THE RECORDING
OF POLICE STOPS:
METHODS AND
ISSUES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researched and written by Michael Shiner,
Rebekah Delsol, and Rachel Neild. Edited by
David Berry.
Thanks to the police departments that shared
information on their stop recording practices,
and to the officers and others interviewed about
their experiences.
Copyright © 2020 Open Society Foundations
This publication is available as a PDF on the
Open Society Foundations website under a
Creative Commons license that allows copying
and distributing the publication, only in its
entirety, as long as it is attributed to the Open
Society Foundations and used for noncommercial
educational or public policy purposes. Photographs
may not be used separately from the publication.
Published by:
Open Society Foundations
224 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
USA
www.OpenSocietyFoundations.org
For more information contact:
Rebekah Delsol
Rebekah.Delsol@OpenSocietyFoundations.org
Cover design and layout by Ahlgrim Design Group
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2 Executive summary and recommendations
10 1. Introduction
• Recording as ‘real’ police work
• Assessing accountability, bureaucracy, and compliance
• Methodology
• Overview of the report
15 2. Origins and development of recording in England and Wales,
the United States, and elsewhere
• Recording practices in England and Wales
• Recording practices in the United States
• Recording practices in other jurisdictions
23 3. What data needs to be collected and why
• Collecting ethnic data
• Other data
• Post-stop police conduct
• Additional information for intelligence purposes
• Benchmarking and analysing stop data
36 4. Methods of recording
• Paper forms
• Dispatch radios
• Mobile devices
• Body-worn cameras/video
62 5. Policy and practice
• Resistance to reform
• Leadership
• Compliance, messaging, and training
• Procurement and software development
• Managerial and oversight value of stop data
75 6. Conclusion
78 7. Appendices
Appendix 1: Resources on data collection
Appendix 2: Sample stop forms
84 Endnotes
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
Every day, police officers in jurisdictions around the world conduct thousands of
stops, identity checks, and searches. Police stops are notoriously imbalanced: officers
experience them as routine, but people who are stopped find the experience can be
embarrassing, intrusive, and frightening. And those who experience repeated encounters
with the police may develop concerns about bias, overly-aressive law enforcement, and
the targeting of certain communities or groups. Despite the frequency and importance of
these police-initiated contacts, police generally collect little data on their stops. Police
legitimacy is inextricably linked to the manner in which officers use their powers and
whether people perceive this manner as fair, reasonable, and transparent. Today, an
increasing number of police departments are starting to record their use of stops, identity
checks, and searches in order to monitor and track disproportionate impacts and to
assess the stops’ effectiveness.
Recording police stops and measuring their effectiveness is complex. Recording stop
data generally requires the introduction of new data collection systems because many
existing systems are not designed to generate statistical data or to support analysis and
conversations with local communities.
Introducing the recording of stop data typically provokes resistance from police officers
who feel that their professionalism is being questioned, and who worry about increasing
bureaucratic burdens. But at the same time, recording only takes a matter of minutes;
some bureaucracy is necessary to ensure that police are accountable, effective, and
transparent; and establishing positive community relations, promoting accountability, and
establishing legitimacy are part of ‘real’ police work.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
3
This report sets out what data officers should record regarding police stops. It examines
three techniques for recording police stops—paper forms, radio dispatch systems, and
mobile systems—and notes the limitations of body-worn cameras (BWCs) as a means for
capturing stop data. Finally, this report reviews experiences in implementing recording
practices, including overcoming resistance, and offers recommendations for good
practices. It is based on interviews with 35 people, over half of whom are current police
officers, involved in the recording of stops across a range of countries. In summary, this
report shows that properly recording police stops need not be burdensome, and can be
used to improve police efficiency and police-community relations.
In general, stop forms collect the following information:
• Personal information on the person stopped (name, age, gender, address, identity
card number where applicable).
• Vehicle registration.
• Ethnicity (and/or nationality).
• Name or badge number and unit/station of the officer conducting the stop.
• Time, date, and place of stop.
• Law or specific legal power used.
• Individualized grounds for suspicion (reason for the stop).
• Object (for searches: what are the officers looking for).
• Outcome of the stop (no action / search / warning / fine / arrest).
• Length of the stop.
• Extent of any search (e.g. is it a cursory pat down, more thorough search, or an
intimate body search / “strip-search”).
• Use of force (e.g. handcuffing, restraint, pepper spray) during the encounter.
• Additional information on specific situations (e.g. stops of several persons or
an incident, descriptions of clothing, other information that might be useful for
intelligence purposes).
This basic data set enables analysis for multiple purposes, all of which can benefit the
fairness and efficiency of policing, and some of which may provide additional inputs for
intelligence, operational, and management purposes.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
4
“ With regards to paper records, it’s cheaper straight o, you are not reliant
on IT. Ocers are used to pen and paper, lling out forms… the potential
downside is that they won’t be completed properly. They will miss boxes …
because this is a brand new way of doing stu, it’s not just a small change….
It’s bringing in a mental shift to start recording in a dierent way. As a starter,
if you don’t have mobile devices, paper will work well.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
METHODS OF RECORDING
Paper forms
Historically, officers have recorded their stops on paper forms. This simple
means of data collection is familiar to the police, who typically use paper
forms for issuing fines and citations. Each officer carries a pad of stop-
search forms, and completes one after conducting the stop. The form
used in England and Wales consists of a front sheet and a yellow carbon
copy given to the person stopped and/or searched. It generally takes officers 3-5 minutes
to fill out the form. Officers submit their completed forms to their supervisors for review,
after which the information is entered onto an electronic database, usually by police
administrative staff or with electronic scanning equipment.
Strengths:
Easy to complete: officers are used
to filling in forms
The person stopped receives a
complete record of the stop at
the time, providing immediate
accountability
Affordable: stop forms can be
introduced without significant
financial investment in expensive
equipment
Easy for supervisors to review
Weaknesses:
Officers and the public may view
paper forms as old-fashioned
Requires double data entry, first to
complete the form and then enter
the information into the database
Poor handwriting can cause
inaccuracies in data entry
No geo-coding for location to
facilitate accurate mapping of stop
activity
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
5
Dispatch radios
The use of police radios and computer-aided dispatch systems to record
stops is fairly well-established in the United States, largely because it
eliminates the need for officers to complete paper forms and builds on
existing communications practices. When conducting a stop, the officer
contacts the control centre by radio and verbally relays required data for
the operator to record directly into the electronic database. The control room operator
gives the officer a unique reference for the stop record, which the officer writes on a
paper receipt and provides to the person stopped. The person can use that reference
number to obtain the full record, either online or through a request to the local police
station. It takes 2-4 minutes for officers to relay information, although there can be delays
in getting through to the dispatch centre before recording can start. An electronic stop
record is emailed to the supervisor for review.
“ We did a survey with sta [about computer-aided stop records]. I think it was
94% of sta said they thought it was a signicant improvement and they
liked it. I mean, it’s taken a 10-minute process down to two to three minutes.
