A range of other actors also demonstrated varying degrees of influence in holding the police to account as this final section discusses. Following the HMIC's (2015a) recommendation that every police force in the country should published an action plan detailing how they intend to incorporate its recommendations into practice, each one has done so using a template produced by the Police-Public Encounters Board (PPEB).66 The
PPEB is a collection of police force leads on stop and search who share best practice, chaired by the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC, formerly ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers]) national lead for stop and search and deputy chief constable of the British Transport Police Adrian Hanstock. This template also includes what steps forces will take to introduce greater procedural safeguards for searches of children and young people after this was thrust into the spotlight by an inquiry of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children (APPGC, 2014) into young people’s experiences of the police. Together with the specific references to BUSSS, this shows how interdependent and mutual reinforcing activities from a wider range of national bodies and actors has been, and beyond those whose statutory role it is to govern the police.
66 For transparency, the author declares membership of this group. The original statement is based upon observations of this group which also publishes its minutes to the public, and the plans are available on each police force's website.
As a cross-party scrutiny group, the APPGC has no legal responsibility or powers in relation to government, parliament or the police. As with other parliamentary committees and groups, it can act as a moral voice by raising attention to various issues and shape the wider socio-political environment within which police officers operate by proposing legislative changes to their fellow lawmakers, in this case with regards to children and young people's policing experiences. As argued earlier, the threat of legislative changes in constraining police powers and discretion has operated as a key motif for police officers to take heed of directives and may partly explain why the APPGC's recommendations were incorporated into police force's action plans. Another likely reason is due to the proactivity of the PPEB's chair in devising a national template that included the APPGC's recommendations, thus supporting suggestions that ACPO (now NPCC) has come to play an important role in coordinating policing issues nation-wide (e.g. Loveday, 1986; Reiner, 2000; Rawlings, 2002).
The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) successfully undertook legal remedies to ensure that all police forces were complying with its investigations, having won a judicial review against the Metropolitan Police (see High Court, 2015). Initially, between 2009 and 2015, the commission used its ‘calling in' power to legally oblige all police forces to refer onto it any complaint made in relation to examinations and detentions at ports under schedule 7. This itself arose from the IPCC sharing concerns over potentially discriminatory practice after it was approached by a group of young Muslim men supported by the pressure group Cage.67 However, the Metropolitan Police had refused to
give the IPCC access to the classified material that it required to properly investigate whether complainants were stopped on the basis of intelligence or unlawfully
67 According to its website, Cage (formerly known as CagePrisonsers) is an independent advocacy organisation working to empower communities impacted by the global 'War on Terror'.
discriminated against. Ultimately, the High Court (2015) ruled in the IPCC's favour, resulting in an agreement reached whereby the commission would be granted access to classified material, including the background information used by port officers to inform their decision to examine or detain people, although the police could appeal to the Court against any disclosures. Once again, litigation appears to have produced a better result than voluntary compliance, particularly in relation to counter-terrorism powers.
Despite the reductions in schedule 7 use over this period (table 6.3), it is unclear what influence this intervention may have had upon port encounters, particularly as the proportion of ethnic minorities detained remained high (table 6.4) and the complaints process can only provide an individual-level, retrospective form of redress. Further, the IPCC's lack of enforcement powers means that forces are not obliged to incorporate any of its recommendations into practice, as interviewees from the IPCC conceded. Nonetheless, this development had introduced an additional layer of scrutiny surrounding a highly secretive power and may ensure that complainants have better access to redress or confidence in externally managed investigations, although broader public concerns about the IPCC's overall independence from the police still exist (e.g. Waters & Brown, 2000; Smith, 2003).
