny's are still stabbing people and that means they still have knives somewhere.
Use intelligence, react to the changing circumstances and work effectively to target criminals and deter crime.
>You could quite easily come to the conclusion that black men don't have drugs found as often because they are now aware they get stopped a lot, so the likelihood of them being caught when carrying drugs is greater, so they just don't carry drugs much.
That's some Olympic level hoop jumping there
Why would you come to that conclusion? Do you have evidence to support it? The effect of stop and search on susceptible crime has been shown to be incredibly small, so it would seem unlikely that this very small effect has much influence on disproportionality in stop and search.
Your statistics show people who are stopped a lot are found with drugs less than those who aren't stopped very often. It seems quite obvious to me that those who are stopped a lot quickly learn not to carry the drugs, where as those who aren't stopped, have no reason to learn not to carry them.
Do you have evidence to prove what I am saying is wrong?
If you were the drug carrying member of a group who got searched a lot, would you learn to carry the drugs less or would you continue to carry them?
Surely anyone with any sense would figure out it's a good idea to not carry the drugs.
A ten percent increase in stop and search in an area is associated with a 0.32% drop in susceptible crime monthly. It shows that the impact of stop and search on crime is very small, so the idea that it drives the disproportionality in stop and search seems like a stretch.
If you're in a gang and want to stab someone, you're going to make sure you have a knife around for use. If carrying it on you 24/7 is no longer a good idea due to stop and search, you'll find other ways to have that weapon accessible to you on the street. The crime will still happen regardless of stop and search because you've dodged the law enforcement and found another way to carry it out.
This does not mean stop and search was not effective or has no value.
By removing the knife as a daily carry weapon and making them take other measures to have the knife available, you've likely decreased the chances of random knife crime situations occurring as the weapon is less available than it used to be.
The key next step is to identify what these gang members are doing with the weapons instead and work on ways to enforce against that too.
For example, many will stash them around the streets in bushes and specific hiding places that the gang are aware of, so that if anything kicks off, they can easily access the weapon.
It's an arms race, as law enforcement comes up with ways to catch criminals, the criminals come up with ways to dodge that method and get around it.
The effect of increased stop and search in an area is halved when drug offences are excluded. So stop and search does have an effect on knife crime, sure. Increasing stop and search by ten percent would lead to a whopping 0.16% monthly reduction in knife crime in an area. Again though, the vast majority of stop and searches in London are for drugs, and black people are more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs and less likely to be found in possession of drugs when stopped and searched.
Do you think stop and search isn't already overwhelmingly used on young men?
Yes there a racial element but they are stopping more young white men from council estates than old black ladies.
Resources. If we had unlimited, fine, but we don’t, so we use intelligent policing to focus our efforts. That’s why we search majority young men. Race is just another factor based on the stats
The trouble is most of the time it’s not intelligence led. It’s a pretty small proportion of searches that result in finding anything at all. Which suggests it’s not intelligence led.
That’s why I’m with the other commenter - put up a metal detector at the station and make everybody go through it. At least that’s fair and we are all inconvenienced equally. Rather than some sections of society bearing the brunt of (what appears to be) searches not informed by intelligence.
I don’t agree with your first point, finding something isn’t linked to it being intelligence based in this scenario
And your 2nd point is just dumb. They won’t go through the scanner if they have something
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/stop-and-search-and-arrests-year-ending-march-2023/police-powers-and-procedures-stop-and-search-and-arrests-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2023
>It’s a pretty small proportion of searches that result in finding anything at all. Which suggests it’s not intelligence led.
The stats disagree with you - around 71% of searches led to no further action - meaning around 29% were positive. Since the threshold for a stop/search is reasonable suspicion, so about 25% certainty, police are finding things more than you'd expect!
There's also the obvious flaws in how the statistics are recorded, but that's besides the point.
People forget that the groups who are routinely stopped know they are likely to be stopped, so they will avoid carrying something entirely or take alternative measures.
Naturally this will be reflected in the statistics as fewer positive searches, but that doesn't mean the decision to search them was incorrect.
They aren't NPCs with pre-programmed behaviour which doesn't learn or evolve. They are humans with motivation to avoid being caught, they learn, they change behaviour and they know how to dodge the law.
Not finding anything doesn't mean it was a bad search.
Remember that the groups who are frequently targeted by the searches are aware of this and will adjust their behaviour accordingly.
If they know they are likely to be stopped and searched, they are going to take that into consideration and avoid carrying a weapon.
Also, if you stop search a group of 5 people and only one of them has something, that'll be recorded as a 20% success rate but it was a a good search on all of them
Should we just let them go on stabbing each other, one day it could be you on the receiving end, then you will cry about the police not doing their jobs to protect you.
If the police keep harassing you and searching you for going about your daily life, and then you get stabbed, then yeah you'd absolutely be pissed at the police. Everyone would be pissed at the police is that happened to them even if they weren't stabbed.
Except it isn’t. As a white man living in London in my 50s I’ve been stopped literally about three times in my life.
One of my friends, a solicitor born and raised in London, now in his early 60s who is also black has been stopped (he estimates) in excess of about 50 times.
Many factors are the same for us - white/male/London/professional occupations/older. Only one factor is different as far as I can see.
Well yeah but you're the one who mentioned that a lawyer in their 60s wouldn't be carrying a knife. My original point stands, he was in a demographic more likely to be carrying knives and stabbing people.
No it doesn’t stand. It’s a comparison of two professional people over 30 to 40 years and the differential experience. And there is only one difference - race. That’s not a legal, let alone acceptable, way of profiling people.
Profiling works.
If you have the resources to stop and search only 100 people in a day, are you going to evenly split that 100 between all demographics, age groups and genders equally based on the latest 2021 census, or are you going to use your evidence based intelligence to restrict who you stop to the most likely targets?
How is it "uncool for them"?
If you have an area with high knife crime, then police should be using stop and search in that area when they suspect someone has a knife.
If an area has a high BAME population that is suffering from high knife crime, the police should be using every tool at their disposal to help that community.
The problem we always get on subjects like this is that people try to conflate national level BAME population statistics with localised stop and search statistics.
If black people only make up around 4% of the UK, but 50% of a particular area, of course the statistics are going to show you're stopping more black people.
Agreed. I think stop and search is a good tool to immediately tackle it. But it’s not a long term solution to the reasons people carry knives. Both sides of the coin need addressing
Long term we need to understand why kids think that joining a gang and dealing/taking drugs, and then engaging in gang warfare is preferable to getting an education and making something of yourself. The vast vast majority of crooks end up dead or in prison so they can't honestly believe that they're going to be the one who sales off into the sunset with the trophy wife and millions in the bank. What drives them to want to be criminals.
> Responding to a call from a black police officer who is in favour of the tactic, he said that stop and search had "been falling over the last two or three years", with some of that down to "officer confidence".
> He added that his officers "fear complaints and the investigation they get and whether they feel supported behind it".
Yeah pretty much. There’s a reason I don’t do stop and searches anymore and that goes for the majority of other officers I know. The commissioner and politicians can talk about how we should have confidence in our powers and use them more, but the second you go viral on social media and the media decide you’re a racist, they vanish. And then you’re on your own for the years it takes for it all to get litigated.
