Stop and Search Controversy

Stop and try ControversyThe power to sp ar and count has been a prominent policing m radical(prenominal) fucker since the Vagrancy Act of 1824. The briefing, Series 2, Edition 3 March 2012 , it has deduct below ceaseless statutory, political and societal examen beca employment of its full and treatary use by its guard military officers. However has in like manner been praised as it has not solo combated plague thus far pr egressed criminal acts happening as law of nature blockade nurture off and search anyone who they eat up clean suspicion ar carrying weapons, stolen goods or going equipped for stealing. Stop and search is extremely subjective in the shot that we must trust the officers views are wholly unbiased and injury and there is no untoward intent of the officer when using see and search ordinance.Since the actually onset of the enactment of legislation in this field of study of natural law bookness, there has been controversy because of the subjectiveness afforded to jurisprudence officers the controversy organism this discretion may be abused. Also the broad term of reasonable suspicion and what is seen as reasonable. There are to a fault fundamental man rights breaches that have been unembellished in much of the case law.Stop and hunt is now governed by 2 statutes stop and search with arrest situates at a lower place the law and criminal evidence act 1984 whilst a stop and search without an arrest comes under section 60 of the criminal justice and creation order act. Section 60 of the 1994 criminal justice and public direct Act was introduced to originally tackle mountain going to illegal raves which were a major problem in the 1980s and early 90s. It gave fare of law the power, if they feared violence or disorder, to stop and search suspects at a specific m and place. I will further be discussing the controversies surrounding practice of law stop and search and concluding with my own views on this s ubject.Before the introduction of the law of nature and criminal evidence act in 1984, the police stop and searched somebodys under what was called the sus law. This beingness because the police provided had to have suspicion on their part in order to stop and search an individual, it did not pick up to be reasonable. The only national stop and search legislation was for the interest group of drugs and firearms, unlike now with the introduction of the Terrorism act and Sporting nonethelesst act. Eventually the Brixton riots in 1981 brought a stop to the use of the sus provide cod to the forbid relationship it caused between the police and the public, in particular, heathenish minorities. maestro Scarmans Inquiry into the Brixton riots acknowledged that stop and search was a demand as welll to combat street nuisance and petty crime save expressed genuine concerns over the extent to which the sus laws were used in regards to the police officers own prejudices and views. In 1999 Stop and search came under scrutiny yet again du circle the St change surface Lawrence murder interrogatory, when Lord Macpherson revealed the shocking disratioate tote up of stop and searches in ethnic minorities, which in turn led on to accusing the police of holding prejudices and being institutionally racist. Lord Macpherson called for stop and searches, whether or not they resulted in an arrest to be recorded so that officers could be monitored and held accountable for if any racially aggravated stop and searches were made. law of nature deform and specially stop and search ranges on the purvey of reasonable suspicion and discretion. perceptiveness, although many an(prenominal) may disagree, is not doing as you please. Discretion is bound by norms, thus including professional norms, correct community norms, legal norms, and moralistic norms. Philosophers such as Ronald D fermentin and H.L.A. Hart have cleverly referred to discretion in the police agitate as th e hole in the doughnut doughnut theory of discretion, Dworkin described discretion as a donut because it is not free-standing but part of a process. Discretion, like the hole in the doughnut, does not exist except as an area left heart-to-heart by a surrounding belt of restriction. Discretion is not external the law but internal to the law1and where the law runs out graphic law theory. Thus meaning unwritten law that is to a greater extent or less the same for everyone everywhere, based on customary behaviour. In other words Unwritten law is the carcass of morals and principles everybody obeys and lives by. This idea refers to discretion as the empty area in the middle of a ring consisting of policies and procedures. It is an empty space inside of the law surrounded by statues and rules. guard discretion and the way it operates can be explained by 3 broad terms individualistic cultural and structural.Individualistic business relationship states that police work and the macho image of the police attracts people with authoritarian personalities, research as yet carried out by Waddington (1999a) does in fact not support this view and states that police recruits are not more than authoritarian then rule civilians. Brown and Willis (1985) and Fielding (1988) explained how the training process for these new recruits has a terminable liberalizing effect however exposure to permanent practical police work leads to an authoritarian perspective and outlook.The work of Zimbardo may give some score as to the sudden behaviour change in these new police recruits. Zimbardo (1973) conducted the Stanford prison house house sample as he wanted to study ossification and was interested in honoring out whether the rough treatment report among guards in American prisons was delinquent to the authoritarian personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment. He took a group of 75 volunteers whom he tested for psychological normalitys, and assig