It involves very little work for them. It’s easy, it’s ecient, it takes other work
away. So the user satisfaction of it is high…. Initially, [control room sta ] were
concerned about it in terms of demand. But if you’re doing a person’s check
and you’re using the information you’ve already got on your system, the large
part of the work is already done for them. And we’re not actually asking them
to record that much extra work. So there is extra work in it for [ocers], but
the benets outweigh the cost and demands.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Strengths:
Reduced bureaucracy (compared to
paper forms)
Easy integration with existing police
systems, which require officers to
call in their stops to log activity and
for safety reasons
Can integrate on-the-spot
supervision
Control room checks encourage
compliance
Weaknesses:
No full record for the person
stopped
Inconsistencies in data-entry as
information is relayed to and then
entered by control room staff
Can overload dispatch systems,
leading to delays and longer stops
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
6
“ Ocers love the tablets and handhelds because it promotes professionalism
and eciency. They don’t have to type things up when they get back into the
station and it looks more professional. The technolog is changing the way
people working—ocers are spending more time on the streets.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Mobile devices
The proliferation of mobile device technology (MDT) has created new
possibilities for the recording of police stop-searches. The use of MDTs
in police vehicles is well-established in the United States, and officers on
foot increasingly use mobile devices. The officer is issued a mobile phone
or tablet with a stop recording application. The process of completing the
online form generally takes 2-3 minutes. Once the form is completed and submitted, it
automatically populates a centrally held database. The system provides the officer with
a unique reference for the stop record, which the officer writes on a paper receipt for the
person stopped. The officer’s supervisor receives a notification to review submitted forms.
Strengths:
Officers view it as modern
Easy to use
Automatic data entry directly onto
the database, no double entry
Automatic geo-coding to support
mapping of stop activity
Built-in supervision options
Integration with other department
software
Weaknesses:
No full record for person stopped
Potentially significant financial and
start-up costs
Limits direct communication with
person stopped
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
7
Body-worn cameras / video
Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are small video and audio recording devices
designed to attach to a police officer’s uniform. The use of body-worn
video (BWV) to record police-initiated encounters is a relatively recent
development that is rapidly becoming more popular. Department policies
differ greatly on matters of when the cameras should be turned on and
what types of incidents officers are required to capture. At the end of the shift, officers
upload the video footage onto the force system, and may mark individual incidents for
evidentiary or other value. While video footage provides a detailed, contemporaneous
account of an incident, it does not generate quantitative data necessary to create
statistics and analyse patterns of stop practice. BWC video cannot be assumed to be
objective, as it suffers from perspective bias, has the potential for manipulation, and any
interpretation of the footage is subjective. Cameras do not preclude the need to use other
forms to produce statistics and to provide those stopped with a record.
“The stop form takes you two minutes to ll out; watching a video will probably take
30-40 minutes to go through to identify when on the footage the stops are. And at no
point have you got the ocer’s grounds [for the stop]. Has the video captured what
the person was saying? Is the camera 100 percent working? If there is a slight fault
in it and the microphone is not operating, I cannot hear the name, the reasons, the
grounds. BWV is supporting evidence. It supports, it does not replace stop recording.
It has no idea what’s going on in your mind.… The camera is there to record actions
in the same way a paper form would but a paper form is more accurate and the
camera denitely can’t replace forms because, when can a camera smell cannabis?”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Strengths:
Provides a contemporaneous
account of contact
Assists in resolving complaints
May enhance civility in encounters
May support training
Weaknesses:
Does not record quantitative stop
data
No record for person stopped
Risks of perspective bias
Cost, data storage requirements
Data editing for privacy required
prior to release
Regulation is required to address
BWV issues
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
8
IMPLEMENTATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Recording police stops poses challenges beyond the technicalities of creating the right
record. These challenges are rooted in both human and systemic factors. Foremost
among the human challenges is officers’ resistance to change. Resistance to recording
stops is a recurring theme in this study, and interviewees emphasised the importance of
police leadership, messaging, and the inclusion of officers of all levels in the design and
implementation process as key factors in overcoming resistance. Systemic factors relate
to the infrastructure required to create, store, and use stop records for their intended
purpose, including questions about procurement, software development, the role of
corporate interests, and important cost considerations.
Concerns about police bias are driving the trend towards recording stops, and research
shows that the public, and particularly ethnic minority communities, value stop
recording as a means of enhancing accountability. Stop recording, and particularly the
recording of ethnic data, remains controversial in many settings, and it is essential that
the introduction of these practices reflects community as well as police concerns and
input into the development and design processes. Systems must be rooted in a solid
understanding of specific community concerns if they are to respond to those concerns.
For example, in jurisdictions where there are concerns about bias in stop practices, stop
data collection systems that do not collect ethnic data risk further exacerbating mistrust.
Yet the collection of personal data, particularly ethnic data, is complex and must be
negotiated with local communities to respect the right to self-identification, meet national
data protection standards, and build public confidence in the data collection process.
Simply making a record of police stops does little to address potential problems; the value
depends on what departments do with the resulting information. Records can improve
supervisors’ understanding of how their individual officers are using stops, and can
provide managers with valuable information for operational and strategic decisions about
resource allocation and choice of tactics. The data—in the form of anonymized statistics—
must also be shared with the public if it is to build trust in and the legitimacy of police.
In practice, external accountability is often framed in corporate terms, whereby police
simply put out general statistical information with little meaningful analysis or exchange
about what that data means, or without any avenues to incorporate community feedback
into police management and practices. Ideally, stop data should be used as the basis
for a discussion of local policing practices and priorities. Several police agencies have
developed innovative review panels that allow members of the public to use stop data to
consider how officers are using stops and, in some cases, to assess individual records to
review the quality of specific stops.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
9
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. All police departments should collect data on their use of identity checks, stops,
and searches. Data collection is essential in order to monitor and track disproportionate
impacts and assess the effectiveness with which these powers are used. The collection
of such data also provides a useful management tool for police leadership.
2. Systems for the collection, analysis, and storage of stop data should be designed
to include safeguards sufficient to comply with national and regional data
protection standards.
3. Systems for collecting stop data should be carefully analysed to ensure they respond
to local context and concerns and make certain that any system weaknesses are
understood and explicitly compensated for in the design and adoption process.
Considerations around accountability (‘on-the-spot,’ supervisory, or corporate),
bureaucracy and compliance should be factored in from the beginning of the
design process. Procedural justice insights should inform design and adoption, with
consideration given to transparency, voice, neutrality, consistency, and impartiality.
4. The collection of statistical data on police stop-searches and ethnicity is essential
to determine whether, where, and why ethnic profiling is occurring and support
measures to reduce it. Detecting and monitoring ethnic profiling require anonymized
ethnic statistics that allow for comparison of minority and majority groups’ experiences
of policing.
5. Ethnic data categories must be negotiated with local communities to respect the
right to self-identification and build public confidence in the data collection process.
6. Stop data collection systems should include the following data categories at a
minimum, to allow for meaningful analysis of ethnic disparities and to manage the
fair and effective use of police powers: personal information/vehicle registration,
ethnicity (self-defined or officer-perceived), the grounds/reasons for the stop (in free
text), the law used, the outcome of the stop, officer name or identification number, and
time, date, and place of stop. Analysis can be enhanced by including further factors
that might indicate any disparities in post-stop treatment such as length of the stop,
extent of any follow-on search, and whether force was used during the encounter.
7. A full record of the stop form should be made available—as easily and rapidly as
possible—to the person stopped.
8. Transparency around the data collection process and all data collected is
essential to support police legitimacy. Anonymised statistics based on the stop
data collected should be released in full to the public at regular intervals. The raw,
anonymised, complete data sets should also be released to allow for independent and
academic analysis that can increase public trust and confidence.
