The controversial legislation, which has been in place since 1994, has recently seen a drastic surge in use following the passing of the Coronavirus Act (2020): an act which has given police unprecedented powers to enforce lockdown in response to COVID-19.
Human rights, race equality and criminal justice organisations have vocally criticised the disproportionate and rapid escalation of Section 60 stops being carried out against young BAME people, especially young black men. But how did we get here? Read more below….
What is it?
Unlike the more common Section 1 Stop and Searches, Section 60 regulation authorises police officers to carry out searches for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments on an individual, driver, a vehicle and its passengers without reasonable suspicion.
It was originally introduced to tackle football hooliganism and violence in football games under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, and intended to be used in a set area for a fixed amount of time. In practice, officers are meant to authorise the use of Section 60 when there has been serious violence involving weapons OR where there is a real risk it may occur to prevent it happening.
Up until 2019, only high ranking officers could authorise these searches.
But, in 2019 then Home Secretary Sajid Javid made it easier for lower-ranking officers to approve the orders as an attempt to tackle rising knife crime (so to speak). Since then, numbers of S60 stops have, predictably, been rising across the UK even though evidence shows Stop & Search has a tenuous link to stopping crime. (For example: stats show only 22% of all stops in the Metropolitan Police lead to a positive outcome.)
BAME communities - policed not protected:
Unsurprisingly, Section 60 searches have been proven to be more racially disproportionate than those that target individuals. This has eroded community trust and engagement with the police.
Human rights organisation Liberty HQ says:
Empowering police to stop and search without suspicion is a recipe for discrimination, doing untold damage to communities’ trust that they will be fairly policed. It is the antithesis of properly targeted and accountable stop and search – arrest levels under section 60 are minimal.
So, we must ask: why do they continue?
A recent UCL study looking at Stop & Search in London found that:
Over the past two years, 90% of searches for weapons under a section 60 authorisation resulted in no further action.
Stop and search is geographically concentrated in some parts of London: half of the searches between July and September 2020 occurred in only 9% of neighbourhoods.
Searches are also concentrated in deprived areas: 69% of searches took place in neighbourhoods that were more deprived than average.
In particular, 80% of searches for weapons under section 60 occurred in the most-deprived half of neighbourhoods.
In some of these areas (which need a focus on proper intervention programmes, youth initiatives and funding for employment and education instead), research has found black people get searched at more than 40 times the rate of white people.
Why so significant now?
In 2020, Liberty HQ found that police powers introduced to enforce the Coronavirus lockdown have followed and exacerbated patterns of discrimination shown in stop and search.
Data from the end of March 2020 shows that 18,081 Stops and Searches under section 60 were carried out in anticipation of violence, an increase of 35% compared with the previous year. Black people made up the highest proportion of those stopped at over 1/3 of searches (at 4858).
A few months later, in London, in May 2020 at the height of the Lockdown, the Metropolitan police stopped and searched 1,448 people under section 60, more than double the number stopped in May 2019.
With a second, stricter and tighter, lockdown declared in January until the foreseeable future, BAME families hardest hit by unemployment, educational inequality and the mental and physical toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as over-policing, are more vulnerable than ever.
Want to find out more?
On February 17th March, EQUAL will be looking at the current landscape of S60 Stop & Search and hearing from those impacted by them first hand. Register here.
Stop-Watch UK also reported there is a four-fold disparity between White and other ethnicities with stop and searches in England and Wales 2019/20. With the Metropolitan Police in London, this is even greater.