ned them to either the use of the prisoner or prison guard. For every 9 prisoners they had 3 guards. They put them in a prison environment and watched as each volunteer began adapting to their roles. The findings were phenomenal, Within hours of starting the experiment the prison guards began to act in a sadistic manner, dehumanizing the prisoners and some fifty-fifty began tormenting and bullying them and alongside this the prisoners began conforming to their newly established roles by fetching the rules very seriously and become depressed and telling tales on their helpmate inmates. Perhaps this experiment and its findings can give an explanation on the maintain view that police recruits adopt an authoritarian perspective mayhap due to its macho nature and the control they have suddenly been ascribed. Zimbardo concluded later on the experiment that people will readily conform to the roles they have been ascribed, in particular when they are strongly stereotyped.mobile cante en Culture could also give an spirit of the individualistic explanation and racism.The police must work as a united front to not only protect the public however to also protect each other so accordingly, so due to the close proximity of the officers in the police mogul it is only infallible officers will begin to conform to sure beliefs and values held by their colleagues, especially if they are outspoken about these. Canteen Culture, Ike Eze-anyika, Faber and Faber (20 Mar 2000).Police sub-culture ( Canteen Culture) is often portrayed as a pervasive, malign and potent crook on the behavior of officers. The grounds for this portrayal are, however, insubstantial and appear to swear more upon the condemnatory electromotive force of the concept than its explanatory power.The cultural explanation of police discretion as said by Skolnick talked about this in a different way by identifying 3 main aspects of police culture and discretion, there is a suspiciousness which they have against certain groups of potential criminals that they treat with prejudice, there is the internal solidarity and social isolation which I consider both internal and support each other solidarity in which the police must remain a force which supports each other as police individuals against danger in the streets and also the social isolation in terms of because of this solidarity the police have it creates more of a rift in society between the protectors and the protected. This creates citizens feeling like they are just stereotypes viewed by the police and they cannot complain about the police because of this solidarity they have or that they are just merely subjects without autonomy.New research from the official human rights body reveals racial disproportionality in the amount of Stop and searched being made. Police forces are still more likely to use stop-and-search powers against black people than blank people, stopping black people up to 28 times more and therefore may be b reaking the law due to breaching their powers and withering police time. The police force has been accused of being predominantly occupied by white middle class males with old fashioned work practices and whos face fits. A report by the equality and human rights burster reviewed the police force 10 years after the Steven Lawrence inquiry, in which Lord Macpherson branded the Police and Its Officers as institutionally racist. The report found a huge amount of black men on the national deoxyribonucleic acid database as appose to other ethnicities.The power is used most by the Metropolitan police, which carried out three-quarters of the stops between 2008- 2011, almost 258,000 in total. Although they could hold the largest amount due to the population size in the metropolitan districts. The adjacent heaviest user of these powers was Merseyside with 40,940 stops.Due to these extortionate figures it was established that something must be do and also perhaps that many of the people they stop may not be educated in this subject and may not ineluctably know their rights. A mobile application was introduced early 2012 to inform the users of their rights when being stop and searched. Many people may be un sensitive that The police have to follow the correct code of conduct when stop and inquisitive an individual An officer should tell you their name, the reason why you have been stopped and the power that you are being stopped under. They should also give you their mark number, the name of the police station and provide you with a receipt at the end. This app tells the user their rights when being stop and searched. This could be either a conjure up or a curse. Perhaps if the user of the mobile application was aware of their rights they could stop any mistreatment or exploitation, However on the other baseball mitt if there is a large amount of clued up new-fangled people then when they do get stop and searched they may feel very confident and start telling the police how to do their jobs and maybe even state that the police did not follow one of the rules even when through with(p) so just to get out of an arrest or fine etc. hAlthough the police force have been branded institutionally racist It could be argued that the police get these racist perceptions from the media. If one crime has been reported, eg- a mugging, the media have been known to blow this story out of proportion and create a societal panic. Pearson was writing in the 1970s, during the time when muggings and the moral panic surrounding it was rife. The word mugging was an invented word to describe a theft against a person, the media stated that muggings were spiralling out of control and were a new dangerous crime.The media were also highly racist and said the crime was commit most by young black males thus resulting in the police using their stop and search powers more and especially on young black males, which in turn led to the