Stop and Search

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Yes, thank you very much, Chair. There has actually been quite a number of consultation events that have taken place, both online events, so we have done stuff with young people online, all the way through to I had the privilege the other day of being in North London at one of the Voice of Youth and Genuine Empowerment (Voyage) programmes which are run by colleagues from the Black Police Association (BPA) around talking about young people and our approach to stop and search, and I will come back to that in a minute.

But the broad approach that has taken place at the moment is in relation to looking at the whole area of how we use stop and search, what is the level of community support for stop and search, which part of the tactics work well and which do not work as well or we have particular problems with. You will start to hear a word around, a moniker of 'Stop It' which really encompasses the strategic approach around stop and search for us. Supervision and quality of leadership, tactical activity, ie how we use it, what we do with it, oversight and engagement at a very local level, ie at a neighbourhood or borough level in terms of the activity taking place, performance, so performance oversight in terms of doing it, how we use intelligence and tasking and the training and knowledge, so that is the broad strategic approach.

What we are talking about at the moment, and we have talked to everyone from the IPCC to the Stopwatch to other pressure groups and people with particular views around stop and search, and met with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, is talk about what are the outcomes around successful stop and search, what does it look like? You saw in the Commissioner's commitment in terms of stop and search, he wanted to be absolutely clear that we were focusing the stop and search activity on the right people. So one of the things we are looking at the moment, and currently seeking views on, and I would welcome views either from individual Members or collectively, if you want to

Joanne McCartney (Chair): Can I just stop you there, because we actually, in preparation for this, spoke to five borough-based stop and search community monitoring groups, all of which were not aware there was any current ongoing consultation. I do not think any Members of this panel were aware that you are currently consulting, so it would seem to be that there is some communication issue out there.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): If you want to give me those groups, I am more than happy to go and talk to them.

Joanne McCartney (Chair): We would say that obviously should be your job to

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): No, I quite accept that, but in the nicest possible way, this is a very broad group of people we are talking to. You know, let us be absolutely honest, if we are talking about stop and search, we ought to be talking to people under 21 years of age.

Joanne McCartney (Chair): Could you send us details of those events you have done and the outcomes?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Yes, by all means. So you can have them in terms of that. So looking at things in terms of the outcomes around the percentage of positive outcomes, so at the moment in the very best boroughs in London, a stop and search activity - and forgive me if I get very technical here - Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE), the one that requires reasonable suspicion, positive outcomes in the very best boroughs are about 12% to 13%. We think that ought to be closer to 20%, so we are talking about that in terms of where we go around that; looking at how we increase the public confidence in our use of stop and search, so should we be setting a target in relation to increasing the public confidence of stop and search, our use of Section 60?

Section 60, for Members that do not know, is the power that allows people to be searched without individual reasonable suspicion and is usually put on an area, and we are looking at reducing the amount of pre-planned Section 60s we do, and also in terms of the signing and notices we give to communities. We actually now run a standard notice which is available on the force intranet, and I will make sure that goes round the colleagues, which is around Section 60 power. We have spoken, as part of the work we have done with people, about whether people would consider mobile signing, but again, we would welcome views because there are issues there, quite rightly, as some leaders and others have said to us about effectively either stigmatising or signalling an area. But one of the views is should we consider when we are doing high-profile knife crime operations that we actually have a sign there that says, 'This is in place, this is working in the area at this time for this reason'? So that is one of the live debates in terms of it.

Then the rest of the work is very much around how we train our staff, and that goes right back from the very beginning of the basic training input, so there is a computer-based learning package that is out and available with staff, and if Members are interested, I could get you a copy of that so you can actually see what is going on in relation to the training of individual staff, then the training of supervisors. We have run an event with Borough Commanders at which one of the borough stop and search leads was there and spoke from one of the boroughs in London where stop and search is particularly challenging, and a whole series of events around how we do it and what we do. We have not just done that in relation to the work we are doing here. We have met with the ten other major users of stop and search in the United Kingdom, so the major police forces, to look at what they are doing. Is there something different they do that we could learn from and share practice around? So it is a thorough review in terms of doing it. Where we are in terms of timelines, it will either be March management board or more likely April management board when any policy changes would come to that board for consideration.