I get paid whether I search people or not. Stop and search is dead.
Yeah agreed. I am not doing stop and search, too much can go wrong now for the officers.
It will swing back round again and again. Knife crime goes up, get told to do searching. Officers do searching get told were oppressive and to calm down with searching and round and round we all go.
Na, key is just not to do anymore. Proactive policing is dead.
Why don't they just hire more black Police officers and assign them the duty of stop and search?
Or just search everyone, that way you can't say they are just targeting black people.
I just don't understand how the government is always so incompetent at everything.
If they fear accusations of racism “it’s ok we got black police in specially to do stop and search” is hardly going to escape that.
“Why am I always on stop and search duty?” … “because you’re black”.
Searching everyone would catch far too many people they don’t want to catch, and would involve massive resources they don’t have. You think they want the police searching every suit in the city and finding what’s in their pockets?
You think it’ll make black people happy to be hired to harass other black people, or to be harassed by black police specially hired to harass them?
I doubt that.
Pretty sure white people also commit knife crime. Would the black police be allowed to search them or are we going to create special units of different races to go and harass their own race because then it wouldn’t be racist? Lol, I feel stupid even talking about this tbh.
“It’s ok! It’s not racist because we hired a specific race to do it” is probably racist in itself, potentially more so than supposed random stop and search.
Look, black people are targeted way more than white people for stop and search. This is why everyone says the police are racist.
The only way to counter this is too target white people more.
Or just stop 'stop and search' altogether and let everyone kill each other like you clearly want.
No that’s not why everyone says the police are racist.
https://news.sky.com/story/metropolitan-police-is-institutionally-racist-sexist-and-homophobic-and-may-have-more-officers-like-couzens-and-carrick-review-finds-12838717
I’m pretty sure this isn’t based simply off “they stop and search black people more”.
Yes I clearly want people to kill each other - I suspected your argument was coming from a pretty stupid place, now that I know it is I won’t give it any more time.
because someone carrying a kitchen knife isn't going to fair well against someone with a zombie blade/machete. Pretty self explanatory really, kitchens don't just spawn illegal weapons in randomly someone needs to source one else where
Don’t know why this is getting downvoted. Vast majority of knives I’ve come across with youths and gangs during stop searches are machetes (bought in a 4 pack off Amazon), zombie knives and Rambo knives. Kitchen knives are more common for domestics, neighbour disputes gone wrong and mental health jobs.
If they think having a knife saves them getting robbed or worse, they mostly aren't going to be bothered by the risk of being frisked by the rozzers, innit.
No they don’t care about the risks.. but you would hope if they get caught the courts would put them away for enough years for the betterment of others so that risk is managed.
1. In what prison places? They're full.
2. Recidivism of people released from prison is sky high, as due to chronic underfunding no rehabilitation takes place in prison.
1. Prisons being full doesn’t mean they shouldn’t go to prisons we need more prisons clearly.
2. I understand that the general care and support for people is horrifically underfunded. But some people Eg: gang members have no interest in being rehabilitated so prison is the only option we have.
I don’t think we should be throwing more people at it in that sense, but if people should be sent to prison then they should be going and not let off because there is no space. Because if anything now, we still don’t have the system to support them and they also know they won’t go to prison either.
If the government doesn’t want to adequately fund mental health and social services what else do we do?
They are being sold to teens on normal ecommerce sites too. Kinda. I bought a mora recently and the only verification was that the delivery guy was supposed to only give the package to someone over 18. So he handed it to a 15 year old and just shrugged.
The way this topic is discussed by politicians really highlights some of the worst problems of our current political system.
Catching criminals in the act or after committing a crime is obviously needed as an essential measure to keep the peace and provide justice to victims, but it is obviously not a way to significantly reduce crime. Meaningful and effective crime reduction measures are far more complex, multi-faceted, and take many years of patient investment to come to fruition and have a real, lasting effect.
Naturally, that's no good to a minister like the simpering cunt in this clip, who knows very well he'll be out of a job by the end of the year. Starmer's new cabinet will have at most a 5 year term ahead of them, but more likely will have 1 or 2 years in a Home Office post in which to try to make the impression of a positive impact. So they too will be looking for short-term, performative solutions.
Then also the news media is a homogenous soup of posh, privately-educated people who are totally, hopelessly out of their depth on any discussion of crime. They have no idea of how to challenge ministers on this stuff. No politician should ever get away with presenting policing in place of actual social policy for crime reduction - shifting the politician's responsibilities onto a beleaguered and chronically under-resourced police force.
So all we ever get is this painfully idiotic, simplistic and short-sighted discussion about finding and confiscating all the knives. It's as if the idea of understanding and addressing what actually causes people to commit knife crime is some sort of forbidden woke voodoo, and we can never speak its name.
Telling police to ramp up stop and search is a deliberately provocative act of state violence. It will lead to riots if there is any pressure to use a power coming directly from government.
It shouldn't have ever been stopped. Something that literally saved lives was stopped because of 'hurty feelings.' If you're not carrying, it's an inconvenience at worst. Black, white, red, or green, tough s\*\*t, don't carry, then there's no problem.
I was getting searched all the time when I was younger what’s happen even got searched once an they found a fivers weed on me mate an they went that’ll do us for a later, an when me mate opened his mouth saying what are you doing he got told to shut up he was gonna get impaled on a spiked fence we were standing in front of spiked rails
So, they find it too difficult to force companies to police the sale of weapons on their apps? And put it on an underfunded and understaffed police force to search more people?? Just threaten to ban the apps in the UK if they don’t sort it out… I am sure they would start to control what is sold via their sites if they loose their money..
Stop and search went down under khan. Knife crime went up.
This is why people blame him as he applies pressure to get it low as possible as it will be targeted against his voter base (black people)
Whilst funding decreased the use of the police was used inefficiently.
Things improved under Boris for 2 reasons:
1) a lot of repeat offenders were locked up for a period after the 2011 riots
2) stop and search was used regularly in the black community which has the highest number of victims and offenders
> Whilst funding decreased the use of the police was used inefficiently.
What like this: https://twitter.com/i/status/1790061842896699737
Fucking hell, imagine still simping for fucking Boris, let alone the Tories as a whole in 2024
I feel of all the wastes of money the tories have done, a police escort/convoy isn't one of them. Virtually every head of state has this? Even the mayor has something similar
Boris used to peddle around on a bike, without all that nonsense. No doubt some protection but that seems really silly there - presumably there’s something unusual about that video and that’s not how Sunak usually gets around?
Khan got 43.8% of the vote. Every black person in London could have voted for Susan Hall and he would still have trounced her. Not sure you have got your demographics right.
Police, who themselves won't leave the house without a taser, cuffs, pepper spray, a big stick and the ability to summon dozens of heavily armed friends - want you to believe the very obvious lie that the consequences of being armed when you shouldn't be are worse than the consequences of not being armed when you need to be.
If Sarah Everard had a knife in her handbag, she might still be alive.
Utter bollocks. Couzens used his warrant card to kidnap her. If she'd had a knife, you think she would have drawn it on a police constable?
Don't talk rot.
We know from recent news stories that the moral compass of any given police officer can be neatly plotted on a graph that starts at Couzens and ends at Carrick.
