May 2024: A ‘vital tool’ or the master plan of a fool?
Policing minister Chris Philp claims that stop and search is ‘a vital tool in taking knives off our streets’. This begs the question, has Mr Philp seen the Home Office figures? We have.
Dear StopWatchers,
Unsurprisingly, this month has witnessed another bleak plethora of police misconduct and disproportionate use of force: the death of a man in police custody in Swindon (bringing us up to 9 deaths following police contact this year so far); two PCs caught strangling a woman in an alleyway; a former Met officer convicted of 13 counts of r*pe; an officer pleading guilty to two terror offences; constables sexually harassing female colleagues and sending discriminatory text messages; child victim blaming by officers; a doubling of cases of racism brought against the Met; and an officer caught drinking on the job. A standard working month ticked off, then.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, even the Met admitted that they are ‘not fit to serve Londoners effectively’ (The Standard, 10 May). Recent performance reports on local forces suggest that it’s not just a London issue, either. In a reactionary move, local forces have been ramping up stop and search patrols (ignoring warnings from the National Black Police Association president that it isn’t effective), special powers (including weapon searches in private properties), as well as knife and facial recognition technologies. You know the police are getting desperate when they’re asking for a ‘Ghostbusters-style’ weapon to fire electro-magnetic rays at e-scooters and e-bikes – we’re sure that’s exactly the fix they needed all along.
In other news, we welcome our newest recruit, Sofia Alouane, who will be supporting our legal team over the course of her internship. Keep an eye out for the upcoming protest factsheet she’s leading on.
Stop and search: A ‘vital tool’ or the master plan of a fool?
Buckling under the pressure of poor election prospects, policing minister Chris Philp has been frantically grasping at straws as of late. Hoping to make tidal waves in the electorate’s voting behaviour before 4 July, Philp has doubled down on recycling one of the government’s favourite futile policies: increasing stop and search.
Electoral nerves never have been terribly conducive to sound policymaking. Seeing as the minister is struggling to do his job, we’ve taken up the reins and looked at the stats for him (Home Office, year to 31 March 2023). While Philp insists that stop and search is ‘a vital tool in taking knives off our streets’ (The Telegraph, 14 May), the tactic is predominantly used to search for drugs (62% searches), not offensive weapons (16%). Given that there has been a 6% increase in offensive weapon searches in the last year, you’d think this would have elevated an already reasonably high find rate, justifying the expansion of these measures, right? Well, on the few occasions when officers were actually looking for weapons, 82% of the time they found nothing and only 3% of searches resulted in the seizure of an offensive weapon or firearm. The government’s pitch for stop and search rings hollow when even the Home Office’s findings show that the tactic does not effectively tackle serious violence.
In insisting that he has ‘a high degree of confidence that police are not unreasonably picking on particular parts of the community’ (Evening Standard, 15 May), Philp appears to be stubbornly turning a deaf ear to the president of the National Black Police Association’s confirmation that ‘racism and discrimination is rife in the [police] service’ (The Voice, 02 May). The policing minister’s announcement is a confession that the government has no intention to learn from the Casey Review and the wealth of academic research which has found time and time again that not only is stop and search racially disproportionate, but it is also unfit for purpose.
Philp’s assurances also seem misguided in light of footage circulating on social media of an officer who appeared to repeatedly strike a man in a wheelchair (ITV News, 21 May). What Norfolk Police Federation chair Andy Symonds referred to in a tweet as ‘lawful & necessary force’, a witness described as a man ‘in the middle of the road, dancing and singing and all happy when the policeman comes and stops him’ then ‘punches him in the face unnecessarily’ (BBC, 21 May). Potayto, potahto. As the most recent Home Office figures show that there were 659,372 incidents of police use of force in England and Wales in 2022/23, almost 100,000 more than in 2020/21, it is a tragic truism that such cases of police violence are disturbingly common. But hey, faith in the police is all that matters, eh?