9. Police departments should engage with the public around stop data to build
dialogue, and shift practices to gain greater community support and reflect
community priorities.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
10
1. INTRODUCTION
RECORDING AS ‘REAL’ POLICE WORK
The two most common forms of police contact with the public are calls for service
(through emergency calls or other assistance lines) and when an officer decides to stop
someone because he suspects that person may be breaking the law. For a police officer,
conducting a stop is a routine matter and something she may do multiple times a day. But
for the member of the public, being stopped by a police officer is generally an unusual and
memorable event, regardless of how professionally the officer behaves. Police stops are
typically conducted in public, often in plain sight of passers-by or neighbours; they can be
embarrassing, even humiliating or frightening for the person who is stopped, especially if
the stop proceeds to a pat-down (frisk) or search, both of which are highly intrusive and
demeaning procedures for the person undergoing them. Despite the frequency of these
encounters and increasing complaints about bias with respect to who is most frequently
subject to police stops, there is little data on police stops collected globally.
Raising concerns about bias in police stops, a growing body of evidence in recent years
has pointed to extensive bias in policing in countries across Europe. Additionally, research
shows that biased or unfair profiling erodes trust in police and undermines police
efficiency. Multiple studies have found that judgements about fairness and procedural
justice shape people’s assessments of police. In assessing what constitutes fairness, the
literature points to the importance of consistency, impartiality, neutrality, and the ability
of those affected by a decision to have a voice and be represented.
1
Research in the
United States and the United Kingdom finds that public concerns about police stops are
particularly focused on unfair targeting of people from black and minority ethnic groups.
2
Police departments have begun to record their use of identity check or stop powers,
and subsequent searches, in order to monitor and track disproportionate impacts and
to assess the effectiveness with which officers use these powers. Stop data recording
generally requires the introduction of new data collection systems because existing
systems are rarely designed to generate statistical data or to support analysis. Where
stops are recorded, it is often hard to search beyond individual record checks and link
to any information on outcomes. Existing systems were designed around corporate
interests, with little or no support for public accountability purposes. The resulting data
is frequently only made public as total numbers of stops conducted by police per year,
lacking the disaregation to provide meaningful insights into patterns of policing.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
11
Introducing stop data recording typically provokes resistance. Police, like many
professionals, are averse to paperwork. Calls for police to be free from ‘unnecessary’
bureaucracy so they can get on with the ‘real’ job of fighting crime are rhetorically
powerful and act as a barrier to the recording of police stops.
3
Such resistance has
been challenged on the basis that recording only takes a matter of minutes; that
some bureaucracy is necessary to ensure that police are accountable, effective, and
transparent; and that establishing positive community relations, building trust and
confidence, promoting accountability, and establishing legitimacy is ‘real police work’.
4
From a practical policing perspective, perceptions of fairness matter because they help to
elicit consent from the public by generating a sense of legitimacy. If members of the public
believe the police are legitimate and operate fairly, they are more likely to feel personally
obliged to obey officers even if they disagree with the specifics of the order.
5
Fairness
encourages the idea that citizens and the police are ‘on the same side’,
6
while unfair
treatment communicates division, social denigration, and exclusion, fostering an ‘us and
them’ dynamic that reduces trust and undermines legitimacy.
7
Securing cooperation and
compliance through a strong sense of legitimacy is not only ethically desirable, but also
more cost effective and ultimately more lasting than compliance secured through force.
8
The common construction of bureaucracy as a burden locates the provision of
accountability outside of core policing activities and may cast efforts to improve
accountability as hostile attempts to limit officer discretion in ways that interfere with
their ability to fulfil their ‘real’ mandate. Bureaucratic procedures aimed at ensuring high
standards of officer conduct cannot be split from the ‘real’ work of fighting crime; one
is a corollary of the other. Recording police stops can be used to promote some of what
procedural justice demands, particularly if the subject of the stop receives a copy of the
record, which alleviates some of the public’s anxieties about such encounters.
Stone and Pettigrew note that providing a clear reason for the stop can ease anxieties
about police stops.
9
Where no such reason was given, people felt uncomfortable and
victimised; but where a reason was provided, and it was thought to be genuine, people
felt happier and believed the police were just doing their job in stopping them. They also
found that monitoring of the information collected on the record of a police stop had
an impact. People felt there could be little accountability without regular monitoring of
stop-searches and sharing of data with the general public. Recording was also seen as
enhancing accountability by creating possibilities for making complaints.
A study carried out in the U.K. assessed the recommendation that stop and search
recording should be extended to cover stops that do not lead to a search, including ‘stop
and account’ (those stops in which officers only ask people to account for their presence or
activity). This study confirmed that, for the general public, the main advantage of recording
was in detailing the reason for the stop.
10
The study also showed that the form enabled
people to prove they had been stopped, supporting potential complaints (other studies
have found that complaints do not necessarily rise as a result of recording
11
), and, providing
a receipt at the time of the stop could increase perceptions of openness and transparency.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
12
ASSESSING ACCOUNTABILITY, BUREAUCRACY,
AND COMPLIANCE
The recording of police stops raises a range of issues that can be summarised using the
following ABeC framework:
• Accountability: Various forms of accountability can be realised by recording police
stops. The person stopped may receive a copy of the form at the time of the stop
(‘on-the-spot’ accountability) or later if requested. Supervising officers may use the
record to assess the decisions made by officers under their command (supervisory
accountability). Records may also be collated to produce statistics that can be used for
internal and external monitoring purposes (corporate accountability).
• Bureaucracy and efficiency: Concerns about the bureaucracy involved in recording
police stops have been a significant source of both resistance and innovation.
Objections to unnecessary paper work have acted as a brake on recording practices,
but have also been one of the main drivers for technological solutions.
12
Bureaucratic
considerations are part of a broader set of concerns about efficiency, which
include convenience to officers, speed, accuracy, data-coverage, financial cost, and
procurement.
• Compliance: Police organisations often resist reforms and are reluctant to record
stops.
13
While such resistance frequently focuses on concerns about unnecessary
bureaucracy, it also draws on wider judgements about what constitutes ‘real’ police
work. Objections to bureaucracy are often grounded in trepidations about how the
data will be used. Police rarely object to bureaucracy that is geared towards enhancing
their crime-fighting capacity, and the idea that recording is not ‘real’ police work
reflects a preference for action-oriented policing.
14
Stop data collection systems can be
designed to monitor and encourage officer compliance.
This report examines different methods of recording police stops, identity checks,
and stop-searches practices, analysing the relative costs and benefits of three main
techniques: (1) paper forms; (2) radio dispatch systems; and (3) mobile (technology)
devices. The report also reviews the limitations of body-worn cameras as a device for
recording police stops.
Each data recording method varies in terms of officer experience, data entry requirements
and accuracy, supervisory value, geo-coding and mapping, public experience, and cost.
Each method scores well in some respects, but weakly in others, and trade-offs may be
required. Using the ABeC framework to assess different options makes it clear that there
is no one perfect system for recording police stops. Different methods have different
strengths and weaknesses and are suited to different applications. Much will depend on
the precise reasons for recording, the broader policing context in which recording takes
place, and the equipment and resources that are available. What might be efficient for
the police organisation as a whole may not be efficient for front-line officers, and what
might be convenient for front-line officers may not be suitable for those who are stopped.
While some police agencies may be content with a single method of recording, others may
decide that the best approach is to employ more than one method.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
13
METHODOLOGY
This report assesses four different options for recording police stop-searches (paper
forms, dispatch radios, mobile devices, and body-worn cameras/video) based on practical
experience with their use across a range of jurisdictions. The analysis is based on semi-
structured interviews with 35 people involved in the recording of police stops in seven
different countries. The majority of the interviews were conducted in 2014-2015, with a
second wave of interviews conducted in 2017-2018 to assess how the recording practices
had developed over time. Approximately half of those interviewed were police officers with
responsibility for strategic development and/or oversight of day-to-day recording practices
in their agency. The remaining interviewees included police officers and government
officials involved in policy development and oversight of police practice at a national
level, as well as academics and other members of civil society. Quotes have not been
attributed to individuals to maintain their confidentiality and anonymity. The bulk of the
data-collection was conducted in England and Wales because stop-search recording is
well-established there and the police are in the midst of adopting technological recording,
providing an opportunity to study these recording tools and their implementation.