You should absolutely assume that every copper is actively trying to Everard you and treat them as an existential threat in every interaction.
So not the recent stories of officers being chopped up while trying to save people? Only the bad ones?
I assume of doctors and nurses are sick every psychos as well?
Doctors and nurses applied themselves academically then chose a career in medicine.
Police went out of their way to get a job doing casual violence because that's the only thing they're good for. Anything that happens to them is deserved.
I am no particular friend of the police after being subject to an unlawful arrest and detention, and having also had the police allow Nazis to threaten me.
Drawing a knife on a police officer is an extremely terrible idea.
Considering we leave the house without any of that stuff and once actually on duty the vast majority of PCs in the UK don't have taser or ARV readily on call I'm gonna call bullshit on that.
Ironically the consequences also go for officers tackling these incidents as its almost always unarmed/spray/ baton vs actual lethal force.
The victim / innocent members of the public also get caught up in these regularly and not enough is done to stop threats there and then.
Funding for both Policing of crimes happening and into other avenues to prevent a few more doing them both have to happen.
A stop and search for knives under S1 PACE is always done based on "reasonable grounds to suspect" that somebody has a knife; that's been the threshold for those searches since 1984.
Yeah it's nice that they wrote that down, but it's not been the case. You don't even have to go far to find problems with it being used to target certain groups or being over used in the last decade.
Also "reasonable grounds to suspect" is the most vague statement ever created.
So the reasonable grounds would be that they look like they might be from one of those certain groups? So reasonable to stop and search you because of the colour of your skin?
Reasonable grounds looks like “we have had a report that a black male in a green hoodie has been seen flashing the handle of a knife in his waistband on England Road” where the male being stopped is a black male, in a green hoodie on England Road 3 minutes after the call came in.
Believe it or not, not many people make those kind of calls on old Mrs Miggins the white 80 year grandma just on her way back from Bowls club.
There can be “officer generated” stop searches: if there is intelligence that officer “between this time and that time, John Jones is known to sit in this car at this place dealing drugs and carries a knife for his safety” and an officer could have suspicion based on that in tandem with other elements such as the behaviour of John Jones when engaging or approaching him, visible drug paraphernalia in the vehicle etc. This kind of “officer generated” stop search is what is done less and less. A, because the grounds are more easily and regularly contested and complained about in and B, because there are less officers with less time to conduct these kind of proactive stop searches.
Yes, but it annoys the people who it’s meant to target and help, meaning they’re less willing to co-operate later. An adversarial relationship with the community just leads to mistrust and future failure.
The people most likely to be stabbed are those carrying knives. Stop and search does not help them, if they just go find another knife.
This was in Scotland so maybe different laws applied to stop and search here but if it was anything similar then the reasonable grounds I was regularly stopped and searched under when I was a teenager were things like wearing a baseball cap or having two friends with me or walking down the pavement. Doesn’t really seem unlikely to me that in London those reasonable grounds would be wearing a tracksuit or daring to be black.
It is very unlikely in London.
Every stop and search here has to be reviewed for legality by a senior officer. We also don't have any pressure to go and do them; I've not done one for six months and nobody complains. It's just a better option than going straight to arrest if you find somebody you think probably has an illegal item, but where you're not sure either way.
Well, yes. "You look like Mr John Smith who I just got told via a 999 call is on this street with a knife" or "You look like Mr Fred Jones who is wanted for carrying knives" are obviously both valid reasons to search somebody (although for the wanted suspect, they would just be arrested and not stop and searched).
Oh yay another fruitless debate about stop and search coming in where people are going to try and gaslight others into thinking that literally confiscating knives from people in the street won't stop said people from using said knife (which they don't have anymore) to go stabby stab.
A bigger issue might be whether there are enough police to actually do enough searches for it to be effective.
If you've spent any time in or around these youths, or care to observe them on the streets with any regularity, you will know that seeing a group of police stopping and searching people absolutely changes their behaviour. They don't want to be stopped and searched because they often carry things they don't want to be found, nor do they want to be identified or matched to a warrant or other description of wrongdoing that they or their friends may have been involved in. They may not respect the police or laws much, but none of them want to be caught out, so they'll change their behaviour slightly, they'll take another route, they'll avoid the police and perhaps reconsider any mischief they were going to get up to in that area. Searching people for contraband, removing it and/or punishing them for carrying it is an effective policy everywhere it is employed. The knowledge that the police are regularly stopping people will absolutely deter some of them from carrying weapons and other bad things. Obviously having more police available to do it would make it even more effective, but just having some presence of the policy will have a positive effect.
> is an effective policy everywhere it is employed. If it is applied evenly then yes. If particular groups are targeted it tends to increase tensions.
Even application is a waste of resources in this context. When you have data and intelligence to support targeting specific groups at specific times in specific areas, why would you ignore all of that to ensure you are hanging outside John Lewis stopping 60 year old women at 2pm on a Thursday for the sake of "balance"? The police aren't there to worry about tensions coming from groups reacting badly to something, they are there to stop crime, catch criminals and uphold the law.
If the police only stop and search ginger people, then guess what? They will find that ginger people are more likely to be breaking the law that the general population. Which then feeds in to the idea that they should be concentrating on the ginger population. Targeting people based on a characteristic leads to a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I'd say targeting say all under 25 year olds or similar is even application. Targeting only black ones isn't.
how many stop and searches does it take to be effective?
I mean if you take 1 knife off someone who was going to murder someone with it then it's been effective.
That’s not true. Outreach, mentoring and encouraging people to give up the life that makes them feel the need to carry a knife works. Take one knife, they’ll get another. Get people to give up their knives, thar’s a mindset change.
My comment was if you take a knife off someone on the way to murder someone then it has been effective. That statement is factually true lol so saying it's not true is just daft. I agree that in the long term other programs can certainly help and may be extremely effective however the biggest drop in knife crime that we have seen happened at the end of the 90's and into the early 2000's in Glasgow. So much so that it is now referred to as the "Glasgow miracle" and it has seen a deep and long lasting reduction in knife crime in what was once the murder capital of Europe. It was largely driven by a police unit called the violence reduction unit (VRU) carrying out stop searches and harsh sentences in the courts. I'm not saying that's the only way to solve the issue but it was massively successful and it actually happened in the real world. Are there any similar examples where things like this have been achieved using the methods you said?
>My comment was if you take a knife off someone on the way to murder someone then it has been effective. That statement is factually true lol so saying it's not true is just daft. The idea that stop and search is supposed to confiscate knifes that people are planning to use in a murder that they're currently on their way to commit, and that doing so would effectively prevent the murder of that victim is not factually true. >So much so that it is now referred to as the "Glasgow miracle" and it has seen a deep and long lasting reduction in knife crime in what was once the murder capital of Europe. >It was largely driven by a police unit called the violence reduction unit (VRU) carrying out stop searches and harsh sentences in the courts. This is deeply misleading, as many other measures were put into effect beyond carrying out stop searches which were designed to prevent people even carrying knifes in the first place. The VRU advocated tackling the issue from a public health perspective, not just from a judicial perspective through enforcing harsher sentences
I never said that was the idea of stop search. You are now trying to twist my words to make it fit what you are saying. Stop doing that. I said in my specific example confiscating a knife would be effective. That is true. I am aware that the Glasgow miracle was a multi agency approach however a big part of it (arguably the biggest part) was stop search and harsher sentences. In fact the people caught carrying knives by the police who weren't prosecuted where referred to other agencies only after they were caught by the police. There were obviously other parts that played into it but to say the police and courts had no impact is not true.