Reacting to the incident being caught on Candid Camera, the chair of the Norfolk Police Federation bemoaned that officers are subjected to ‘trial by social media’ when criticised for their actions:
My colleagues are second guessing themselves when it comes to using force as they know that trial by social media will start & an investigation will take far too long…
We must have confidence that when we use our powers within the law we don’t have constant fears that when we do use lawful force we will backed by the Constabulary & the investigation is done within a week or two…
Rather than being “thrown under the bus” and potentially charged with allegations that are either criminal or misconduct in nature. Which then places officers at risk of their livelihood…
There are examples of officers using unnecessary or even excessive force which will and are being dealt with & I have no issues with this and welcome it. We have to act within the law and use force which is lawful, necessary and proportionate.
Certainly, it’s no secret that officers aren’t massive fans of being video recorded, hence why so many of them switch off their body-worn cameras when using force or delete the footage after the fact (BBC, 28 Sep 2023). But in a climate where the Home Secretary has promised additional funding to the police (Police Professional, 15 May), and the leading political parties have centred their campaign pledges on putting more police officers on the beat (The Times, 24 Apr), the force can hardly claim that it’s the victim of a mass smear campaign. Andy Symonds laments officers ‘second guessing’ their use of force, as though thinking twice and reflecting on whether force was proportionate and necessary is a harmful practice. On the one hand espousing the importance of safeguards and repercussions for misconduct, on the other conflating officers being held accountable by the justice system with being “thrown under the bus’’, Andy cannot reconcile these contradictory threads while in such an acute state of cognitive dissonance. Our thoughts and prayers are with him as he recovers from this syndrome. Ultimately, Andy’s reaction is a microcosm for the severe case of megalomania rotting the police force at large.
While this pathological police culture persists, Chris Philp’s assurances that expanded stop and search powers will be used appropriately are meaningless.
Deaths from police contact, cases old and new
Mohamud Hassan (statement from Hickman & Rose solictors)
Mohamud Hassan, a 24-year old British-Somali man, died at home, following recent contact with South Wales Police, in Cardiff on 9 January 2021 (INQUEST, 02 May).
Mohamud died at home, but the night before his death was held in police custody. Although the pathologist found no link between Mohamud’s injuries, and any cause of death, the family feels immense sadness that force and restraint were used on Mohamud some hours before he died.
Following a three-week inquest, a jury at Cardiff Coroner’s Court decided that the cause of Mohamud’s death was ‘unascertained’ and recorded an ‘open conclusion’ as to how he came about his death.
The family take comfort that South Wales Police has publicly taken responsibility for the failure of one of the arresting officers to record important details on the custody record, and South Wales Police’s assurances to the Court that changes are being made to information recorded on detainees’ custody records to make sure that the use of force and health conditions are recorded in future.
Other news
Officers cleared of assaulting unarmed man: Two police officers have been cleared of assault following the arrest of a man in Exeter (ITV News, 09 May). The court was shown the aftermath of a stabbing in the early hours of 19 March 2023 in Exeter city centre. Their body worn video cameras showed a man who had been in a fight say the knifeman attacker had 'blonde' hair. Yet, when they rounded the corner of the road, in pursuit of a suspect, they came across Neil Omari-Cole, who is black and has black hair.
One of the officers, who claimed to know Omari-Cole well, kicked him to the floor before handcuffing and searching him, the court was told. Officers said they believed Omari-Cole was carrying a knife, but he was not found to be in possession of one. Omari-Cole accused the officers of racism and made the formal complaint.
Acquitting the men after a three-day trial, the District Judge told them he accepted their actions were in accordance with their duties as police officers, that they were both of good character and the burden of proof by the prosecution had not been met. The case was investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), who will now liaise with Devon and Cornwall Police about any potential misconduct hearings.
Shadowy facial rec spying site accessed by Met officers at least once an hour: Figures from a freedom of information request found that PimEyes, which allows users to upload photographs of people and match them with images of the same individuals elsewhere on the internet, was visited from Metropolitan police computers 2,337 times in a three-month period since the start of this year (i news, 06 May).
UK police forces already have access to facial recognition software capable of matching images of suspects with official databases. But unlike those tools, PimEyes could be used by an officer or staff member without an official audit trail of searches or safeguards around which images are submitted.