Tony Arbour (AM): Can you say about the committee monitoring groups?

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I think you have hit on what is a problem for us that we are reviewing at the moment. The committee monitoring groups actually belong to the MOPC, they are not a Metropolitan Police Service thing, and they meet with the lead officer on every borough for stop and search, look at data and challenge and all the rest of it, but we are just having a review of them and seeing how effective they are, because there are two broad problems. One, there is no young people on them, and two, very often the people on them are not actually necessarily going to have a lot of contact with young people, so the fact that they did not know that there was a review ongoing - and I, having reviewed Stop It with Tony Eastaugh [Commander, Public Contact], who has been running it, and being aware of the engagement process - it illustrates a problem that we might have to address.

James Cleverly (AM): Something I touched on a little bit earlier on, and I said we will come back to, was disproportionality, and obviously this is often cited as one of the biggest criticisms of stop and search as a tactic within the Commissioner's concept of total policing, can you just give us an indication of what the approach will be to addressing concerns around disproportionality within that total policing framework?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): By all means. I think first of all, and this is something that I think we have got to get better at, and it is something about how we present things as well in terms of making data and information available, one of the challenges around the disproportionality figures is trying to consider Section 60, section 1 and all the powers together, because the reality is the disproportionality looks very different across the range of powers. It also looks different at a borough level, almost down to a neighbourhood level, so we are looking at a much higher level of granularity. Disproportionality looks very different and satisfaction looks very different around our use of Section 60 powers as opposed to our use of section 1 of PACE, and one of the reasons that is given for that is actually of course in the use of section 1 of PACE, the officer has to provide a reason, a rationale as to why you are being stopped. That does not happen with Section 60.

We also see very different disproportionality with Section 60, and a really good example is where we started earlier on this afternoon. If you looked at the Section 60 that went in after those tragic incidents in Lambeth over the weekend, you would expect to see disproportionality. It was targeted at gangs. You would absolutely have an outcome that was disproportionate. That is what it was targeted at. Sorry, were you going to come back on one?

James Cleverly (AM): I was just going to say with regard to that, and again, I hinted at it earlier on with regard to how different elements of the community react differently to policing, and I think disproportionality, are we scientific enough with how we use the word 'disproportionality'? I will give you some examples. It strikes me that because quite logically there will be certain times of the day where you are more likely to conduct stop and searches, there are particular geographical areas where you are more likely, you know, areas that have a higher crime rate, for example, and if we look at the active street population in those places at those times, are we measuring our proportionality figures against that mix of the London population, or are we measuring it against the totality of the London population? So, for example - I was about to say my grandparents, none of them are alive at the moment, so a bad example - but someone's grandparents are less likely to be in Shoreditch high street at 10.00pm on a Saturday night, so automatically you are getting a skewing of the figures. Is that taken into consideration?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Not in the way the national figures are presented. The national disproportionality figures are just straight from the resident population. Whether it could be better, I think that is a very difficult debate for the police to put forward, because I think people then say, 'Well, you are trying to dodge the issue' so to speak. The disproportionality figures are there. I think we absolutely accept that whatever we say around disproportionality, the perception is that we use this to target particular groups of people.

James Cleverly (AM): Because this leads us on to community confidence in both the process and I suppose by extension to the police service as well, because obviously it is a phrase that we use all the time, and I know it is at the heart of policing, which is policing by consent, and there has been a concern that the phrase 'total policing' comes across as quite a forceful, almost macho phraseology. How are we going to ensure that as a concept that is implemented without alienating the communities within which policing has to happen?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Well, I think I would point to the total professionalism, the total victim care, because I think the Commissioner is absolutely clear in what he said around it, you cannot have stop and search that is anything other than professional, and with the support, or overwhelming support, of the community in terms of what we do. I will give you some really good examples of that. The most interesting people I find to talk to around stop and search are young people, to hear the views, the real concerns about the way we carry it out, when you share the figures in terms of percentage success rates and what we recover, but overriding it all, I think the thing that sometimes gets missed in this, often young people say, 'We want effective stop and search, because we do want to be safe in our communities' which is quite an interesting dynamic in terms of what we do when we work around this. Now, I have worked in this area now for over five years in all sorts of environments across the UK. Getting it right and changing it is not a quick process, but it begins with some straightforward steps at the start.