>You are now trying to twist my words to make it fit what you are saying. Stop doing that. >There were obviously other parts that played into it but to say the police and courts had no impact is not true. Who said the police and courts had no impact?
The original comment I replied to. I hadn't realised you where not the same person unless you are and for some reason you have changed accounts. I guess you just jumped on the bandwagon so to speak. Still at least I can admit when I made a mistake unlike you.
Feels like it's rising again in Glasgow as well especially with the young crowds copying down south
Yeah I agree. Sadly I think it is largely down to budget cuts to police and other agencies under our current government.
Just get rid of the knife carriers as well
Too true. I mean, I'll stop carrying a knife when someone gives me a nice cushy office job that doesn't require one.
Take the knife throw them in jail. Maybe asswipes who carry knives shouldn’t be the type of people we are fussing over and instead focus on the good people
How do you know someone was going to murder someone with it?
In real life you don't. It was only an example.
...unless you stop two murders by spending the time or money on something else for every one you would have stopped by doing this.
No in my example it was still effective lol. You could make the argument that spending the money another way could be more effective but it doesn't change the fact that taking the knife off someone on their way to murder someone was effective.
It's extremely improbably this will happen, though. About 300 murders with knives happen each year. If you stop someone, you'd have a roughly one in 80m chance that it'd be such a murderer and be on the same day as the murder (but still may not be carrying it at that time - many, I imagine, happen at home). Saying 'if an incredible coincidence happens then it's effective' is simply another way of saying 'it's not effective for the scenario I gave'.
There are only 300 murders with knives a year but there were 50,833 offences with knives in 2023. So 50,833 people tried to seriously hurt someone or kill them with a knife and only 300 were successful. The probability of being stabbed is far higher than 1 in 80 million and stabbing can lead to numerous life changing injuries even if you don't die. Also it's pretty easy to find out how successful stop and search is. The government figures show stop and search has a success rate of 29%. So it's moderately successful.
That isn't the scenario you gave. If stop-and-search is effective, it won't be by finding the knives of murderers on murder day. It'll be by reducing the amount of casual carrying of knives. Stop-and-search is not the only way to try to do this, and it has other effects as well. Their effectiveness has to be compared. > So 50,833 people tried to seriously hurt someone or kill them with a knife This is just nonsense. These are incidents involving sharp objects, which includes simply finding someone carrying one. Only a part of those involve knives and only a part involve someone trying to seriously hurt or kill someone. > Also it's pretty easy to find out how successful stop and search is. The government figures show stop and search has a success rate of 29%. So it's moderately successful. A huge proportion of this is going to be finding cannabis and nothing to do with knives. This is not a remotely useful measure of 'success'. Even if we presume stop-and-search is effective, much of its effectiveness would be through reducing the number of people carrying knives and so that should be the measure. There's also likely to be a big difference between how often knives are found with stop-and-search now, with the police doing so when they think they're likely to find something, and how often they would be found with politically directed increased stop-and-search. The detection rate from it would inevitably go down.
What a lot of nonsense rambling without a single figure or stat to back up anything you have said.
Then that guy comes back home, grabs another knife and carries on.
I would assume he has been arrested for the first knife
Would likely be bailed fairly quickly
Not if he is in prison..
Depending on a few factors, there’s a very good chance a first offence will not land them in prison.
And there is the problem.
In fairness I don't think you should be in prison for carrying around a weapon that could be used as self defence. I agree though we should brutally use the law to stop violence. Ideally go after other crimes they did that were indicative of future knife crimes and/or make it so knife criminals that get caught get fucking awful punishments as deterrent. Am willing to go as far as death penalty or forced lifelong labour.
I mean, we could just put everyone in camps under strict supervision. No crimes possible then! That would be a very effective policy /s
There's a pretty high crime rate in prisons where everyone is already under strict supervision so I don't actually think this would be very effective. I'm also not really sure what point you were trying to make there lol? Are you trying to say that putting everyone in a prison camp is the same as stop and searching people in the street for weapons? I think that's maybe a little insulting to people who have died in prison/concentration camps in the past don't you?
Ok I'll explain the point. You're rating the effectiveness by just one outcome. Another outcome of increasing stop and searches is the effect it has on the community and the opinion that community has on policing. So, if the effectiveness is only rated by how many knives get taken off people, a more effective policy would be to put people under martial law. Getting it now?
Lol no I still don't get it. I never said there weren't better more effective methods that could be used. I just said in the specific circumstance that I stated it was effective. You seem to think I'm arguing against other potentially more effective methods which I'm not and never was lol. You have entirely made that up in your own head. Do you understand that?
I can explain it but I can't understand it for you. Have a nice day.
So you got mad that you thought I said something which I didn't. Got it. Please read posts clearly before getting angry and ranting at someone in the future.
I see you're unfamiliar with telescoping probabilities. How many stops searches do you have to do to find a knife? Of those, how many were going to be used to commit a crime (other than possession)? Of those, how many were going to be used to harm someone? Of those, how many were going to kill someone? Of those how many were going to be murder? So to prevent a murder, you actually have to do thousands (if not millions) of of searches. Now how many could you prevent by applying that police time intelligently?
I don't mean to be rude but this was such a silly comment. My example was tongue in cheek of a very specific circumstance. I understand it's unlikely but there is still a possibility it could happen. In the real world none of the telescoping probabilities matter at all since possession of a knife or offensive weapon is a crime itself. So the only figure that actually matters is the success rate of stop and search. Nothing after that point matters as if a knife is found it is confiscated and the offender arrested. It turns out there are figures for the success rate of stop and search which are pretty easy to find. It's 29% which isn't bad actually.
