In response to the College of Policing's authorised professional practice (APP) on stop and search, StopWatch proposed the following:
The APP guidance has limited efficacy with regards to stop and search supervision until the College of Policing pilots and evaluates ‘the use of decision-breaks and real-time supervision as a way of tackling ethnic profiling. Officers should be required to check their grounds and secure authorisation from a supervising officer before proceeding with a stop and search in circumstances that are prone to disproportionality (e.g. drug searches of Black people in relatively affluent areas)’, as per the recommendation of the Colour of Injustice Report (Shiner et al., 2018, p. 62).
The APP should explicitly explain the issue of adultification bias towards Black children. The Children’s Commissioner (De Souza, 2026) found that Black children had their size, gender or build cited as justification for their strip search 4.7 times more often relative to white children and their proportion of the population. The APP should clarify that the build of a person should not be cited as justification for strip searches or stop and searches.
The APP should acknowledge the compounding harms that stop and search is likely to have when carried out in conjunction with other police use of powers which likewise risk racially disproportionate outcomes. For instance, the concomitant use of live facial recognition and police patrols enforcing civil orders (e.g. Public Space Protection Orders, Dispersal Orders, etc.), traffic stops, and stop and searches in what are designated as ‘hotspot areas’ intensifies the overpolicing and criminalisation of communities. E.g. research by Grother et al. (2019) found widespread evidence that racialised individuals are much more likely than white individuals to be misidentified in the 200 facial recognition algorithms studied, with some algorithms confusing non-white individuals as many as 100 times more often than white individuals, and racialised individuals much more likely to appear as ‘false positive’ suspects.
These measures are necessary but by all means insufficient in light of a long history of overpolicing of racialised communities which has eroded trust in the police as an institution, thereby deterring engagement in scrutiny processes.
For a full explanation of our position, please download and read our submission.