Additional information was also gathered from police officers and other experts in Austria,
Hungary, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States.
This report is the first part of a three-part series looking at different elements of stop data
collection, analysis, and community engagement using stop data. The other papers are:
• Toolkit for the Analysis of Police Identifications: A guide to the practical analysis
of police stop data in PIPE sites and beyond (2017). Using data from the Spanish
Programa para la Identificación Policial Eficaz (PIPE), this toolkit explains how to
analyse stop data, focusing on quantitative data analysis for pattern identification;
provides questions to guide reflection and interpret the reasons for any troubling
patterns identified; and offers considerations on how to develop and implement
responses. The guide focuses on three key dimensions of police identification activity:
frequency, disproportionality affecting minority ethnic groups, and effectiveness. It
also explains four bases for comparison that may shed light on whether problems are
persistent, which policing activities are generating disparities, and whether problems
arise within the police organisation and/or in specific neighbourhoods. The toolkit was
created in partnership with the Plataforma por la Gestión Policial de la Diversidad to
support data analysis of stop data collected in Spain. It has been piloted at trainings
with police and community representatives. It will be useful for any jurisdiction where
stop data is collected.
• Regulating Police Stop and Search: An Evaluation of the Reasonable Grounds
Panel (2019). The Reasonable Grounds Panel of the Northamptonshire Police is an
innovative approach to regulating police use of stop and search powers. The panel
engages the public directly in examining whether these powers are being used lawfully
and in initiating corrective action in cases where officers fail to meet legal grounds
for a stop. While designed in and for a specific jurisdiction, the Reasonable Grounds
Panel has broader implications. Many current debates about what kind of policing is
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
14
consistent with democratic principles are framed in terms of values including trust,
justice, and legitimacy. The panel operationalises these ideas and provides a practical
template for regulating the use of police power, particularly where there are concerns
about discretion and fairness.
OVERVIEW OF THE REPORT
This report first discusses the origins and development of recording in the United Kingdom,
the United States, and elsewhere (section 2). Section 3 examines what data needs to be
captured and why. Section 4 addresses the technicalities of how to record police stops
through each of four methods, and closes with a chart comparing the relative strengths and
weaknesses of each. This is followed by section 5, which discusses broader issues including
police leadership, officer resistance, procurement, software design, and development.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
15
2. ORIGINS AND
DEVELOPMENT OF
RECORDING IN ENGLAND
AND WALES, THE UNITED
STATES, AND ELSEWHERE
Both U.K. and U.S. police departments began recording police stops because communities
of colour alleged that police were practicing ethnic profiling. The development of stop
recording in each country diverges in important ways, with the United Kingdom from the
start adopting national statutory requirements, while civil rights litigation and occasionally
federal intervention in some of the country’s hugely diverse 18,000 state and local police
departments has generally driven recording in the United States. The law in England
and Wales has always included a focus on both accountability to the person stopped
and corporate management, while in the United States recording has often been court-
ordered, temporary, and characterised by limited public or managerial engagement.
Recording practices developed in England and Wales and the United States have provided
a template for the development of recording mechanisms in other jurisdictions in
continental Europe, Australasia, and Latin America.
RECORDING PRACTICES IN ENGLAND AND WALES
Police in England and Wales are required to record ‘stop and search’ (often shortened to
‘stop-search’) under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE). This legislation
was introduced in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots and the subsequent inquiry led
by Lord Scarman, which described the riots as ‘essentially an outburst of anger and
resentment by young black people’ at police tactics.
15
The Scarman Report highlighted
the disproportionate impact of stop and search on black and minority ethnic groups and
lack of community support for police tactics. While the report noted some problematic
individual officer behaviour, it focused more on the role of ‘consent’
16
arguing that in
Brixton the police had lost the consent of the people to be policed through their use of
‘unimaginative and inflexible’ police tactics,
17
and a general failure to build relations with
local communities. The report’s recommendations focused on rebuilding consent through
greater consultation and improved accountability.
The Scarman Report had a major influence on the development of PACE, which one
expert called ‘the single most significant landmark in the modern development of police
powers’.
18
PACE created a new national stop and search power alongside safeguards
governing its use, set out in a code of practice.
19
PACE Code A clearly defines stop and
search as a mainly investigative power that enables officers to allay or confirm suspicions
about individuals, particularly whether they are carrying stolen or prohibited articles,
without exercising their power of arrest. The governing principles emphasise that stop and
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
16
search must be used fairly, responsibly, with respect, and without unlawful discrimination.
Subsequent revisions incorporated new non-discrimination norms, notably the Equality
Act 2010, which creates a positive obligation to ‘have due regard to the need to eliminate
unlawful discrimination’ and to ‘advance equality of opportunity’.
20
Finally, Code A
specifies that officers must have ‘reasonable grounds for suspicion’ to stop and search;
specifying that this legal standard requires an ‘objective basis for that suspicion… so that
a reasonable person would be entitled to reach the same conclusion based on the same
facts and information and/or intelligence’.
21
The requirement for ‘reasonable grounds’ was designed to guard against discrimination and
to build the consent of the community. PACE Code A specifies that age, race, religion, or any
other ‘protected characteristic’ cannot be used alone or in combination with any other factor
as the reason for a stop and search. Code A insists that: ‘All police officers must recognise
that searches are more likely to be effective [and] legitimate and secure public confidence
when their reasonable grounds for suspicion are based on a range of objective factors’.
22
Standards are reinforced through a series of duties to inform and monitor the use of
stop-search powers. Crucially, front-line officers must take ‘reasonable steps’ to inform
the person searched of the officers’ name and police station, the legal power that the
officer is exercising, the purpose of the search, and the grounds for it. Officers also have a
general duty to make a record of the search, which conveys much of this information, and
provide it to the person searched.
The stop record must always include the self-defined ethnicity of the person subject to
the search and, if different, their ethnicity as perceived by the officer carrying out the
search; the date, time, and place of the search; the object of the search; the grounds for
suspicion (except for exceptional powers that do not require reasonable grounds); and the
identity of the searching officer. Until fairly recently, officers were also required to ask for
the name, address, and date of birth of the person searched, though the person stopped
had no obligation to provide this information, and many police departments continue
to include these fields even though the requirement was removed in 2011. The record of
the grounds ‘must, briefly but informatively, explain the reason for suspecting the person
concerned, by reference to information and/or intelligence about, or in some specific
behaviour by, the person concerned’ (para. 4.6). In practice, this requirement cannot be
fulfilled through the use of tick boxes alone, but requires a free text entry.
As well as facilitating on-the-spot accountability to the person stopped and searched,
PACE creates obligations for supervisory oversight and corporate accountability.
Supervising and senior officers are required to monitor the use of stop-search, taking
action where necessary to ensure compliance with the regulations. Supervisors must
examine whether the records reveal any trends or patterns which give cause for concern
and, if they do, take appropriate action. Senior officers with area or department-wide
responsibilities are required to monitor the use of stop-search and, where necessary,
take action at the relevant level. The code of practice requires the compilation of
comprehensive statistical records of stop-searches at force, area, and local level,
identifying and investigating any apparent disproportionate use of the powers, to support
supervision and monitoring. Finally, the code requires transparency and community
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
17
consultation: ‘In order to promote public confidence in the use of the powers, forces, in
consultation with police and crime commissioners’, are required to ‘make arrangements
for the records to be scrutinised by representatives of the community, and to explain the
use of the powers at a local level’.
