Stop & Search

[Julnar]

Police have been making unnecessary use of stop and search laws in order to balance the racial profile of such searches.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8105093.stm
Isn't profiling, racial or otherwise, actually a sensible use of limited resources?

[Gromit]

What an absolute waste of police time. Stopping people they know are innocent just to balance their figures.

It is time these Terror Laws were amended. Their constant misuse shows they were hastily and badly conceived.

[paraffin]

"Stopping people they know are innocent..." Duh!!!!

These Police must have supernatural powers? No, that's totally impossible and, unless acting on intelligence received, stop and search is the only way in which Police CAN eventually establish that someone is "innocent".

The eventuality that, in hindsight, a person is found not to be a terrorist does not mean that Police have no right to stop them in the first place. As long as an Officer can justify his reasons in law for his actions, then s/he is acting within the law. The fact that people don't like it is irrelevant. Life's a b!tch at times, ian't it?

Don't forget, a terrorist will not have that title branded across his forehead, nor will he necessarily come from any specific racial group, therefore so called racial profiling would be fruitless as well as an unjustifiable attack on a particular ethnic group. We don't want that, do we?

The Police have a very difficult and thankless job to do under these circumstances and if any of their detractors here has a viable and practical solution to stop and search, I'd love to hear it, as I've no doubt would Police Forces the length and breadth of the UK as well.

Carry on with the good work, lads + lasses!

[Gromit]

paraffin

Police are making unjustified searches of members of the public to provide "racial balance" to stop and search statistics, Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, has said. He warned that police were wasting money by carrying out "self-evidently unmerited searches" which were an invasion of civil liberties and "almost certainly unlawful"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/pol itics/lawandorder/5559436/Police-carrying-out- stop-and-search-just-for-statistics.html

The only reason these people are stopped is to make the statistics look even. That is a waste of resources and a waste of money. By all means the police should concentrate their attentions on people they genuinely think have committed a crime.

[birdie1971]

Gromit -

Blame the Government not the Police.

This is about Government intervention and social engineering. The Government's view seems to be, �If it can be counted and categorised than it shall be�. If someone is stopped and searched then the Government wants to know their ethnicity, sex, etc. so they can count and categorise them. And then go berserk if one section of society gets stopped more than another.

It wasn't the Police who wanted those stupidly long and thin 'Stop & Search' forms.

This is about the Police having to waste their time just so they meet Government targets.

[Gromit]

birdie1971

I am blaming the Government. I said the laws should be changed.

You cannot really blame the police for abusing poorly defined legislation. Over 1 million stop and searches failed to find anything last year. That is a lot of wasted time and money filling in the long forms for nothing.