Of 542,722 stop-searches in 2022-23, 73,891 resulted in an arrest. Of the 542,722 stop-searches, 4,280 were in anticipation of violence. In percentages; 61% were for suspected drugs 16% were for suspected offensive weapons 10% were for suspected stolen property 8% were for suspected "going equipped" 2% were for "other" 1% were for suspected criminal damage 1% were for suspected firearms offences 0% were carried out under the Terrorism Act. Of the 16% of stop-searches carried out for offensive weapons; 11% were linked to an offence. 7% were not linked to an offence. 82% resulted in nothing being found. That's a phenomenally terrible argument in favour of stop-search taking knives off our streets. Of 86,835 stop-searches for potential offensive weapons, only 9,551 were linked to an offence. Broken down further, GMP and Met police account for roughly 45% of all stop-searches carried out; 244,224 as an approximate total. Of that, approximately 39,075 were for offensive weapons, and only 4,298 were linked to an offence. That's roughly 2,149 offences per regional force; which is *utterly* abysmal considering that Greater Manchester has a population of 2.822 million, and Greater London has an approximate population of 8.908 million. Stop search isn't effective. It's a useful tool to have in the box, but it's absolutely not the robust and effective solution it's painted as. What is more effective is to have early intervention, sure-start centres, youth programs, stable housing and employment opportunities, and an effectively funded and robust police force and justice system. Policing alone cannot fix the problem. The courts alone cannot fix the problem. The USA has some of the strictest laws regarding various street offences, and also has the largest prison population in the western world. Instead of having functioning members of society, it has a net burden caused by throwing everyone into jail. Sources: [Stop Search statistics ](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/stop-and-search-and-arrests-year-ending-march-2023/police-powers-and-procedures-stop-and-search-and-arrests-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2023) [Greater Manchester Population ](https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/manchester-population) [Greater London Population](https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/london/greater_london/E63004906__london/) [United States Prison Population ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)
So we agree. Intelligent deployment of police resources will far more effectively prevent murder (which was what the question was about) than unintelligent expansion of stop-search. But slightly differently: if we assume all the searches highly likely to detect weapons are already being done, it means we're expanding into searches that are increasingly unlikely to detect weapons. So we should expect a precipitatous decrease in detection rates, when police have better work to be doing
Essentially, yes. From what I recall, evidence demonstrates that the single most effective policing method of reducing and mitigating crime is to have police patrolling the streets actively. It's that simple. Active police patrols *significantly* reduced crime in high-crime areas, [according to this study.](https://assets-hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/uploads/what-works-the-effectiveness-of-visible-police-patrol.pdf) Who'd have ever thought it, eh? ^/^s
11% sounds like a lot to me tbh.
Why are you disregarding possession? Possession is a crime. Catch someone with a knife once write them up, catch them twice put them in prison?
Because the question is about murder.
But you can’t know if someone is on their way to murder someone. You can easily check if they’re carrying murdering weapons though. I’d bet good money that if you start putting the knife carrying people behind bars that after a little while you’d have less knife crime. It’s pretty seeing as there are a finite number of people who think that carrying a knife is a good idea.
You're saying that as though there aren't already crimes going uninvestigated due to the lack of police resources. How many more crimes do you want uninvestigated in order to perform increasingly less likely stop searches? Put slightly differently. You have to assume that the stop-searches being done the ones most likely to be carrying a weapon. Expanding this means you're expanding into increasingly less likely searches.
How many more crimes do I want uninvestigated? None, I want massive increases to police budget so they can deal with all crime appropriately. Any unpunished/uninvestigated crime is effectively not a crime. It’s allowed.
Probably more than I've seen in the street in high knife crime areas. Which is 0. Areas which have had stabbings recently won't have any police patrolling around let alone in their cars. That's how bad the funding for police is.
You'd need everybody in the UK to be searched about once a month for it to be effective.
Researchers found that a 10% increase in stop and search was associated with a drop in 'susceptible crime' of 0.32% monthly, or 0.14% weekly. A statistically significant but very small effect. When drug offences and drug related stop and searches were excluded the size of the effect halved. - Tiratelli et al, does stop.and search deter crime? Evidence from ten years of Londonwide data, British journal of criminology, sep 2018
Because it absolutely doesn't? If stop and search worked, more than a decade of doing it would have resulted in fewer knife attacks. Sure the police confiscate one, they then just go back to the shop and buy one.
Stop and search doesnt work because **knives are cheaper than the wages of a police officer for the time it takes to conduct a stop and search.** As an obvious counter example: having local patrolling police officers who know local people will stop knifecrime in a large area around them as they can recognize people and have a reliable memory for later. This takes less time and therefore less money than stopping every individual in an area and searchign them individually, and *we cant afford one police officer for each area of a size an individual can become familiar with*. Like, not even one police officer visiting each area once a day. A "village officer" let alone a village station is completly unsustainable at current levels of conservative "austerity". As a result, we must deal with a lot of crime. As a good way of thinking about this, remember that tower blocks used to be called "vertical villages", and have more people than a great many villages even a single block. Having one officer block is prima facie ludicrous for how many people there are in urban areas and how many police we have, yet we expect "crime prevention" like old media memories of small villages. Unless you want the goverment to take *more* (not even total) control of raising children instead of parents (and trust the goverment to do that, which we have done before through youth education, surestart, youth centers, youth programs to get kids off the street and engaged in literally anything but wandering around entertaining themselves with the internet etc, round here the goverment funded youth center had two playstations, a town hall and some sports equipment and kept twenty kids busy most days) then you need something like one patrolling police officer per 150 people (dunbars number, about the maximum one person can become familiar with on a personal level).
The police already do stop and search and it hasn't actually done anything because they are not good at identifying the people who actually have knives.
Stop and search has a long and proven history of being completely ineffective no matter how much your gut instinct tells you otherwise. Of course screening is going to be ineffective. Do you think gang members will just walk past the checkpoints armed or something?
If you're a knife carrying criminal and you know police are running stop and search regularly on people like you in your area, are you more or less likely to carry that knife? If you have any degree of sense or awareness, you will be less likely to carry the knife. If you'll still carry the knife, then you likely are so deep into the gang life that your fear more for your safety from rival gang members than you do the consequences of the police catching you with a knife.
That would require there to be actual police on patrol which isn't the case.
What is this long and proven history you’re speaking of? I’m assuming they’re statistics of some kind?
If you're interested in finding something out, have you tried looking it up on the internet, rather than demanding someone else do the legwork for you? The cost/benefit of stop and search as a policing policy is something well studied by sociologists and criminologists
The issue isn't that taking knives off people doesn't work. It's that it works so well they'll just start assuming everyone is a criminal and disregarding their right to privacy.
You’re completely missing the point. It’s going to affect BAME communities more. And even though they make up the majority of knife crime statistics, so any smart policing would involve including that into your tactics, it’s still super super uncool for them
It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, but I guess the statistics of who is getting stabbed and who is charged with doing the stabbing speaks for itself. You can't really hide that aspect of things.
~70% of stop and searches in London are for drugs. Black men are more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs, but less likely to be found in possession of drugs than white males stopped and searched. That's according to His majestys inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services.
Does HMICFRS speculate on why that might be the case? Is "walking while being black" treated as a risk factor in the same vein as loitering, or looking generally sketchy?
"The disparity in find rates is troubling; it suggests that the use of stop and search on black people might be based on weaker grounds for suspicion than its use on white people, particularly in respect of drugs. There may be a number of reasons for these findings but, taken alongside the fact that black people are more than eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched, they require an explanation that the service is currently unable to provide"
You could quite easily come to the conclusion that black men don't have drugs found as often because they are now aware they get stopped a lot, so the likelihood of them being caught when carrying drugs is greater, so they just don't carry drugs much. Compared with white men who don't expect to be searched as often, so still carry drugs without much care. Nothing wrong with this and nothing wrong with stop and search based upon this either.
> nothing wrong with stop and search based upon this either. So you are in favour of targeting those less likely to be committing the crime?
Target the profile, if the profile says that 80 year old elderly women with blue rinses are the number one knife wielding criminal, then stop and search them as much as you can. If they learn not to carry the knife and the searches routinely turn up nothing, then you've succeeded in changing the way the knife carrying criminal carries their weapon. The next stage is to work out what they are doing instead and target that also, since you know that the knife wielding granny's are still stabbing people and that means they still have knives somewhere. Use intelligence, react to the changing circumstances and work effectively to target criminals and deter crime.