23
The recording of stop-search in England and Wales has traditionally been on paper forms,
but this approach has been largely displaced as part of a government-led push towards
technological data-capture. In 2014, then-Home Secretary Theresa May announced that
stop and search data would be added to the government’s police portal, a website that
shares data on crime rates and police activities at a local level.
24
This initiative was part
of a broader reform package designed to address regulatory failings exposed following
major public disorder in the summer of 2011. As in Brixton, the August 2011 riots again
reflected anger over the misuse of stop-search, and the official inspection uncovered
‘alarming’ evidence of non-compliance with the law, with more than a quarter of inspected
stop-search records failing to meet reasonable grounds, and ‘disturbingly’ low levels of
supervision.
25
When announcing the reforms, May emphasised that people from black
or minority ethnic backgrounds were up to seven times more likely to be stopped and
searched by the police than white people, and that only about ten per cent of stops of
people of any race result in an arrest. Insisting that the misuse of stop and search is
hugely damaging to the relationship between the police and the public, May said the
police would implement mapping ‘in order to improve transparency and accountability’.
26
As accurate mapping requires a specific geocode, this requirement has led police
departments in England and Wales to adopt technological data-capture.
RECORDING PRACTICES IN THE UNITED STATES
The U.S. experience of recording police stops is both similar to and different from that in
England and Wales. Concerns about racial discrimination have been a key driver in both
countries and Lord Scarman’s recommendations drew heavily on the American response
to major U.S. riots in the 1960s.
27
Vehicle stops and ‘stop, question and frisk’ (SQF) are
common American police tactics and are associated with long-standing concerns about
discrimination. Federal authority over policing is limited, with no national legislation
requiring stop recording.
28
Standards for police work conducted by state and local
departments are primarily set out in state statutes. State regulation must reflect the case
law of the Supreme Court, which has created key national standards on police stops
powers, but has not required recording of stops.
29
The most referenced Supreme Court ruling governing the use of stop and frisk is Terry v.
Ohio (1968)
30
in which the Court assessed the constitutionality of stop and frisk under
the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (prohibiting unlawful search and seizure).
The Court acknowledged that this tactic had been used in a racially discriminatory way,
and held that police may conduct a stop (a temporary detention for investigation) and
frisk (a cursory pat down of the outer clothing for the purposes of detecting weapons) on
the basis of ‘reasonable suspicion’ rather than the higher ‘probable cause’ standard. In
defining reasonable suspicion, the Court stated that an officer must be able to articulate
the factual basis for suspicion.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
18
Both civil rights litigation and federal interventions based on the 1994 Federal Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act have driven the development of recording
practices in the United States. Early legal cases concerned vehicle stops, often on state
highways (State v. Pedro Soto, 1996
31
, Wilkins v. Maryland State Police, 1993
32
). The
Wilkins case yielded a court-ordered requirement that Maryland State Police should
collect and release stop data.
33
This set a model for much subsequent litigation and court-
ordered data collection, although often for limited time periods.
Concern over police stops of pedestrians emerged in New York City during the 1990s
as the New York Police Department (NYPD) implemented the ‘broken windows’ law
enforcement theory, which advises strict enforcement of laws against minor offences
through extensive use of stop powers.
34
In 1999, spurred by the fatal police shooting of
Amadou Diallo, the Office of the Attorney General investigated the use of stop and frisk
amid deep public concerns about its impact upon minority communities. Officers in New
York have been required to record stop and frisk activity since 1986. The NYPD’s UF-250
form covers the name, age, gender, physical description, and race of the person stopped
as well as the name, identification number, and command of the officer who performed
the stop. This form was intended to be used for supervisory purposes and, according
to training materials, ‘to protect the officer and the Department from allegations of
PACE Code A recording requirement for searches that
do not result in an arrest:
4.1 When an officer carries out a search in the exercise of any power to which this Code applies and
the search does not result in the person searched or person in charge of the vehicle searched
being arrested and taken to a police station, a record must be made of it, electronically or on
paper, unless there are exceptional circumstances which make this wholly impracticable (e.g. in
situations involving public disorder or when the recording officer’s presence is urgently required
elsewhere). If a record is to be made, the officer carrying out the search must make the record
on the spot unless this is not practicable, in which case, the officer must make the record as
soon as practicable after the search is completed.
4.2 If the record is made at the time, the person who has been searched or who is in charge of the
vehicle that has been searched must be asked if they want a copy and if they do, they must be
given immediately, either:
• a copy of the record; or
• a receipt which explains how they can obtain a copy of the full record or access to an
electronic copy of the record.
4.2A An officer is not required to provide a copy of the full record or a receipt at the time if they are
called to an incident of higher priority.
Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office.
Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems: Promising Practices and
Lessons Learned, Washington: U/S. Department of Justice.
BASED ON THE EXPERIENCE OF AGENCIES
THAT COLLECT DATA, THE UNITED STATES
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE OUTLINED THE
BENEFITS OF A WELL-PLANNED TRAFFIC-STOP
DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM:
Police forces committed
to improving legitimacy
find that measurement of
police activity is a critical
first step toward effective
management.
In contrast to a rigid set
of guidelines, the data
collection approach
allows a fluid and local
determination of how to
deploy law enforcement
resources.
Data collection sends a
clear message that racial
profiling is inconsistent
with effective policing and
equal protection.
The process of collecting
data begins to change
behaviour of line officers
and supervisors.
Having available data
moves the conversation
within the community
away from rhetoric
and accusations to a
discussion about the
effective deployment of
police resources.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
19
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
20
police misconduct’.
35
The Attorney General’s report included the first comprehensive
empirical analysis of NYPD stop and frisk practices finding that minorities, particularly
black Americans, were stopped at a higher rate than whites, and differences in offending
behaviour could not explain these disparities.
36
In 1994, President Bill Clinton directed federal agencies to begin gathering data to address
concerns about racial profiling in the context of traffic stops, and the 1994 Crime Act
empowered the Civil Rights Bureau in the Department of Justice (DOJ) to intervene in
state and local law enforcement when there is evidence of a pattern of practice that
violates constitutional civil rights. DOJ published guidance on racial profiling data
collection systems to encourage ‘voluntary’ compliance.
37
Hundreds of jurisdictions began
to organise data-collection efforts and some states introduced legislation requiring police
agencies to record and make public the racial and ethnic pattern of their traffic stops.
Today about half the states mandate stop data collection, but some of these laws are
temporary. Individual departments may also change their practices with turnover in police
chiefs or elected authorities and city managers.
The focus on pedestrian stops and SQF has also expanded. For a long time the NYPD
seemed to be the only U.S. police agency that regularly collected comprehensive data on
pedestrian stops, but a recent survey found that more than 20 of the 55 largest police
departments in the country were doing so.
38
While four of these departments were
required to collect the data as a result of agreements with the DOJ Civil Rights Bureau or
lawsuits brought by private citizens and non-governmental organisations, all of the others
did so as a result of internal departmental policy. The vast majority of departments that
record stop and frisk data include the ethnicity of the person stopped and frisked as well
as the reasons for and location of the stop.
Although it is difficult to generalize about recording practice in the United States, there
are some identifiable differences from the practice in England and Wales. Recording
in the United States is driven by the goal of providing an empirical basis for assessing
ethnic disparities and evidence of racial profiling. This focus leaves little room for using
the records to promote on-the-spot or public accountability (in an exception, the NYPD
was introducing a receipt for persons stopped at the time of finalizing this publication
39
).
