There is little connection between the use of stop and search powers by the Metropolitan police and reductions in knife crime, according to new figures analysed by a leading criminologist.
Professor Marian Fitzgerald says that in the case of one London borough – Southwark – a huge expansion in the use of "section 60" stop and search powers has actually been accompanied by an increase in knife crime. The section 60 powers under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act allow the police to search anyone without needing to have grounds for suspicion in a designated area at a specific time where they believe there is threat of serious violence.
Fitzgerald also says the recent European court of human rights ruling that section 44 counterterrorist stop and search powers are unlawful because they are too widely drawn and lack adequate safeguards should also apply to section 60 searches.
This exceptional power was introduced to deal with football hooligans and gang fights and has been rarely used over the past 15 years. But a decision by the Met to use section 60 searches as part of their drive against knife crime means that since May 2008 there has been a huge expansion and they have become routine in many London boroughs. The latest figures show the number of section 60 searches has rocketed from 4,400 in 2003-04 to more than 80,000 in 2008-09.
Senior police officers and Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor, have described section 60 as a central element of Operation Blunt 2 – the Met's anti-knife crime campaign – which has brought down the number of youth murders and reduced knife crime by 4%, or 305 offences. But Fitzgerald says this claim is not borne out by new Met figures broken down by borough which show a very mixed picture across London in the use of the powers: "The boroughs which have resisted politically driven pressures to take a gung-ho approach to using section 60 have been as successful in reducing knife crime, and often more so, than the boroughs where the police have been happy to let section 60 searches go through the roof."
The new figures show that among the 10 boroughs with the highest knife crime figures, the biggest fall as a result of Operation Blunt 2 between April and October last year was in Islington, where knife crime dropped 25%. But Islington also saw the second fewest section 60 searches in the top 10 knife crime boroughs with only 840. By contrast Southwark, which had the second highest level of section 60 searches, with 9,437, actually saw knife crime rise by 8.6% over the same period.
The results in the other top 10 knife crime boroughs were more mixed. In Waltham Forest there were 3,123 section 60 searches last summer but knife crime rose by 6% and Lambeth, where 1,512 searches were carried out, saw a 3.8% rise in knife crime. However in Newham, by far the heaviest user of section 60, with 13,347 searches between April and October last year, knife crime fell by 7.7%.
Ethnic monitoring figures for the use of section 60 in Blunt 2 show that during the first year of the campaign, from May 2008 to April 2009, 34,400 white people were searched compared with 50,596 black people. Despite this massively disproportionate impact on minority ethnic communities the arrest rate is lower than 5%.
Neil Gerrard, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, said the use of section 60 was simply not being monitored properly: "In fact, there is very little relationship between knife crime and the number of searches under section 60. Its use is a source of resentment among young men who are stopped again and again. It is about time we looked at how it is used and monitored and we should be looking to amend the way it operates."
He said it was only supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances but was now being used "absolutely routinely in certain police forces, as a method of doing stop and search without having to have suspicion regarding the individuals concerned".
The Met says that since Operation Blunt 2 began in May 2008 there have been nearly 2,500 arrests, with 550 knives, 20 guns and 150 other weapons seized.
