Police in London should carry out more stop and search because “it can save lives” and “keep people safe”, the policing minister said on Wednesday as he urged the Met to step up its use of the tactic.
Chris Philp said he was concerned that knife crime – which rose 20 per cent in the capital last year - had been allowed to increase because of an accompanying drop in the number of stop and searches being carried out by the Met.
He said the trend should be reversed and, dismissing fears of disproportionality, suggested that more searches could play a vital role in protecting young black men, who are over-represented among the victims of blade homicides, from dying from knives
“I would like stop and search to be used more because it takes knives off the street and if knives are in circulation then there’s a risk they are going to be used. It’s about having the confidence to use it more,” Mr Philp said.
“In the Metropolitan Police area stop and search has gone down by 44 per cent over the last two years. Some of this is about the confidence to use it where there are reasonable grounds for suspicion.
“Stop and search takes knives off the streets. It can save lives. That’s why it’s so important the power is used, of course lawfully, respectfully, but we do need to use it to keep people safe. It’s tackling knife crime
Mr Philp, who was speaking to broadcasters after writing an article for the Daily Telegraph accompanied by a graph showing knife stop and searches down as blade offences rise, said more searches could “protect the public and particularly the kind of young men who often end up being victims of knife crime.
“The sad truth is that young black men are disproportionately victims of knife crime and we’re doing this as much to protect them as anything else.”
He said the success rate of stop and searches was typically 25% to 30% and that the “percentage is pretty much the same across something to within 1% across all ethnicities so that gives me quite a high degree of confidence that police are not unreasonably picking on particular parts of the community,” he said.