Finally, the College of Policing was commissioned by the Home Secretary to design training intended to be delivered to every police officer country-wide on the role of unconscious biases in producing discriminatory practice. More immediately, the College set up a stop and search scrutiny group to oversee its work and consists of key stakeholders from national policing bodies, civic groups and members of the public. It also established a definition of what constitutes a 'fair and effective stop and search encounter' in consultation
with these key stakeholders and in response to a HMIC (2013) recommendation, but not before being criticised for taking a whole eighteen months to do so (HMIC, 2015a). This definition is reproduced in table 7.1, which also highlights its probable influences and ahead of a discussion of its subsequent revision.68
Table 7.1 – College of Policing (2015) definition of a 'fair and effective stop and search', and probable influences
Definition Primary influence
“A stop and search is most likely to be fair and effective when
1. the search was a justified and lawful use of the powerA that stands up to public scrutiny;B
2. the officer genuinely believes the person has an item in their possession;A
3. the member of the public understands why they have been searched and feels that they have been treated with respect;C D E
4. the search was necessary and was the least intrusive method a police officer could useF to establish
whether a member of the public has a prohibited article or an item for use in crime with them and 5. more often than not the item is found”F
A Home Office (2014h) B NPCC C IPCC (2009) D EHRC (2010) E HMIC (2013) F StopWatch
Source: College of Policing (2015)
As table 7.1 shows, this definition drew upon a wide range of central influences and reinforced the primacy of these national bodies in holding police officers to account for their use of stop and search. For members of the public and their PCCs, only the first standard on ensuring that searches “stand up to public scrutiny” could provide them with possible opportunities to interrogate police practice albeit indirectly through scrutinising stop and search records and soliciting retrospective explanations. Further hampering this was the failure of many forces to even establish the necessary scrutiny groups throughout
68 For transparency, the author declares membership of the College of Policing's Strategic Stop and Search Scrutiny Group and involvement in the creation of the definition analysed and subsequent revision.
most of this study (HMIC 2015a, 2016). Whilst the third criteria introduces some degree of immediate, individualised accountability by encouraging officers to explain to individuals why they had searched them, the mere provision of such an explanation is unlikely to facilitate more robust forms of accountability given that many individuals searched do not agree with the justifications given (HMIC, 2013; Home Office, 2014c), and also without an effective means to seek redress for any perceived injustice, an important dimension of democratic police accountability (chapter 2).
Ultimately, these standards were short-lived as this definition was watered down only six months later to secure the voluntary compliance of all police forces. This serves as another example of how successful some chief and senior officers are in loosening the standards by which they are held accountable. The current definition is:
“A stop and search is most likely to be fair and effective when:
1. the search is justified, lawful and stands up to public scrutiny;
2. the officer has genuine and objectively reasonable suspicion they will find a prohibited article or item for use in crime;
3. the person understands why they have been searched and feels that they have been treated with respect;
4. the search was necessary and was the most proportionate method the police officer could use to establish whether the person has such an item.”
(College of Policing, 2016) As the revision shows, there was considerable discomfort in the original expectation that the item searched for would be found “more often than not”, resulting in its retraction. Related to this, the measure of a successful outcome reverted back to the traditional standard of finding any “prohibited article or item for use in crime” rather than the formerly higher standard of linking this directly to whether or not the original object of the search was found. Notably, these revisions concerned issues not proscribed by legislation or the codes of practice and shows how constrained more robust police accountability may
become when narrowly reduced to legal compliance rather than also attending to the organisational policies and environment that grant police officers their wide discretion.
As the work of the College relates to better decision making of police officers and its training was being trialled during the course of this research, it was difficult to identify what their influence may have been on the use of police-initiated stops without interviewing and monitoring the constables who took part in the pilots. Its work was, however, revealing of some of the tensions between national statutory organisations who sought to change police practice and improve the quality of the encounters, and some police forces who successfully resisted the more demanding aspects of those reforms. There were also more practical concerns preventing the implementation of training. These issues became apparent during a public, national conference observed near at the end of this research:
A police force lead questioned the ability to deliver two day training in his force where he said stop and search is not perceived to be a problem- although he distanced himself from that view- and his force only has five allotted days of training a year. A chief officer from another force interrupted to say that this is an issue concerning leadership because “leadership will define what gets seen as a priority”. He acknowledged that the issues are “more germane to the Big Six, you know, London, Greater Manchester and Birmingham [etcetera]” but the chief officers who do not perceive this to be an issue must be reminded that stop and search is a “flash-point in community relations.” A stop and search lead from another police force welcomed the training but expressed disappointment that it fell short of the Home Secretary's proposal of ensuring that only accredited officers could use the power, thus showing differences between officers and forces across the country in how the reforms are received. Later, a lead from another force welcomed the training but said his force would struggle to fit a two day training into a police force which only has three days allocated to training, and requested a “light version”.
