The police are afraid to do actual policing

Officers already have the powers to stop and search people in the street – but they’re wary of using them

The debate over stop and search is back, as violence spirals out of control on our streets. London is locked in a grim ritual of gang-fuelled stabbings and its knife-crime rate is at a seven-year high – but the bloody footprints of this epidemic are spreading outside the capital, too, as sophisticated “county lines” drug criminals push out small-time dealers in the provinces. Shockingly, a person is now more likely to be stabbed in Bedfordshire than in Manchester.

Sajid Javid has said that police are to be given enhanced powers to stop and search suspects; he wants to cut down bureaucracy and the police to be more confident when they turn people over. The Home Secretary also hinted that officers could soon be allowed to take a person’s criminal record into account when using stop and search; this is not currently included in the “reasonable grounds to suspect” that police officers must have. Police chiefs, meanwhile, want the requirement of “reasonable grounds” to be scrapped altogether.

As a former detective sergeant who spent more than three decades serving in the police force, I am sceptical that twiddling with the rulebook for stop and search will make any difference at all. The police’s current powers are perfectly adequate. The problem is they are too afraid to use them.

Part of my current job is to teach prospective uniformed officers stop and search. Every time I meet with them I ask the same question: “Have you used stop and search powers while on patrol since our session?” Depressingly, they shrug: “No. It’s not worth the hassle.” This attitude, now widespread across the police force, is starting to bear out in cold, hard figures: stop-and-searches in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017 dropped by 21 per cent compared with the previous 12 months.

One excuse I often hear from serving officers is that they are too busy to do the paperwork. This is nonsense. When I was serving in the force in the 1980s and 1990s, we had to fill in a big form every time we used the power, but it didn’t put us off. Nowadays, officers can do it all on their mobile phones and yet they seem to avoid it at all costs.

After a bit of grilling, I usually get to the bottom of the excuse-making: they feel it is not worth the inevitable onslaught of accusations of being heavy-handed or racist. They don’t want to deal with the draining scrutiny that they are inevitably subjected to when a disgruntled stop-and-search target lodges a complaint. They worry about being disciplined or even losing their jobs.

This is the institutional reverse of the situation when I was policing the streets of Nottingham. Back then, if a police officer wasn’t generating stop-and-search complaints, it was thought to be a sign that they weren’t doing their job. When I was patrolling the city centre, it was a given that I would be stopping and searching an average of two people during my shift.

But accusations of police racism are now a serious sticking point. Critics of the practice point out that, in 20162017, black people were more than eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. But does this mean the police are racist? The Metropolitan Police in London, a diverse, multi-ethnic city, is the heaviest user of stop and search powers in the country. If a police officer’s beat is Brixton, which has a large Afro-caribbean community, then it logically holds that they may well end up stopping and searching black people.

Even though Mr Javid yesterday backed police using stop and search in ethnic minority communities, officers will still be highly suspicious. How long before he caves into pressure from protesters and changes course, they will ask.

This, combined with the rise of “textbook cops”, is paralysing the police.

Since the 2000s, I have observed a rising number of officers who are well-educated and ambitious but nervous about the actual policing bit of the job – including stop and search. Protecting the public and “getting in amongst it”, as they say on the force, not liberal sensitivities or a disciplinary-free track record, is the backbone of proper policing – and it’s being lost.