After 30 years, the evidence on section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 proves that it is no longer fit for purpose, according to StopWatch.
A new report looking at Roberts v Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis – the only occasion on which the English courts have given serious consideration to section 60’s compatibility with convention rights – argues that the UK supreme court case was wrongly decided and is vulnerable to being overturned on appeal to the European court of human rights.
The report also reviews post-Roberts case law, the current policy agenda regarding section 60, and other abortive attempts at legislative reform, coming to the conclusion that a decade after the controversial Roberts decision, section 60 remains ‘an unfettered, highly damaging power’ in the hands of a police force that ‘routinely dichotomises the trust of Black communities against visions of its own effectiveness’.
Habib Kadiri, executive director of StopWatch said:
The evidence from all sides is clear: section 60 searches are of no use amongst the vast range of powers that police forces have at their disposal today. On the one hand, the phrase “too little too late” perfectly describes their impact as a preventative power. On the other, section 60 authorisations are almost always guaranteed to involve the intensified harassment of racialised communities and the subsequent breakdown of police-civilian relations in those areas. The political fallout from the Roberts case made this plain. A genuinely effective approach to tackling serious violence knows that section 60 searches are not – and can never be – part of the solution.
Intended purpose versus actual use
The report also found dwindling usage of section 60 searches by police force in comparison to other police powers for the purpose of preventing violence, indicating that the search tactic no longer meets its intended purpose. Data from Home Office records and freedom of information responses from police forces show that:
- For a power ostensibly dedicated to breaking ‘the culture of people carrying knives’, the long run trend is one of almost complete and total failure: since records began, the arrest rate for offensive weapons represents only 0.6% of all section 60 searches.
- For a power initially dedicated to dealing with violence at football matches, section 60 was used only 11 times at football grounds in the last seven years. This is compared to more than 350 uses of section 35 dispersal orders on football crowds over the same period, a clear sign of the fact that police forces have more suitable powers in their possession for controlling crowds liable to commit acts of violence.
- As a power adjudged in the Roberts ruling to disproportionately target young Black lives because ‘it is members of these groups who will benefit most from the reduction in violence, serious injury and death that may result from the use of such powers’, far fewer young Black people feel safe around the police (only 40% of Black children compared with 75% of their white peers), and other studies have identified a lack of trust in the police as ‘a strong predictor of weapon carrying among young people’ from so-called high crime neighbourhoods.
Some of the data on alternative powers – notably on section 35 dispersal orders – was particularly difficult to obtain, highlighting a serious lack of transparency amongst police forces. StopWatch member Ella Thomson, who collated the research, said:
A large proportion of police forces in England and Wales are not recording basic data on their use of dispersal orders in an accessible way, as a matter of public record. It is alarming that police forces cannot quantify how often they use a power that can ultimately lead to arrest. If you have been entrusted with the power, you also have a responsibility to monitor its use. Equally, it is wholly unclear why some forces are able to record and store the data while others are not.
The full report is available to download below.