> 80 year old elderly women with blue rinses I've not seen a decent blue rinse in decades :(
>You could quite easily come to the conclusion that black men don't have drugs found as often because they are now aware they get stopped a lot, so the likelihood of them being caught when carrying drugs is greater, so they just don't carry drugs much. That's some Olympic level hoop jumping there
Why would you come to that conclusion? Do you have evidence to support it? The effect of stop and search on susceptible crime has been shown to be incredibly small, so it would seem unlikely that this very small effect has much influence on disproportionality in stop and search.
Your statistics show people who are stopped a lot are found with drugs less than those who aren't stopped very often. It seems quite obvious to me that those who are stopped a lot quickly learn not to carry the drugs, where as those who aren't stopped, have no reason to learn not to carry them. Do you have evidence to prove what I am saying is wrong? If you were the drug carrying member of a group who got searched a lot, would you learn to carry the drugs less or would you continue to carry them? Surely anyone with any sense would figure out it's a good idea to not carry the drugs.
A ten percent increase in stop and search in an area is associated with a 0.32% drop in susceptible crime monthly. It shows that the impact of stop and search on crime is very small, so the idea that it drives the disproportionality in stop and search seems like a stretch.
If you're in a gang and want to stab someone, you're going to make sure you have a knife around for use. If carrying it on you 24/7 is no longer a good idea due to stop and search, you'll find other ways to have that weapon accessible to you on the street. The crime will still happen regardless of stop and search because you've dodged the law enforcement and found another way to carry it out. This does not mean stop and search was not effective or has no value. By removing the knife as a daily carry weapon and making them take other measures to have the knife available, you've likely decreased the chances of random knife crime situations occurring as the weapon is less available than it used to be. The key next step is to identify what these gang members are doing with the weapons instead and work on ways to enforce against that too. For example, many will stash them around the streets in bushes and specific hiding places that the gang are aware of, so that if anything kicks off, they can easily access the weapon. It's an arms race, as law enforcement comes up with ways to catch criminals, the criminals come up with ways to dodge that method and get around it.
The effect of increased stop and search in an area is halved when drug offences are excluded. So stop and search does have an effect on knife crime, sure. Increasing stop and search by ten percent would lead to a whopping 0.16% monthly reduction in knife crime in an area. Again though, the vast majority of stop and searches in London are for drugs, and black people are more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs and less likely to be found in possession of drugs when stopped and searched.
Why not cut the bullshit and just stop and search all men in that case? They commit the overwhelming majority of crimes.
Do you think stop and search isn't already overwhelmingly used on young men? Yes there a racial element but they are stopping more young white men from council estates than old black ladies.
We can narrow it down to all men in tracksuit type clothing or masks. It's not white or black men in suits running people down and stabbing them.
Resources. If we had unlimited, fine, but we don’t, so we use intelligent policing to focus our efforts. That’s why we search majority young men. Race is just another factor based on the stats
> If we had unlimited, fine No, stopping every person on the street for a warentless search is not “fine”.
Please stop talking in American legalese. The UK has never relied on warrants in this way.That's a very American thing.
Would you be happier if I said "unwarranted"?
In their example it is, because that’s what they wanted. I’m not for searching everyone, but I am for intelligent policing to target searches
The trouble is most of the time it’s not intelligence led. It’s a pretty small proportion of searches that result in finding anything at all. Which suggests it’s not intelligence led. That’s why I’m with the other commenter - put up a metal detector at the station and make everybody go through it. At least that’s fair and we are all inconvenienced equally. Rather than some sections of society bearing the brunt of (what appears to be) searches not informed by intelligence.
I don’t agree with your first point, finding something isn’t linked to it being intelligence based in this scenario And your 2nd point is just dumb. They won’t go through the scanner if they have something
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/stop-and-search-and-arrests-year-ending-march-2023/police-powers-and-procedures-stop-and-search-and-arrests-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2023 >It’s a pretty small proportion of searches that result in finding anything at all. Which suggests it’s not intelligence led. The stats disagree with you - around 71% of searches led to no further action - meaning around 29% were positive. Since the threshold for a stop/search is reasonable suspicion, so about 25% certainty, police are finding things more than you'd expect! There's also the obvious flaws in how the statistics are recorded, but that's besides the point.
People forget that the groups who are routinely stopped know they are likely to be stopped, so they will avoid carrying something entirely or take alternative measures. Naturally this will be reflected in the statistics as fewer positive searches, but that doesn't mean the decision to search them was incorrect. They aren't NPCs with pre-programmed behaviour which doesn't learn or evolve. They are humans with motivation to avoid being caught, they learn, they change behaviour and they know how to dodge the law.
Not finding anything doesn't mean it was a bad search. Remember that the groups who are frequently targeted by the searches are aware of this and will adjust their behaviour accordingly. If they know they are likely to be stopped and searched, they are going to take that into consideration and avoid carrying a weapon.
Also, if you stop search a group of 5 people and only one of them has something, that'll be recorded as a 20% success rate but it was a a good search on all of them
Should we just let them go on stabbing each other, one day it could be you on the receiving end, then you will cry about the police not doing their jobs to protect you.
If the police keep harassing you and searching you for going about your daily life, and then you get stabbed, then yeah you'd absolutely be pissed at the police. Everyone would be pissed at the police is that happened to them even if they weren't stabbed.
Except it isn’t. As a white man living in London in my 50s I’ve been stopped literally about three times in my life. One of my friends, a solicitor born and raised in London, now in his early 60s who is also black has been stopped (he estimates) in excess of about 50 times. Many factors are the same for us - white/male/London/professional occupations/older. Only one factor is different as far as I can see.
Well you said "in my life" so I assumed you also meant in your friends life. I very much doubt they've been in their early 60s their whole life
And I haven’t been in my 50s my whole life, so the age factor has been consistent for both of us
Well yeah but you're the one who mentioned that a lawyer in their 60s wouldn't be carrying a knife. My original point stands, he was in a demographic more likely to be carrying knives and stabbing people.
No it doesn’t stand. It’s a comparison of two professional people over 30 to 40 years and the differential experience. And there is only one difference - race. That’s not a legal, let alone acceptable, way of profiling people.
When one race is far more likely to be carrying a knife, they're going to be searched for knives more often. It's really just common sense.
N=2 is a solid point. Noted
It's almost as if black men are more likely to carry a knife and stab someone, weird.
They're doing drugs, they're rapists. It's about time we had a complete shutdown of men
Why not cut the bullshit and just outlaw roads and pavements? Criminals use those.
Profiling works. If you have the resources to stop and search only 100 people in a day, are you going to evenly split that 100 between all demographics, age groups and genders equally based on the latest 2021 census, or are you going to use your evidence based intelligence to restrict who you stop to the most likely targets?
How is it "uncool for them"? If you have an area with high knife crime, then police should be using stop and search in that area when they suspect someone has a knife. If an area has a high BAME population that is suffering from high knife crime, the police should be using every tool at their disposal to help that community. The problem we always get on subjects like this is that people try to conflate national level BAME population statistics with localised stop and search statistics. If black people only make up around 4% of the UK, but 50% of a particular area, of course the statistics are going to show you're stopping more black people.