Harris notes that the recording of stop and frisk has the potential to increase
transparency, but found only a minority of police departments made the data available
to the public.
40
Police resistance to releasing data, and indeed to recording stops at all,
reflects in part police concern that the data will fuel further litigation, which has indeed
happened in some jurisdictions.
The information gathered in forms also varies, and has been limited by frequent use of
pre-coded tick boxes rather than articulated grounds for conducting the stop.
41
The use of
check boxes or drop-down boxes provides only ‘the vaguest suestion of the reason’ for
the stop, in the words of an expert interviewed. The tendency not to provide on-the-spot
accountability is linked to the fairly widespread use of technological data-capture using
laptops in cars (mobile data terminals/MDTs) and dispatch radio systems. As this report
discusses in the next section, one of the disadvantages of such methods is that they do
not generate a physical record that can easily be given to the person stopped.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
21
THE STEPSS PROJECT
In January 2007, police forces and civil society worked together in pilot sites in Bulgaria, Hungary, and
Spain through the ‘Strategies for Effective Police Stop and Search’ project to monitor police use of ID
checks and searches. The project first assessed existing policy and practice, then designed forms for
recording stops, prepared and trained officers and community members on operational protocols, and
collected stop data for six months. Throughout the process, police met with community consultation
groups to share and discuss the stop data. Importantly, the project included ethnic data in the stop
forms in every jurisdiction except one in Spain that used nationality data instead.
The data showed that police in every pilot site were ethnically profiling persons of ethnic minority
and immigrant origin. Minorities and immigrants were more likely to be stopped, often more likely to
be searched, but, almost without exception, were no more likely to be found to be offending than the
majority group. In some cases, they were significantly less likely to be found offending than ethnic
majority residents.
The act of data gathering also increased the effectiveness of officers’ use of stops. In Hungary and
Spain, officers in the STEPSS project tended to make fewer stops over the period during which they
were required to record stops, but the proportion of their stops that produced an arrest or other law
enforcement outcome increased. This suests than officers are more effective when they focus
on developing clear and individualised grounds for stops, and when their supervisors hold them to
account.
In Fuenlabrada, one of the Spanish pilot sites, the police reduced the disproportionality in the rate at
which they were stopping persons of immigrant origin. They achieved a dramatic decrease in stops of
Moroccans from 9.6 times more often than Spaniards to 3.4 more often, largely because they ended
a fruitless counter-terror operation. Overall, officers conducted just over half as many stops as they
did before the pilot, while increasing the percentage of their stops that produced positive outcomes
by nearly three times. Fuenlabrada achieved these remarkable results by making systemic use of the
STEPSS data both for closer supervision of individual patrol officers and in force-wide management
of operations and personnel deployment. The data enabled them to factor disproportionate ethnic
impacts into their strategic decision-making and reduce unfair policing while enhancing efficiency.
STEPSS also resulted in the forging of new relationships between the police and community
representatives through the stops monitoring process. In Fuenlabrada, these discussions directly
helped the Municipal Police in identifying and addressing crime patterns and other community
concerns. In Hungary, where the project used regular ‘ride-alongs’ to monitor the data gathering,
the police and Roma community representatives developed new understandings and insights. One
unanticipated outcome is that one of the Roma STEPSS community participants has now joined the
police force – becoming the first Roma police officer in the county.
Open Society Justice Initiative (2009) Addressing Ethnic Profiling by Police: A Report on the Strategies for Effective Police Stop
and Search Project, New York: Open Society Institute.
Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/profiling_20090511.pdf
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
22
More broadly, the relatively limited use of stop records to promote public accountability
in the United States, compared with England and Wales, may reflect a difference in the
way the two countries construct policing. The notion of consent is central to the way
England and Wales understands policing and national regulations requiring on-the-
spot accountability as well as more general forms of public accountability reflects this.
Policing in the U.S. tends towards a more adversarial and militarized approach, shaped by
a particular history of racialized social exclusion and state-level decision-making, in which
public accountability is less central.
42
RECORDING PRACTICES IN OTHER JURISDICTIONS
Recording practices in England and Wales and the United States have provided a
template for initiatives in other jurisdictions in Europe, Australasia, and Latin America.
Longstanding concerns about ethnic profiling in police use of ID checks, stops, and
searches
43
have led to initiatives by progressive police departments to measure their
policing practices in order to be able to respond to these concerns. In 2007-8, the Justice
Initiative coordinated a pilot programme, Strategies for Effective Police Stop and Search
(STEPSS), to introduce the recording of stops in police agencies in Bulgaria, Hungary,
and Spain.
44
The British approach heavily influenced the STEPSS pilot: an introductory
conference was held in London followed by study visits to two English police departments;
the forms used for the pilot were based on those developed in England and Wales; and,
in some sites, officers were required to give a copy of the record to the person stopped. In
Spain, the Programa para la Identificación Policial Eficaz (PIPE), extended stop recording
to two more Spanish police agencies.
45
It has since been extended to six other agencies.46
In November 2018, the Madrid Municipal Police introduced a stop form pilot. Similar data
recording initiatives have been piloted in Victoria, Australia
47
; Wels, Austria; and São Paulo,
Brazil; and new initiatives are currently underway in Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and
Zurich, Switzerland. In a number of the European initiatives, ethnically-disaregated
data—which remains controversial across much of Europe—is not included in the forms,
thus severely limiting their value as a tool to address disproportionality.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
23
3. WHAT DATA NEEDS TO BE
COLLECTED AND WHY
COLLECTING ETHNIC DATA
The collection of ethnically disaregated data on law enforcement practices is essential
for enabling statistical analysis to examine stop-search patterns across population groups
and to respond to individual cases of discrimination. As Michael Rustin notes, race is
‘both an empty category and one of the most destructive and powerful forms of social
categorisation’.48 Yet race and/or ethnicity may serve as an important positive source of
self and group affirmation.49 Given the prevalence of racial stereotypes linking minority
groups to crime or violence, measuring race and ethnic status of those stopped is vital to
determine that stops are being used equitably and lawfully and to measure the impact of
procedures introduced to reduce discrimination and improve fairness. Forces that collect
data on stops but do not collect ethnic data also risk exacerbating community frustrations
as they will not be able to provide answers to concerns about ethnic profiling.
Collecting data on race and ethnicity is complex and requires consultation with local
communities around the use of ethnic categories and developing systems to meet
national data protection standards. The belief that data protection standards preclude the
collection of information on ethnicity and policing is incorrect; in fact, the European Racial
Equality Directive explicitly recognizes the use of statistical data in order to demonstrate
unequal treatment on the basis of race or ethnicity (EU Directive 2000/43/EC, Preamble,
Para. 15). European data protection law highlights the need to protect privacy and self-
identification, while allowing for the good-faith collection and dissemination of ethnic data
for legitimate purposes of public interest with safeguards in place.
50
One safeguard is to omit the storage of personal data such as name and address in stop
data. In the U.K. system, records include such information unless the person stopped
exercised the right not to give it, which is rare. The NYPD records the person’s name,
address, and ID number on the paper form or on a mobile app but these details disappear
when the record is transferred to the electronic database. This allows for aregate
statistical analysis on the dataset to look for patterns of discrimination but does not allow
the NYPD to track repeat stops of individuals that may reflect targeting or harassment.
