Beating Crime Plan – punching down not levelling up

Let’s start with the figures. It is indisputable that stop and search is discriminatory - between April 2019 and March 2020, there were 563,837 stop and searches in England and Wales, 76 per cent of which resulted in no further action.

Black people were nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. Stops under section 60, where no reasonable suspicion is required, rose by 35 per cent to 18,081, with four per cent leading to an arrest. 

The rationale for making the easing of restrictions permanent is explained as a means to tackle knife crime. However, the easing of section 60 is likely to increase racial discrimination, criminalise more children, particularly young black men, erode trust in the police and exacerbate marginality.

If this doesn’t provide a strong enough counter-argument to the government’s plans, surely knowing that there is no evidence to suggest that stop and search is an effective means of reducing violence, is powerful enough. However, it seems not to have reached the desk of the policing minister, Kit Malthouse, who defended the plans by saying there were few other options.

Kit, if you are after ideas here are a few things that you could try:

• Use limited police resources to carry out more effective duties and non-punitive community engagement. Such as robust intelligence gathering, positively engaging and listening to communities and seeking to repair the damage done to ethnic minority communities through the over-use and discriminatory use of stop and search.

• Consult with communities and let community leaders, children and their families influence the debate around Section 60 stop and search and subsequent responses.

• Listen to children affected by stop and search and the negative impact that it has on their lives from increasing contact with the criminal justice system, racial abuse, further marginalisation, exclusions from school, an increase in familial abuse and violence, and an increase in mental health illnesses.

• Work harder to realise the recommendations in the Lammy Review (2017, 2020) around the recruitment, progression and promotion of a more diverse workforce across the different stages of the criminal justice system, in particular the police.

• Adopt a public health approach to address the causes and consequences of knife crime. I was recently involved in a Youth Justice Board Serious Youth Violence Pathfinder programme project. The findings demonstrated that of 150 children working with the Manchester Youth Justice Service for serious youth violence (including knife crime), exactly three quarters had experienced some form of abuse (either emotional, physical and/or sexual) and 71 per cent had experienced some form of neglect (either emotional and/or physical). Shockingly, 60 per cent had experienced both abuse and neglect.

• Support and encourage children to participate in the development of responses to violence and knife carrying. Encouraging and supporting children to tell their stories and describe their experiences and opinions, provides an opportunity for professionals to co-create personalised responses.

• Recognise that children are traumatised by their involvement in violence and knife crime and provide clinical support to those children who need it.

• Develop a systemic approach to trauma-informed practice. Children should receive trauma-informed intervention/s at the point of the trauma/s. Schools, children’s services, and health services should be adequately funded and equipped by central government to embed trauma-informed practice into their services and organisations. If offered at an earlier stage in a child’s life, this could potentially reduce the number of children presenting to youth justice services for violence and knife crime offences and reduce the staggering social and economic costs of these offences.

The government’s lack of forethought and punitive response to what is a public health concern and, what can only be understood as a lack of interest in listening to those affected by stop and search, is likely to alienate a whole generation of children, impact negatively on wellbeing and mental health and serve to disproportionally target those very communities who the government suggest they are committed to “Levelling up”.  

The YJB Serious Youth Violence Pathfinder Report can be read here

• Hannah Smithson is Professor of Criminology and Youth Justice and Director of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is currently chair of the Board of the Alliance for Youth Justice.