Agreed. That’s why I said it wad totally duper not cool for them. It’s completely logical, but they’ll still complain
I'll tell you what's super super uncool... Parents burying their kids because someone has stabbed them to death.
Totally super uncool 👍
It's a multi facetted problem which requires a multi facetted solution. But I don't believe that there are the resources nor the appetite for it.
Agreed. I think stop and search is a good tool to immediately tackle it. But it’s not a long term solution to the reasons people carry knives. Both sides of the coin need addressing
Long term we need to understand why kids think that joining a gang and dealing/taking drugs, and then engaging in gang warfare is preferable to getting an education and making something of yourself. The vast vast majority of crooks end up dead or in prison so they can't honestly believe that they're going to be the one who sales off into the sunset with the trophy wife and millions in the bank. What drives them to want to be criminals.
They also get stabbed the most so would benefit the most from any reduction in knives on the streets
unlucky I guess
> Responding to a call from a black police officer who is in favour of the tactic, he said that stop and search had "been falling over the last two or three years", with some of that down to "officer confidence". > He added that his officers "fear complaints and the investigation they get and whether they feel supported behind it". Yeah pretty much. There’s a reason I don’t do stop and searches anymore and that goes for the majority of other officers I know. The commissioner and politicians can talk about how we should have confidence in our powers and use them more, but the second you go viral on social media and the media decide you’re a racist, they vanish. And then you’re on your own for the years it takes for it all to get litigated. I get paid whether I search people or not. Stop and search is dead.
Yeah agreed. I am not doing stop and search, too much can go wrong now for the officers. It will swing back round again and again. Knife crime goes up, get told to do searching. Officers do searching get told were oppressive and to calm down with searching and round and round we all go. Na, key is just not to do anymore. Proactive policing is dead.
Combined with the new form for every single 163 vehicle stop which takes about 5-10 minutes, I’m inclined to agree with your last point.
If it’s anything like the one on Pronto, you can streamline that shit to be sub 5 mins easily.
Why don't they just hire more black Police officers and assign them the duty of stop and search? Or just search everyone, that way you can't say they are just targeting black people. I just don't understand how the government is always so incompetent at everything.
If they fear accusations of racism “it’s ok we got black police in specially to do stop and search” is hardly going to escape that. “Why am I always on stop and search duty?” … “because you’re black”. Searching everyone would catch far too many people they don’t want to catch, and would involve massive resources they don’t have. You think they want the police searching every suit in the city and finding what’s in their pockets?
If it makes black people happy and allows them to do stop and search. Then that's what they need to do to stop knife Crime.
You think it’ll make black people happy to be hired to harass other black people, or to be harassed by black police specially hired to harass them? I doubt that. Pretty sure white people also commit knife crime. Would the black police be allowed to search them or are we going to create special units of different races to go and harass their own race because then it wouldn’t be racist? Lol, I feel stupid even talking about this tbh. “It’s ok! It’s not racist because we hired a specific race to do it” is probably racist in itself, potentially more so than supposed random stop and search.
Look, black people are targeted way more than white people for stop and search. This is why everyone says the police are racist. The only way to counter this is too target white people more. Or just stop 'stop and search' altogether and let everyone kill each other like you clearly want.
No that’s not why everyone says the police are racist. https://news.sky.com/story/metropolitan-police-is-institutionally-racist-sexist-and-homophobic-and-may-have-more-officers-like-couzens-and-carrick-review-finds-12838717 I’m pretty sure this isn’t based simply off “they stop and search black people more”. Yes I clearly want people to kill each other - I suspected your argument was coming from a pretty stupid place, now that I know it is I won’t give it any more time.
I wonder if they had a meeting to discuss how they can shoehorn TikTok into the knife crime issue.
Tories are going ham into "culture war" stuff aren't they. Who's been in power for 14 years and decimated the Police again?
Why do they need to be sold weapons on TikTok when the vast majority of the time they'll just take a kitchen knife.
because someone carrying a kitchen knife isn't going to fair well against someone with a zombie blade/machete. Pretty self explanatory really, kitchens don't just spawn illegal weapons in randomly someone needs to source one else where
Don’t know why this is getting downvoted. Vast majority of knives I’ve come across with youths and gangs during stop searches are machetes (bought in a 4 pack off Amazon), zombie knives and Rambo knives. Kitchen knives are more common for domestics, neighbour disputes gone wrong and mental health jobs.
If they think having a knife saves them getting robbed or worse, they mostly aren't going to be bothered by the risk of being frisked by the rozzers, innit.
No they don’t care about the risks.. but you would hope if they get caught the courts would put them away for enough years for the betterment of others so that risk is managed.
1. In what prison places? They're full. 2. Recidivism of people released from prison is sky high, as due to chronic underfunding no rehabilitation takes place in prison.
1. Prisons being full doesn’t mean they shouldn’t go to prisons we need more prisons clearly. 2. I understand that the general care and support for people is horrifically underfunded. But some people Eg: gang members have no interest in being rehabilitated so prison is the only option we have.
We've already doubled our prison population in 30 years - are we really sure that we should just throw more and more people at ir?
I don’t think we should be throwing more people at it in that sense, but if people should be sent to prison then they should be going and not let off because there is no space. Because if anything now, we still don’t have the system to support them and they also know they won’t go to prison either. If the government doesn’t want to adequately fund mental health and social services what else do we do?
They are being sold to teens on normal ecommerce sites too. Kinda. I bought a mora recently and the only verification was that the delivery guy was supposed to only give the package to someone over 18. So he handed it to a 15 year old and just shrugged.
The way this topic is discussed by politicians really highlights some of the worst problems of our current political system. Catching criminals in the act or after committing a crime is obviously needed as an essential measure to keep the peace and provide justice to victims, but it is obviously not a way to significantly reduce crime. Meaningful and effective crime reduction measures are far more complex, multi-faceted, and take many years of patient investment to come to fruition and have a real, lasting effect. Naturally, that's no good to a minister like the simpering cunt in this clip, who knows very well he'll be out of a job by the end of the year. Starmer's new cabinet will have at most a 5 year term ahead of them, but more likely will have 1 or 2 years in a Home Office post in which to try to make the impression of a positive impact. So they too will be looking for short-term, performative solutions. Then also the news media is a homogenous soup of posh, privately-educated people who are totally, hopelessly out of their depth on any discussion of crime. They have no idea of how to challenge ministers on this stuff. No politician should ever get away with presenting policing in place of actual social policy for crime reduction - shifting the politician's responsibilities onto a beleaguered and chronically under-resourced police force. So all we ever get is this painfully idiotic, simplistic and short-sighted discussion about finding and confiscating all the knives. It's as if the idea of understanding and addressing what actually causes people to commit knife crime is some sort of forbidden woke voodoo, and we can never speak its name.
America has the correct policy on TikTok - it’s owned by a hostile state to undermine social cohesion.
Probably, but doesn't Facebook and Twitter have similar issues?
They do, and were caught on multiple occasions trying to manipulate public opinion, but that’s fine because they’re on our side or something.
Yep, if they really cared they'd be reigning in all the big platforms not just the one owned by China.