Observation 2016/01/26' As can be seen, despite some best intentions from the College and some stop and search leads country-wide, the varied police organisational policies hampered the ability to ensure
that unconscious bias training would be incorporated across the country without a mandatory requirement to do so. Whereas some forces had volunteered to participate in the pilot, others refused to do so and exploited the College's lack of enforcement powers to resist incorporating the final training package into their own programme. As another officer suggested, the Home Secretary had backtracked on her threat to remove police officers' right to conduct searches due to malpractice, despite its already successful implementation in Northamptonshire Police. These issues are exemplary of how successful some chief and senior officers have been in limiting the scope of reform even in the face of intense pressures by those they are supposedly accountable to.
7.6. Conclusion
In conclusion, police governance had remained strongly centralised throughout the entire research period and despite the introduction of PCCs. Compared to the relatively straightforward period discussed in chapter 6, the events outlined here shows how incredibly complex and difficult police accountability is negotiated in practice. As with the previous chapter, a whole range of actors had produced an environment favourable towards greater police accountability and resulted in significant reductions to the operational use of stop and search. This shows how operational practice remains open to external influences but also how powerful chief constables are in resisting these pressures and deciding which reforms are implemented locally and to what extent.
This chapter also supports Shiner & Delsol's (2015) argument that the politics surrounding the use of police powers is key to understanding the developments to stop and search governance and use. Successful litigation and large-scale disorders (chapter 6) made it seem that the police had lost control and necessitated the government intervening to prove
its competence to govern. Electoral uncertainties surrounding the impending 2016 general election and the large number of ethnic minority voters residing in parliamentary constituencies considered crucial in deciding which party formed the next government (OBV, 2013) produced a political environment amenable towards greater police accountability. It necessitated the Conservative-led coalition government pay better attention to issues affecting ethnic minorities, and this also applied to the Labour Party which was no longer able to take those votes for granted. For the Conservatives, now occupying a space traditionally associated with Labour and becoming increasingly confident in discussing issues of 'race', stop and search became an important example to demonstrate their willingness to listen to ethnic minorities and ensure better outcomes than a discredited Labour Party. Needless to say, the government was not shy in not only frequently reminding voters of its achievements in rectifying Labour's mistakes on stop and search as the general election drew closer, but to also then capitalise upon its subsequent electoral success to declare, in the words of the Prime Minister of the first majority Conservative government in 25 years, that “The Conservatives have become the party of equality” (Cameron, 2015).
The Home Secretary and her department has played the greatest role in shaping operational practice during both periods (chapter 6 and 7) but, as this chapter has argued and contrary to the suggestion underling police research, national government's influence was not as determinant in shaping policing as previously thought. While national government has proven 'virtuous' by using its unique access to state resources to make police practice more responsive to communities' expectations (Loader & Walker, 2007), chief constables retained a determinant role in deciding the extent to which any stop and search reforms translated into operational practice. What makes this extraordinary is that chief officers
have collectively managed to successfully frustrate these reforms despite the sheer scale of pressures applied by the various institutions that they are supposedly accountable to: national government, Parliament, national policing bodies and concerned members of the public whose consent is essential to ensure policing in Britain remains democratic. This suggests that chief officers remain the most powerful actor within the structures for police governance, even if the potential to influence that practice is dispersed across a wider set of actors than is usually considered.
Ironically, despite central actors claiming to seek a police service more responsive to ethnic minority communities, they have collectively failed to provide these groups, the public or PCCs any meaningful opportunity to participate in their programme of enhanced police accountability. Whilst BUSSS appears to provide some role for the public, it appears only likely to reproduce the explanatory and retrospective form of accountability that has dominated police governance and been criticised for failing to introduce more robust local democratic controls (Marshall, 1978; Jefferson & Grimshaw, 1984; Brogden, 1988). This is because it fails to give the public a greater say over operational practice and relies upon chief constables to adopt the more intrusive forms of scrutiny which they have largely resisted (HMIC, 2016), namely the opportunity for citizens to accompany the police out on patrol. But the greatest irony belongs to the government itself for failing to enhance the role of its flagship PCC reform in introducing the greater local democratic accountability that it purportedly seeks to achieve. Therefore, Reiner (2010), Newburn (2012) and Lister (2013) were right to predict that the government would refrain from devolving greater powers to PCCs, at least in relation to the governance of police powers.
Although PCCs were largely ignored, some still sought to carve out their own role and in response to concerns by their electorate. The next two chapters discuss their role in enhancing local police accountability. This is followed by the overall conclusion for this thesis which summarises the main research findings and considers the potential of additional measures proposed by the government towards the end of this study in improving local police accountability.