One in five in Greater Glasgow stopped and searched by police
THE equivalent of nearly one in every five people in Greater Glasgow were stopped and searched by police last year, according to a new report.
The rate in Glasgow is almost 19 times higher than in Greater Manchester. Officers in Tayside carried out more searches as a proportion of the population than the Metropolitan Police did in London.
The frisk level across Scotland as a whole is also four times the per capita rate of England and Wales.
Stop and search was rolled out by the single force after being a flagship policy at the old Strathclyde force, which was led by current Police Scotland Chief Constable Stephen House.
It was revealed last year that 642,643 searches had been recorded in 2013-14, proportionately higher than anywhere else in the UK.
A majority of the searches were non-statutory – meaning they had no legal basis – and young children had been frisked on a so-called “consensual” basis. The figures provoked a major political row and the single force has been forced to radically scale back non-statutory searches.
A new report Monday, written by stop and search expert Kath Murray at Edinburgh University, compares frisk levels in the 14 Scottish police divisions with the 43 forces in England and Wales.
The Scottish figures cover 2014-15 – a period during which the policy was supposed to have been reformed – and are based on the number of searches carried out per 1,000 people.
The national total shows a fall from 642,643 to 426,404, but the Scottish divisional statistics are huge when compared to other UK forces.
The top five – Greater Glasgow, Renfrewshire & Inverclyde, Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, and Argyll & West Dunbartonshire – were all divisions in the abolished Strathclyde force.
Scottish Liberal Democrat justice spokesperson Alison McInnes MSP said: “We must ask if we are getting the balance r ight between protecting public safety and civil liberties.”
Professor Alan Miller, chair of the Scottish Human Rights Commission, said: “We should all be free to go about our daily business unless the police have reasonable suspicion that we are doing something illegal.”
Chief Superintendent Barry McEwan, head of the Licensing and Violence Reduction Unit, said: “The use of stop and search is one of several legitimate policing tactics used to tackle issues. Used in the right place at the right time, it can play a key role in keeping people safe.”