The Met insisted that the 2,337 ‘hits’ recorded on the search engine from its computers did not mean the site was accessed to carry out a facial recognition search and said that officers may have been researching PimEyes in light of recent controversy about the software. Nonetheless, after i put the figures to Scotland Yard, it said it had ‘strengthened existing safeguards’ around the use of facial recognition and blocked all access to the site from its devices.
It is unclear just how many UK forces have accessed PimEyes or conducted searches. A separate request to disclose data relating specifically to facial recognition searches was declined or went unanswered by all 45 territorial police forces and the British Transport Police. Those forces which refused disclosure said that to do so risked revealing police tactics and hindering the prevention of crime. The National Police Chiefs’ Council, the body representing police chiefs, has advised in a memo disclosed under FOI rules that forces should neither confirm nor deny if they use PimEyes, citing concerns about ‘negative press’.
Met police giving 110%… to racism: The Race Action Plan is a distant memory with Black police leaders warning that racism is getting worse in the Met (Independent, 11 May). Employment tribunal data shows that cases brought against them on the grounds of racism more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.
£4m goes towards new tech while commander says police can’t solve knife crime alone: The Home Office will put £3.5 million toward the research, development and evaluation of new technologies which can allegedly detect knives carried from a distance and hand-held or body-worn systems that can be operated by individual officers (Police Professional, 15 May).
The MPS will also receive £547,863 to fund the refit and redeployment of four vans into new mobile Live Facial Recognition units to bolster efforts to address knife crime.
The investment comes during Sceptre, the national policing intensification week for knife crime led by National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), and is just one of a package of measures intended to tackle serious violence.
However, national lead for policing knife crime commander Stephen Clayman admits officers cannot solve knife crime alone ‘as criminals turn to social media to peddle weapons despite a clampdown on sales’ (Independent, 15 May).
Clayman said: ‘Like all emergency services, we are dealing with the symptoms but, while the cure is something we are involved in, we are clearly not going to be the ones that ultimately solve this.’
Police picking on hundreds of under-10s: An investigation found that at least 317 minors under the age of criminal responsibility were stopped and searched by the police forces in England and Wales in 2023, according to data.police.uk records. Nearly a quarter of all the searches were conducted on those from black, Asian, or other minority ethnic backgrounds – disproportionately high compared with population representation. The vast majority of the stop and searches – 81% – led to no further action from officers, either formal or informal. The highest number of searches on children under 10 were logged by Kent and the Metropolitan police.
The Home Office claim that the stop and search data on data.police.uk, which is compiled from police forces’ systems and used to inform their internal decision-making, is ‘not subject to the same level of quality assurance as Home Office-published official statistics’, which had only verified 64 stop and searches on those under 10 years of age in 2022/23.
Met facing legal action over use of facial recognition: Big Brother Watch have launched a challenge against the Met’s use of facial recognition technology following the stop of a community worker who was held and interrogated for almost half an hour and threatened with arrest following a facial recognition misidentification.
Shaun, who was walking home from a patrol with Street Fathers, a community group that provides a positive male presence for young people and takes knives off the streets said, ‘instead of working to get knives off the streets like I do, they were wasting their time with technology when they knew it had made a mistake’.
Tim Cushing notes in an article for Techdirt (29 May) that this is likely to continue: while the force used the technology nine times between 2020 and 2022, in 2024, it has already used it 67 times, ‘which makes it clear the plan is to steadily increase use’. Worse still, the number ‘only covers deployments. It says nothing about how long people were subjected to live facial recognition, nor how many faces were scanned by the tech.’
If you wish to support the campaign to roll back live facial recognition by supporting their fundraiser, which also includes the case of a teenager falsely flagged by a facial recognition camera in a supermarket store, click on the headline link below.
Crowdfunder: STOP mass facial recognition surveillance
Section 60 watch*
Hampshire
Thornhill (10 May)**
London (Met)
Islington (15 May)
Thames Valley
Bedfordshire
Luton (27 May)
West Midlands
Shard End, Birmingham (27 May)
Greater Manchester
Salford (02, 27 May), Royton (06 May), Worsley and Little Hulton (27 May), Oldham (28 May)
* This is not a comprehensive list
** Nothing was found on anyone searched, according to news reports
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