Which ethnic categories to use and how to collect them depends on the phenomenon
being investigated. The purpose of data collection systems can differ; some may seek to
explore whether broad population groups are being stopped more, less, or equally to white
ethnic groups (i.e. is ethnic profiling taking place?), whereas others may be seeking more
in-depth exploration of policing practices across different ethnic groups. None of the
current stop-search data collection efforts record data on religion or perceived religion,
although there are concerns about religious profiling in many contexts.
51
In some contexts,
ethnic or nationality data has been used as a proxy for religion.
52
While providing some
means of assessing whether different groups may be disproportionality stopped due to
their religion, using ethnic proxies for religion will not illuminate the full extent of the
experience of stop-search across different religious communities.
Personal information on the
person stopped
Vehicle registration
Ethnicity (and/or nationality)
Name or badge number and
unit/station of the officer
conducting the stop
Time, date and place of stop
Law or specific legal power used
Individualized grounds for
suspicion (reason for the stop)
Object being searched for
Outcome of the stop
Length of the stop
Extent of any search
Use of force
Additional information on
specific situations
Stop & Search Record
12:08 PM 72%
Such as name, age, gender, address, identity card
number, where applicable.
• Supports the analysis of stop patterns by age, gender
and ethnicity.
• Personal identifiers allow for the identification and
analysis of repeat stops, which may indicate the
targeting of individuals or vehicles.
• Essential for statistical analysis to examine stop
patterns across population groups and to respond to
individual complaints of discrimination.
• Can be either officer-defined or self-defined
categories but must be developed in consultation
with local communities.
• Supports supervision and the investigation of complaints
• Allows for managers to benchmark data in comparison
to different units/ stations and to identify issues with
tasking and resources.
• Helps to identify when the stop took place and to
support the analysis of patterns over time.
• Accurate location data allows for the mapping of stop
patterns and comparison to crime pattern maps.
• Essential to determine that legal standards are met.
• Must be a free text field to require officers to articulate
specific reasons for the stop.
Such as no further action, search, warning, fine/citation
or arrest.
• Essential for determining the ‘hit rate’ or how effective
stops are.
• Allows for oversight of how long people have been
detained for the purpose of the stop.
Such as a cursory pat down, more thorough search or an
intimate body search (“strip search”)
• Essential for analysis and oversight of more
intrusive follow-up actions and an analysis of
patterns of their use.
Such as handcuffing, restraint, pepper spray or any use of
force during the stop.
• Allows for oversight of the use of forces during stops,
comparisons amongst officers and units and analysis of
patterns of use of force.
Can provide additional information for intelligence
purposes.
In general, stop forms collect the following information:
This basic data set enables analysis for multiple purposes, all of which can benefit the
fairness and efficiency of policing, and some of which may provide additional inputs
for intelligence, operational, and management purposes.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
24
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
25
Examples: Officer perceived ethnic categories and self-identified ethnicity codes
New York Police Department Unified Form 250 ethnic categories:
• White
• Black
• White Hispanic
• Black Hispanic
• Asian/Pacific Islander
Self-defined ethnicity (18+1) Group Code
United Kingdom 18+1 self-defined ethnicity codes:
1 English/Welsh/Scottish/ Northern Irish/British White
2 Irish White Irish
3 Gypsy or Irish Traveller White Other
4 Any Other White Background
5 White and Black Caribbean Mixed
6 White and Black African Mixed
7 White and Asian Mixed
8 Any Other Mixed / Multiple Ethnic Background
9 Indian Asian/ Asian British
10 Pakistani
11 Bangladeshi
12 Chinese
13 Any Other Asian Background Other Asian
14 African Black African
15 Caribbean
16 Any Other Black / African / Caribbean Background
17 Arab
18 Any Other Ethnic Group
19 Not Stated
White
Mixed,
Multi-ethnic
Groups
Black African,
Caribbean,
Black British
Asian,
Asian British
Other
Ethnic Group
Not Stated
W
M
B
A
O
O
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
26
There are two common ways to collect ethnic data on stop practices: a police officer
can ask for race/ethnicity details of the person stopped or officers can record their own
perception of a person’s ethnic appearance. In the United States, many data collection
systems rely on the officer’s perception, sometimes supported by personal information on
state identification documents, if the state lists that information. They generally use broad
identification categories.
53
The fact that many data collection initiatives are a response
to concerns about ethnic or racial profiling drives the use of officers’ perception. It is
considered unimportant whether the officer had guessed correctly the race or ethnicity of
the person stopped because the objective is to determine whether, having perceived the
driver or pedestrian as a person of colour, the officer has stopped and treated the person
fairly. Ethnic categories need to be broad enough to allow officers to make a judgement,
but still be capable of identifying problematic policing practices. Using officer-perceived
ethnicity can avoid concerns about officers’ discomfort in asking someone for their
ethnic identity, particularly during potentially tense stop encounters. It may also alleviate
concerns that asking for personal data during a stop may exacerbate a person’s sense of
intrusion.
54
However, relying on officers’ perception raises concerns as to officers’ ability to determine
accurately someone’s ethnicity and whether officers will record their actual perceptions.
Some community groups have also expressed the importance of self-identification.
55
The
U.K. data collection system uses both self-defined ethnicity and officer perception. This
allow for cross referencing between the two types of ethnic categorisation and an in-
depth data analysis of a broader range of ethnic categories. Officers ask individuals who
are stop-searched to choose an ethnic category from a list of national census categories.
The person is not required to give a response. The officer may also record their own
perception of the person’s ethnic appearance.
Some forces have used proxies for ethnicity. For example, the PIPE project works with a
number of local forces in Spain to collect stop data to examine concerns around ethnic
profiling.
56
Each data collection system is negotiated with local communities, and many
have used nationality as a proxy for ethnicity. Although this can give some measure of
ethnicity and illuminate differential treatment of migrants, many people police perceive
as different may have been born in Spain or be naturalised citizens. The policy also
potentially reifies notions of nation-states as mono-ethnic or homogeneous and could risk
alienating communities who see themselves still defined as “others” or “foreign.”
OTHER DATA
The collection of other personal data (name, age, address, identity card number, vehicle
registration) supports analysis of patterns of stops by age, gender, and (ID) race/ethnicity,
which can then be compared with the outcomes of stops, grounds for stops, and places
and times in order to assess whether those stops were appropriate or whether there are
patterns that might indicate discrimination. Personal identifiers such as name, address,
identity card number, or vehicle registration allow for an analysis of repeat stop-searches
on the same person possibly indicating targeting and harassment of that person.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
27
Data on the individual officer and unit/team conducting stop-searches enables analysis
that can support direct supervision of individuals’ as well as units’ use of their powers,
and may assist in identifying officers whose practices are clearly out of the norm (outliers)
because they are more (or less) effective or more (or less) biased. This can allow managers
to identify issues with tasking or resource allocation to particular units. Information at
both individual and unit level can be cross-referenced with additional data such as crime
rates and calls for service in the relevant unit or patrol area. It may be best to analyse
trends over time within an area as this controls for area-specific differences.
The time and location that stop-searches take place are required to examine patterns,
which again can be compared to reported crime rates to support more efficient police
resource deployment. Accurate location data allows forces to use mapping software to
map where and when stop-searches are taking place. This can then be overlaid with local
crime map data to ensure effective use of resources. Analysing the outcomes for stops by
time and place may also indicate whether other tactics might be more effective.
Detailed information on the specific reasons for suspicion is essential in order to
determine whether stops meet legal standards. Articulating clear and lawful grounds will
support any subsequent outcome flowing from the stop. Requiring officers to articulate
specific grounds has been shown to make officers more attentive and to reduce risks
of arbitrary stops. Research shows that the more reasonable and objective the officer’s
decision to conduct the stop, the less likely it is to be disproportionate.