James Cleverly (AM): The Commissioner is very - and I have heard him mention this on a number of occasions - proud that whilst he was at Merseyside the level of complaints was I am not going to say the lowest - amongst the lowest in UK policing. Are there simple lessons that can be drawn across to make sure that robust policing does not automatically mean that it is confrontational or insulting or

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Yes. No, you can draw lessons across. The only thing I would say in relation to stop and search is I would not ever come to you and say, 'Low complaints means people are happy with stop and search'. It is a very, very poor proxy in stop and search, because certainly the work I have done with people, and it is not just London, Manchester, elsewhere, they will say they will not complain about stop and search.

James Cleverly (AM): Obviously, we are going to be regularly hauling the Deputy Mayor for Policing, you, the Commissioner across the coals on issues like this, or indeed this issue. What about at borough level? What is going to be the interaction process at borough level around making sure that the granularity of this policy is working borough by borough?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): I will not subject you to that, but that is the borough breakdown that I get every month. I have taken over and will chair the work of yet another operation, Operation Pennant, which looks at stop and search data, and allows me to go into a level of granularity and individual actions in relation to stop and search right across the Metropolitan Police Service, including specialist units.

I also, when we started the work around Stop It and talked about the work we wanted to do around how do we begin to change this and how do we have a more informed internal debate and external debate, spoke to all the Borough Commanders at the start of that, in terms of saying, 'Look, these are the issues. These are the risks around stop and search, these are the consequences if we get it wrong, if we lose the support of the community, but these are the outcomes we need to try and get to how do we do it?'

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Plus, from our point of view, as I say, we will be reviewing the community monitoring groups to make sure they are effective as possible, because the main problem is they are doing at the moment valuable work. They obviously challenge, they go out on visits, all the rest of it, but nobody knows they are there and certainly not the people who are mostly subjected to stop and search, which is young people. So we need to look at that on a borough basis to see what confidence they can give to the community that the thing is being monitored.

James Cleverly (AM): Then finally, before I hand back, and again, one of the things that was touched upon in the context of the transition of the role for the Trident team, and obviously one of the key elements of their success in dramatically reducing gun crime in London was the quality of the community roots, organisations like the Trident IAG kind of provided. Now, obviously they are hoping to carry across those skills on to specifically the gang-related stuff, but obviously a lot of stop and search activity is not in direct support. I mean, the vast bulk of it is not in direct support of anti-gang operations, so how do we maybe I could be wrong on that, but

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): I mean, forgive me, but my assumption was that actually the whole point about the change to stop and search, that it would focus on those people who were most likely to be carrying knives and causing harm, and in most areas, they are most likely to be gang members.

James Cleverly (AM): OK. So the

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): You want gang members to be stopped and searched more often and non-gang members to be stopped and searched less.

James Cleverly (AM): So the shift in role and the beefing up of the numbers of the Trident team are to basically kind of populate the wider stop and search activity with the experience that they have got from their anti-gun work?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): With boroughs and with the existing links, so I talked earlier on about Brixton and the work that went on there in terms of the Section 60 over the weekend on the back of the stabbings there, and that was all around talking to communities first, and explaining what we were doing and why, and then putting dedicated people out there; and I touched on something that we now do as well. From what we know about how the gangs behave at the moment those sorts of tactics go in place, the weapons will disappear and that is why we sweep areas afterwards, to try and recover weapons, and then look at what we can do with them forensically.

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): The critical thing from the Trident point of view of course is the promulgation of intelligence. What you want is your patrolling cops with a thing saying, 'If you see this guy, stop him and search him again and again and again, because we know from our intelligence he is a gang member, he is likely to cause harm and violence and very likely to be carrying a weapon'.

