Kath Murray

Under-regulated and unaccountable? Explaining variation in stop and search rates in Scotland, England and Wales

ABSTRACT From a position of near parity in 2005/2006, by 2012/2013 recorded search rates in Scotland exceeded those in England/Wales seven times over. This divergence is intriguing given the demands placed on the police, and the legal capacity to deal with these are broadly similar across the two jurisdictions. The aim of this paper is to unpack this variation. Using a comparative case-study approach, the paper examines the role of structural ‘top-down’ determinants of policing: substantive powers of search, rules and regulations, and scrutiny. Two arguments are presented. First, we argue that the rise of stop and search in Scotland was facilitated by weak regulation and safeguards. Second, we argue that divergence between the two jurisdictions may also be attributed to varying levels of political and public scrutiny, caused, in part, by scrutinising stop and search almost exclusively through the prism of ‘race’. In Scotland, the significance of these factors has been made evident by dint of organisational developments within the last decade; by the introduction of a target driven high-volume approach to stop and search in Strathclyde police force circa 2007 onwards; and the national roll-out of this approach following the single service merger in April 2013. The salient point is that the Strathclyde model was not hindered by legal rules and regulations, nor subject to policy and political challenge; rather a high discretion environment enabled a high-volume approach to stop and search to flourish without challenge.

Trust in the Police and Police Legitimacy Through the Eyes of Teenagers

Earlier sweeps of the International Self Report Delinquency Survey (ISRD) made no attempt to cover teenagers’ attitudes towards criminal justice institutions. ISRD3 goes a little way to filling this gap by including a short suite of questions on trust in the police and perceptions of police legitimacy, that sets out to see if well-established insights into adults’ attitudes, built on procedural justice theory, also hold true for teenagers. Results are presented in this chapter. To anticipate our conclusions, the results very largely reflect those that have emerged internationally for adult samples: that trust in procedural justice is a precondition for legitimacy, reducing preparedness to break the law, and that the quality of teenagers’ experience of the police is a clear determinant of their trust in the police.