The Met’s long-awaited precision stop and search pilot, published earlier this month, was found to have no effect on weapon-enabled crime in designated ‘high harm’ areas (Barking & Dagenham and Lambeth).
What we now know from the pilot, which ran from June to December 2023, is that:
Standards weren’t maintained
- 101 officers received one day of procedural justice training on stop and search, and while there were small improvements in how searches were conducted during patrols within the precision search zones, there was no substantive difference in the quality of their searches outside of them. This suggests that officers were not able or willing to learn new skills and techniques for handling stop and search encounters. Despite the fact that scrutiny was the important factor in evaluating the pilot, the report concludes that ‘new training for S&S and procedural justice is being considered by the MPS, and lessons from the PSS evaluation will feed into this work.’
Trust was low
- Street interviews conducted two months after the start of the pilot in pilot wards found that only one-third (93 out of 281) of respondents felt confident that stop and search is used fairly.
Crime levels did not change
- The evaluation noted that ‘pilot areas did no worse or better than comparison areas in terms of weapon-enabled crimes and crime harm’.
The report also admitted a methodological fault in the fact that the pilot’s focus was on measuring the quality of encounters in ‘high harm’ areas, rather than on the volume of searches undertaken. This may have been due to the size of the areas targeted and scale of the intervention: precision stop-searches counted for only 4.7% of all searches recorded in the designated wards, so it would be very difficult to detect impact using ward-level data. However, this casts doubt on the pilot’s aim to ‘have maximum impact in terms of [weapon-enabled] crime reduction with minimum intrusion’, and nowhere in the report does it state the outcomes of the precision stop-searches conducted.
Published in the week that the BBC Panorama documentary on Charing Cross station officers was aired, one could be forgiven for thinking this was a case of using a busy day to bury bad news. As far as we can tell, it has not yet been mentioned by Sir Mark Rowley to the London Assembly or any political or media outlets, despite the aim of the pilot to share plans of how we conduct data-driven stop-search patrols with the public.