Infringing child rights with stop and search to be ended

Tam Baillie
Monday, September 28, 2015

The Scottish government has announced that all non-statutory - or "consensual" - stop and search by police officers in Scotland is to end, which I strongly welcome. Non-statutory searches, as the name suggests, have no basis in Scots law. They rely on people voluntarily consenting to a search by a police officer. There is no requirement for an officer to have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, nor for the officer to justify the reason for carrying out the search. These searches infringe children's and young people's rights. The inherent power imbalance between a police officer and a child or young person makes it unlikely that the tactic could ever truly be called "consensual".