James Cleverly (AM): One of the other things, I mean, it has just triggered in my mind, when you say about the kind of immediate response to a likely stop and search is that weapons or drugs or whatever it might be get ditched, how are we going to have a grown-up debate about what success looks like, because if the simple metric is proportion of people found with weapons or drugs on them at the point that they are stopped and searched, you are going to get a very distorted picture, because as you say, someone tossing a knife into the bushes as they see an officer walking towards them, you know, they are not necessarily going to be picked up on that, found in possession, but five minutes later a weapon - or whatever it might be - is found, so how do we make sure that we are not getting a distorted picture as to what success looks like?

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): In relation to what happens with the Section 60 authorities, because they have to be signed off, and every one is reviewed in detail, what you have got is you look at the intelligence: what was the rationale as to why this was put in place? Does the outcome meet the rationale? In other words if you are after knife crime and it was gang-related, have we been stopping people that were either gang members or associates of gangs? Then in addition to what was the percentage arrested, were there cannabis warnings; you actually look at what did we recover on a knife sweep. So an hour after that Section 60 finished, they walk through the area, they found seven knives. You can start to build a more complete picture, and this is also part of the work that the Metropolitan Police Service is also doing with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission have written to a number of police forces, of which the Metropolitan Police Service is one, about how we use our Section 60 powers and we have met with them and we are talking with them about, 'Come on in and have a look'. We are being very open about, 'These are the challenges we face' because the reality is the operational challenges are not going to go away. They are there for every borough, day in, day out, and what we have started to do, and I did it with some of the groups of young people, is explain the operational challenges we are asking people to take and, 'What would you do in this scenario?'

I give the example that, sadly, it is not uncommon now of a duty sergeant or a duty inspector somewhere across the Metropolitan Police Service being told at 3.45pm that two schools are going to empty out at 4.00pm, they have intelligence that there is going to be a fight and there is going to be weapons involved. What do we want that person to do? Or the other one that is a real example; a security guard sees someone with a hoodie on and jeans - the description given - pocket a knife in the hoodie and walks round the corner in a shopping centre. There happens to be a patrolling officer there. They go round the corner, there are three people fitting that description. What do we want them to do? Or a group of people standing outside Friday prayers at a local mosque, probably skinheads, something like that, officer walks past. Do we want the officer to talk to them? Do we want them to do anything? These are the real challenges that we ask on our behalf of communities of London, operational officers, to wrestle with like that. We take communities through some of the decision-making and rationale around it. That is about saying those problems will not go away. We are happy to have all sorts of debates around the tactics, how we use it, but those challenges that are there in our communities are not going to go away. We think done effectively, done properly, done with the values we have talked about; stop and search can be part of the solution to that.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): I think we came to the sort of meat of the issue with that summary from you, Deputy, and can I just say, from the young people that I know through the IAGs that I know are very good, they are well supported and have gone through exercises like that, you will find the response Jenny just asked me, do I know young people who say, 'Yes, stop and search should be used' - then those young people definitely say, 'Yes, stop and search should be used'. Two weeks ago, I was with a group of ex-gang members, offenders and others, and when I said to them, 'Oh, what about stop and search?' and they said, 'Yes, yes, I want stop and search to be used'. Mind you, they wanted it for their own purposes, because they wanted other people taken off the street, so I think you have to be sure who you are asking.

