Mr. Nick Glynn:

I am not just talking about the UK police. I have worked with policing in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain as well. The powers are misused in many ways. For instance, the powers to stop, do identity checks and search for drugs are seen by some police officers as a gateway into controlling places, or, as they might say, controlling the streets. I have spoken to police officers who said they were not really comfortable approaching a group of youths on a street corner or whatever. The way they have done that is to search them. Some police officers see that as a form of engagement but, in fact, it is the use of a coercive power. Often, the use of search powers in regard to drugs is a gateway into the use of other powers, including, of course, the use of force. We see interactions that start with a stop and account or a stop and search and can end up in a death because the situation escalates.

Police officers often have numerical targets they must hit. There has been some pushback to that in England and Wales over the years but it ebbs and flows. There will be police officers who approach people saying they smell cannabis because that is impossible to disprove. If they say they can smell cannabis, they cannot be proved wrong. They will then search people and will, of course, find nothing because there was nothing there in the first place. However, it ticks a box on the spreadsheet. In particular, the experience in England and Wales of the operation of section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which covers without-suspicion stop-and-search powers, was that those powers were massively overused. As officers did not need reasonable grounds to search people, they could use them in a particular geographical area over a limited period. The powers were massively overused to no avail. The find rates on those searches were minuscule but they were ticking a box on a spreadsheet. As I said, regarding the suggestion that police officers might need more powers, if certain drugs are decriminalised, in order to manage public spaces, it is important to note that police have plenty of powers already, have had them for a long time and we are still in the situation we are in. Different approaches need to be taken other than police use of powers.