police recovering more illegal articl es and led to more arrests. This only because the police stop and searched more people. With these new figures young black males were then labelled as thugs and unnatural and therefore left people and also the police with a negative perception towards young black males. This has also been seen lately with the knife crime moral panic and also the London riots as the media stated that works class undeducated young males from broken families decided to revoThe police force is stereotypically glory for being a macho profession, and there perception of their job role should be on the streets searching for true criminals murderers, rapists etc, however they are on the streets stop and searching individuals for petty crimes in most cases. They therefore perhaps to gain some job comfort feel they have to find prohibited articles or straighten out an arrest and fight crime therefore they want to find criminals instead of being well-provided that there are no criminals which could result in a high amount of stop and searches. They have work pressures that determine their career on the basis of how many arrest they make and illegal articles they find. They therefore obtain their job satisfaction by finding criminals, by stop and search, rather than being satisfied that they live in a society where there are no criminals. On the other hand with the higher volume of stop and searches results in a higher amount of arrests which shows that justice is being done and therefore heightens the morale of the police officers who are fighting the more every solar day street level crime.Along with lord Macpheresons statement he released during the enquiry into the steven Lawrence case and also Lord Scarmans statement during the Brixton riots in which he claimed that the police abuse their powers yet again Stop-and-search powers have come under blame again when they were ruled illegal by the European court of humanity rights in January 2010. The Strasbourg court has been recen tly hearing a case involving 2 civilians who were stopped near an arms fair in London in 2003.The court heard the case of Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinton who had been stopped outside the Defence Systems and Equipment world(prenominal) exhibition at the Excel Centre in London Docklands in 2003, Both individuals were held for twenty to thirty minutes. The court stated that their right to gaze for a private and family life was violated. The European Court of Human Rights also said their rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated.Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives power to the base secretary Theresa May, to authorise the police force to make random searches in certain circumstances, but The court said the stop and search powers were not sufficiently circumscribed and there were not adequate legal prophylacticguards against abuse. later on both individuals were awarded 33,850 euros (30,400) to cover legal costs.Lord Carlile the gover nments independent reviewer of anti- terrorist legislation stated, In my view, section 44 is being used far too often on a random basis without any reason behind its useThe fundamental point that the court is making is that it increases the possibility of random interference with the legitimate liberties of the citizenOn the other hand, we have to be safe against terrorism. There is therefore a very difficult balancing physical exercise to be done and Im sure Section 44 will come under intelligent scrutiny in the coming months.Speaking to BBC radio set 4s The World At One, Ms Quinton said Its not about proverb that theres no need for stop and search. What were really saying is people have a right to privacy and there needs to be a balance between police powers to ensure our safety but also our rights to a private life.To conclude the police force and more specifically the stop and search powers they hold have come under regular scrutiny by many different proffessionals Lord Scar man, Lord Macphereson and the European court of human rights, to name just a few. The Police force works mainly on discretion and they are trusted upon to make the right decisions, act subjectively and have reasonable suspicion however it is hard to define what is reasonable. This term is too broad and vague and a police officers perception of what is reasonable may differ from his colleagues. Another measurable point to remember is that each police officer has his own views and prejudices and even if they do not consciously work upon these prejudices they are still engrained into the officer and this may change or dim their view on certain individuals.I study police should work with discretion to not only to protect the public however also themselves against any foreseeable danger. Police officers get into numerous situations daily and therefore too many laws would be needed to govern every situation in which discretion is used.On the other hand, the stop and search figures broug ht to the publics attention over the last dickens decade do indicate levels of racism in the police force however with more and more ethnic minorities and also women beginning to invade the force there is no room for racism or sexism. corporation is rapidly changing alongside peoples perceptions of other races.Finally, I strongly believe that stop and search over the past years has caused a make do of controversy. The concept of stop and search stop anybody whom you believe to be more or less suspicious, does seem to work on paper however in practice the officers deeply engrained morals and prejudices seem to subconsciously effect their work which is evident in past figures. Further along Stop and Search does also need reforming due to the very public way in which the individual is stopped which leads to labelling by passing people, even if the individual is completely innocent.