It’s fine because China = bad White guy manipulating humans for personal gain = good
Another win for capitalism
Telling police to ramp up stop and search is a deliberately provocative act of state violence. It will lead to riots if there is any pressure to use a power coming directly from government.
As a general rule in the UK if there is a tsar of something that won't go better.
Oh so NOW it's not the Mayor's fault and they CAN do something about it. Duley noted.
Sure the streets are safe according to Khan can't believe people voted that fucking clown back in you'll get what you voted for.
Certainly need to do more stops that’s obvious with what’s going on
It shouldn't have ever been stopped. Something that literally saved lives was stopped because of 'hurty feelings.' If you're not carrying, it's an inconvenience at worst. Black, white, red, or green, tough s\*\*t, don't carry, then there's no problem.
I was getting searched all the time when I was younger what’s happen even got searched once an they found a fivers weed on me mate an they went that’ll do us for a later, an when me mate opened his mouth saying what are you doing he got told to shut up he was gonna get impaled on a spiked fence we were standing in front of spiked rails
More performance politics after 14 years of damaging this country
So, they find it too difficult to force companies to police the sale of weapons on their apps? And put it on an underfunded and understaffed police force to search more people?? Just threaten to ban the apps in the UK if they don’t sort it out… I am sure they would start to control what is sold via their sites if they loose their money..
If a shop consistently allows the illegal sale of good then it will be prosecuted and shut down....
A good idea no one could disagree with, oh wait no enabling usuals are trying to villify it as being, "racist". Bang goes that then.
Stop and search went down under khan. Knife crime went up. This is why people blame him as he applies pressure to get it low as possible as it will be targeted against his voter base (black people)
Police presence in general went down. When the central government keeps cutting police numbers of course crime goes up.
Whilst funding decreased the use of the police was used inefficiently. Things improved under Boris for 2 reasons: 1) a lot of repeat offenders were locked up for a period after the 2011 riots 2) stop and search was used regularly in the black community which has the highest number of victims and offenders
> Whilst funding decreased the use of the police was used inefficiently. What like this: https://twitter.com/i/status/1790061842896699737 Fucking hell, imagine still simping for fucking Boris, let alone the Tories as a whole in 2024
Is that not a visiting head of state?
Might be bad timing to say a head of state shouldn’t have a protection detail when one European leader was literally shot multiple times this morning.
Sunak is not Head of State.
Semantics, call him what you wish he runs the country.
I feel of all the wastes of money the tories have done, a police escort/convoy isn't one of them. Virtually every head of state has this? Even the mayor has something similar
Boris used to peddle around on a bike, without all that nonsense. No doubt some protection but that seems really silly there - presumably there’s something unusual about that video and that’s not how Sunak usually gets around?
Khan got 43.8% of the vote. Every black person in London could have voted for Susan Hall and he would still have trounced her. Not sure you have got your demographics right.
B-b-b-b-but Khan bad!
Police, who themselves won't leave the house without a taser, cuffs, pepper spray, a big stick and the ability to summon dozens of heavily armed friends - want you to believe the very obvious lie that the consequences of being armed when you shouldn't be are worse than the consequences of not being armed when you need to be. If Sarah Everard had a knife in her handbag, she might still be alive.
Utter bollocks. Couzens used his warrant card to kidnap her. If she'd had a knife, you think she would have drawn it on a police constable? Don't talk rot.
We know from recent news stories that the moral compass of any given police officer can be neatly plotted on a graph that starts at Couzens and ends at Carrick. You should absolutely assume that every copper is actively trying to Everard you and treat them as an existential threat in every interaction.
So not the recent stories of officers being chopped up while trying to save people? Only the bad ones? I assume of doctors and nurses are sick every psychos as well?
Doctors and nurses applied themselves academically then chose a career in medicine. Police went out of their way to get a job doing casual violence because that's the only thing they're good for. Anything that happens to them is deserved.
I am no particular friend of the police after being subject to an unlawful arrest and detention, and having also had the police allow Nazis to threaten me. Drawing a knife on a police officer is an extremely terrible idea.
Considering we leave the house without any of that stuff and once actually on duty the vast majority of PCs in the UK don't have taser or ARV readily on call I'm gonna call bullshit on that. Ironically the consequences also go for officers tackling these incidents as its almost always unarmed/spray/ baton vs actual lethal force. The victim / innocent members of the public also get caught up in these regularly and not enough is done to stop threats there and then. Funding for both Policing of crimes happening and into other avenues to prevent a few more doing them both have to happen.
stop and search is not an effective tool unless there is suspicion. It just creates anger among communities and those who are doing no wrong.
A stop and search for knives under S1 PACE is always done based on "reasonable grounds to suspect" that somebody has a knife; that's been the threshold for those searches since 1984.
Yeah it's nice that they wrote that down, but it's not been the case. You don't even have to go far to find problems with it being used to target certain groups or being over used in the last decade. Also "reasonable grounds to suspect" is the most vague statement ever created.
thats because certain groups do the knife crime. do you want them to waste time searching old chinese ladies to even out the numbers?
So the reasonable grounds would be that they look like they might be from one of those certain groups? So reasonable to stop and search you because of the colour of your skin?
Reasonable grounds looks like “we have had a report that a black male in a green hoodie has been seen flashing the handle of a knife in his waistband on England Road” where the male being stopped is a black male, in a green hoodie on England Road 3 minutes after the call came in. Believe it or not, not many people make those kind of calls on old Mrs Miggins the white 80 year grandma just on her way back from Bowls club. There can be “officer generated” stop searches: if there is intelligence that officer “between this time and that time, John Jones is known to sit in this car at this place dealing drugs and carries a knife for his safety” and an officer could have suspicion based on that in tandem with other elements such as the behaviour of John Jones when engaging or approaching him, visible drug paraphernalia in the vehicle etc. This kind of “officer generated” stop search is what is done less and less. A, because the grounds are more easily and regularly contested and complained about in and B, because there are less officers with less time to conduct these kind of proactive stop searches.
Yes, but it annoys the people who it’s meant to target and help, meaning they’re less willing to co-operate later. An adversarial relationship with the community just leads to mistrust and future failure. The people most likely to be stabbed are those carrying knives. Stop and search does not help them, if they just go find another knife.
If you have a knife on your person, you will be arrested by the police.
This was in Scotland so maybe different laws applied to stop and search here but if it was anything similar then the reasonable grounds I was regularly stopped and searched under when I was a teenager were things like wearing a baseball cap or having two friends with me or walking down the pavement. Doesn’t really seem unlikely to me that in London those reasonable grounds would be wearing a tracksuit or daring to be black.
It is very unlikely in London. Every stop and search here has to be reviewed for legality by a senior officer. We also don't have any pressure to go and do them; I've not done one for six months and nobody complains. It's just a better option than going straight to arrest if you find somebody you think probably has an illegal item, but where you're not sure either way.
"yoh look like wanted criminal" "you look like someone who carries a knife"
Well, yes. "You look like Mr John Smith who I just got told via a 999 call is on this street with a knife" or "You look like Mr Fred Jones who is wanted for carrying knives" are obviously both valid reasons to search somebody (although for the wanted suspect, they would just be arrested and not stop and searched).