But the thing that I still have a problem with is when you look at disproportionality, and when it is clear to you that it exists is when the outcome does not match the evidence or the intelligence.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Absolutely, yes.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): You know, you very rarely get people going out and corralling white men because they would not use that as their primary intelligence, but I do know from experience where people will say, 'It is a black man that is being looked at or it is an Asian' so it is about keeping the intelligence and the evidence at the centre, but would you not agree with me, it is also about the police when they have made a mistake, when they got it wrong, to stay with that community. I am thinking college students in my constituency who are regularly just not corralled, but they fall within a Section 60, and they are the ones time and time again that are being stopped, because in a number of my boroughs, you can have maybe three or four Section 60s a week, if not more. Now, very little is done with those young people to actually say to them, 'Apologies. We are sorry, you were not involved' and that way, you would then gain their confidence and their understanding. Will you explore doing more with maybe the Safer Neighbourhood teams or whoever, because you just leave it and then you go away and you come back again with another Section 60, and it is the same young people. No wonder then they get cross, because they know that the people you are looking for have long gone, and I keep saying this, but you do not have that ongoing discussion with the innocent young people and the majority of them that are caught in a Section 60 are innocent, so you need to do that follow-up and I think apologise to them for saying, 'Sorry you were caught up in this. This is what we were doing and can you help us?' and that is not being done.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Yes, I would absolutely agree with you in terms of the approach around it. Two areas that may assist around this, one, and you know this better than I do, saying we will have a meeting and explain it to young people is not the way to do it.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): It is rubbish.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): There is now a stop and search app, which is around Know Your Rights in terms of what we do, so there is actually a way that young people can know, because I think part of it is rebalancing that relationship. We now give advice to officers, because most groups of young people, someone will have a mobile phone with a video camera on, 'You want to video us doing it, video us doing it'. We are doing a number of things in terms of that. We would like, and I am told the technology will do it, but whether it is doable, is as you enter an area where there is a Section 60 in place, if you are signed up, you could get something that says you are in a Section 60 area.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): Get an alarm.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): But for some people, it is really important.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): I am sure Google will help you with that.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): But some people want it because they want it for their young people, for their community, they see it as a secure means of getting to school or to transport hubs, others will want to say, 'Well, I do not want to be part'.

Jenny Jones (AM): I go to different meetings, because I hear a lot of anger about stop and search and I do not hear people saying, 'Yes, it is all right if the police are polite' because they say the police are not polite, and I have talked to Hugh Orde [President of the Association of Chief Police Officers and former Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland] about this and he said in Northern Ireland that - where they did quite a lot of stop and search - he told his officers they had to be relentlessly polite. He said it really irritated the criminals they stopped, when the police were just endlessly, rigorously polite, but I think now, because stop and search has been used as such a blunt weapon, we are suffering a sort of backlash on it and so your training has to be even better than it would have been if you were starting ten years ago, because the community already feels - a lot of people feel - angry about it.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): I would totally support that view. I mean, one of the issues when we talked about this the other night when I was with colleagues in a borough is the use of body-worn video cameras to actually video the interaction. It is quite interesting sometimes to see the level of hostility a normal interaction can invoke on the street.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): Yes, I have seen it. It is not easy.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): It is quite useful to share that and say, 'This is what we are asking over 50,000 people a day to go out and do' but no, your point about that in terms of relentlessly polite, I had not heard Hugh Orde use it in that way, but I have had that conversation about stop and search in Northern Ireland. No, you are right, it is about the professionalism and dignity with which we carry out those interactions, and there are many, many examples where it is done well. One of the things - I know we disagree on this - I have wrestled with, with having this portfolio for five years or more, is generalisations around stop and search, because it is too complex an issue to generalise around. But I agree with your point.

Kit Malthouse (Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime): Just to say, I mean, my experience is similar to yours, Jenny, in that dozens and dozens of young people I have spoken to now in the last three years, I have not met a single one who said, 'You should not be doing stop and search' but I have met many who said, 'You should be doing stop and search politely'.

Jennette Arnold OBE (AM): Of course, that is the starting point.

Joanne McCartney (Chair): The point about the complaints issue, certainly when the MPA had that borough data - I think it would be useful for us to have access to it on a regular basis, but if I look at my own boroughs, Haringey had very low complaints, and yet arising out of recent reports following the August 2011 disturbances, it certainly appears that that is an issue that is being put forward where there was some tension; I think I agree with you on the level of complaints. But can I ask on that, will the new approach when you are talking with young people encourage people to complain if they think officers have got it wrong, because the two must go hand in hand.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Yes. That leaflet that is going round and round, the Section 60, does talk about complaining and the Know Your Rights app, and I have not seen it recently, I am told it has how you complain, and also from talking to colleagues in the IPCC, it is something we are saying, 'You do not have to talk to us, complain to the IPCC'. It is very straightforward to do and something does happen. Their Lead Commissioner is very strong on this issue.

Joanne McCartney (Chair): Well, can I thank you both for coming. It was very interesting today.

Craig Mackey (Deputy Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis): Thank you.

Joanne McCartney (Chair): I think we have learnt a lot so that is very useful.