Page 33 - JUSTICE Tackling Racial Injustice - Children and the Youth Justice System

affluent areas the fact that find rates for drug stops are lower for Black
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people than White people indicates stops for Black people are based on
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weaker grounds. This strongly suggests bias and discrimination in decisions
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to stop and search.

2.25 This chimes with what we have heard: that often the reasons given for
suspicion can be spurious. We understand that it is common for police officers
to use the smell of cannabis as a reason for suspicion. This is despite the
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College of Policing’s Authorised Professional Practice guidance stating that it
should not, by itself, be used as a ground for a search. Moreover, it makes no
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difference to how effective a search is when the alleged smell of cannabis – a
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highly subjective and inscrutable standard - is stated as a ground for a search.
Indeed, the IOPC recently upheld a complaint where such grounds were used.
It found that “the officer’s grounds for the search […] were not reasonable as
the use of the smell of cannabis as a single ground is not good practice as set
out in the College of Policing’s Authorised Professional Practice on stop and
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search”.

2.26 We have heard of many instances where children are stopped on weak
grounds. Such instances highlight the seemingly low bar that some officers
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82 For example, according to Home Office Statistics, 4,070 (of which 2907 were Black) stops were made
in Thames Valley, compared to 665 (of which 233 were Black) stops in Suffolk, See: Home Office
‘Police powers and procedures, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2020’, (October 2020), p.1.
83 There was a 33% find rate for White people compared to 26% find rate for Black people in drug
searches in 2017, See, M. Shiner, Z Carre, R. Delsol and Niamh Eastwood, The Colour of Injustice:
‘Race’, drugs and law enforcement in England and Wales, (StopWatch, Release and IDPU, 2018), p.15.
84 HMICFRS, PEEL: Police legitimacy 2017 – a national overview, (2017), p. 29.
85 K. Irwin-Rogers and M. Shuter, Fairness in the Criminal Justice System: what’s race got to do with
it?, (Catch 22, 2017), p. 10.
86 This guidance is not mandatory, and its implementation among police forces remains inconsistent,
with some resisting. See Stop and Search: legal basis, College of Policing.
87 P. Quinton, A. McNeill and A. Buckand, Searching for cannabis: are grounds for search associated
with outcomes? (College of Policing, 2017).
88 IOPC ‘IOPC upholds cyclist’s stop and search complaint against Metropolitan Police officer’,
September 2020.
89 The PACE Codes of Practice detail the approach to reasonable suspicion: the officer must have formed
a genuine suspicion in their own mind that they will find the object for which they search and that there
must be an objective basis for that suspicion based on facts, information and/or intelligence which are

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