57
Reasonable and
objective decision-making also increases the effectiveness or ‘hit rate’ of stops. Officers
should be required to provide a detailed reason for the stop in their own words, whether
in written or oral form, rather than using a code, multiple choice, or menu of options. In
efforts to reduce bureaucracy and increase the reliability of data for analysis, some police
departments have experimented with using generic categories to provide the reason
for the stop. Generic categories provide no meaningful information about the decision-
making behind the stop to allow for an assessment of reasonableness. As one officer
described, “we tried doing drop down menus. But in the age of data analysis, [you] need
more information about what [officers are] really stopping [people] for. [The] problem
with drop down menus [is] that you can make everything fit. Even with unjustified stops,
you just check a box and it looks justified” (Police officer, United States, Interview S).
Research backs up this insight that providing a credible reason is an important lever for
promoting police legitimacy.
58
Recording the object or item that officers are searching for provides an important
reminder for officers of the purpose of the search and can be compared with items found.
Recording the outcome of a stop-search is essential information to determine how
effectively the police are using their powers and resources. The outcomes listed will
depend on the national options for disposals coming out of stop-searches but may
include: an arrest, a summons, a citation/ticket, a verbal warning, or no further action.
This makes it possible to calculate the effectiveness of stops through the hit rate (the
rate at which stop-searches lead to positive outcomes) or arrest rate (the rate at which
stop-searches lead to arrest). Hit or arrest rates can be simply calculated by dividing the
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
28
number of people arrested or stopped with a positive outcome by the overall number
of people stopped. They can be compared across policing areas and ethnic and other
demographic groups. It is also important to measure whether the outcome of the
stop-search was linked to the initial reason for conducting the search. This increases
transparency by allowing for a distinction between those outcomes that are a result of
a professional judgement (i.e. the officer found what they were searching for), and those
where the item found was not what the officer was searching for, or where nothing was
found or an outcome like arrest was generated as a result of a conflictual encounter.
Recording the outcome is the most accurate test of the reasonableness of the grounds for
using stop and search powers.
A copy of the record has several benefits, namely: helping people better understand what
happened during the stop-search (particularly knowing the reason for the stop), informing
them of their rights, and providing the name of the police officer involved in the stop-
search should people want to complain.
59
CASE STUDY: HUNGARIAN STOP DATA COLLECTION
FOR STEPSS
In 2007, the Hungarian police participated in the Strategies for Effective Stop and Search (STEPSS)
project, which aimed to identify discriminatory use of ID checks. During a six-month pilot, three
police departments collected data on their officers’ use of ID checks. The project team devised a very
simple stop form and process to minimize paperwork and comply with Hungary’s strict personal data
protection laws.
The 1992 Hungarian Data Protection Act requires government agencies to treat data related to ethnic
affiliation or origin as sensitive data which can only be lawfully processed in connection with other
personal data if an act of Parliament permits or by the consent of the people it concerns. Since it
was deemed impractical for the police to ask for consent during the stop, and no act of Parliament
had occurred, police officers were not authorized by law to process data of ethnic origin during the
course of conducting ID checks. Therefore officers recorded the perceived ethnicity of people they
stopped on a separate and anonymous STEPSS form. These forms were stored separately from the
standard ID check forms that the police have a legal obligation to complete and recorded separately,
then destroyed. This meant there was no possibility of restoring a link between the race / ethnic
data and the individual with regard to whom the data have been recorded. The data therefore ceased
to be personal, and the Data Protection Commissioner and the Minority Rights Commissioner
approved the procedure.
Kádár, A., Körner, J., Moldova, Z. and Tóth, B. (2008) Control(led) Group: Final Report on the Strategies for Effective Police Stop
and Search (STEPSS) Project (Budapest: Hungarian Helsinki Committee).
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
29
POST-STOP POLICE CONDUCT
Discrimination can occur at various points during a police-initiated contact. These
include: a) the decision to stop; b) the decision to search and the extent of that search;
c) the decision on what law enforcement action to take (e.g. arrest, citation/fine); and d)
the conduct of the stop (e.g. length, language used, use of force etc.). Thus, to provide
data for management and assessments of fairness and effectiveness, monitoring should
consider the recording and analysis of the reasonableness of decision-making at each
stage. This can be done by recording the length of the stop, which allows managers to
determine if the time a person was detained for is appropriate given the specific context
and to compare detention times across ethnic groups. Recording the use of force such as
the use of handcuffs or other physical restraint during a stop-search allows for oversight
of use of force and comparisons between different officers and units and across ethnic
MONITORING THE QUALITY OF ENCOUNTERS BY
THE HERTFORDSHIRE CONSTABULARY
In 2007, the Hertfordshire Constabulary introduced stop forms that include a section to record the
quality of the encounter. At the end of a stop-search, officers were required to ask the person stopped:
Thinking about the experience of being stopped by your local police on this occasion,
which of the following do you agree with:
• I understand the reason I was stopped. Yes/No
• During the stop, I was treated professionally, respectfully and with dignity. Yes/No
The forms have a line just under these questions for the stopped person to sign to acknowledge
their answers. The inclusion of these questions creates a focus on more professional conduct
among officers. The questions (including the use of the phrase “your local police”) are also intended
to empower the public and reinforce the notion of policing as a public service. They also provide
supervisors with means to monitor officers’ completion rates and professional conduct.
Analysis of answers to these professional conduct questions showed that people were generally
most satisfied with stops that result from planned operations, probably because these are based on
intelligence and officers are briefed beforehand, enabling them to provide full explanations of why
they are conducting stops. Stops conducted in response to an incident—such as a witness reporting
“suspicious behaviour,” for example—had the lowest satisfaction ratings. This may be due to the
limited and rapidly changing information available to officers, leading to a poorer explanation of the
reasons for the stop.
Monitoring of the data showed that black people and young people were least likely to be asked
about their treatment and most likely to record negative experiences when asked. Officers who
disproportionately stop ethnic minorities were also least likely to complete the stop forms.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
30
and other demographic groups. Most jurisdictions require different levels of suspicion for
searches of different levels of intrusion. Measuring whether a search has taken place, for
what reasons, the level of intrusion (e.g. what clothing was removed and by whom) and
authorisation given allows an analysis of whether legal standards have been met.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FOR INTELLIGENCE PURPOSES
Often stop forms contain space for officers to record additional information on specific
situations (e.g. stops of several persons or an incident, descriptions of clothing, or other
information that might be useful for intelligence purposes). Cameras, of course, if used
during stops, inevitably provide information beyond what a form would provide. Depending
on what national law allows, some police departments use stop and search records to
establish who was present at a particular time and location when an incident occurs,
enabling officers to identify potential witnesses and offenders, while also ruling-out other
potential suspects. One English police department explicitly viewed the recording of stops
as a form of intelligence gathering and developed a new system to link stop and search
and intelligence databases. As one officer employed there explained:
“ The old paper records were really good for intel.… I have actually solved
robberies o the back of the intelligence that we had on the old paper records
because they were written in such a way that allowed us to capture clothing
details and other factors. So if I was looking for two people, one in a red coat,
one in a blue coat, of a certain age, certain ethnicity, in a certain area at a
certain time. Put those details into the search database and it brought up
people stopped around the place and time. Then we could get CCVT [closed
circuit television] to conrm—that’s them.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
The intelligence value of data, of course, depends on the police departments’ ability to
ensure the accuracy of the data recorded and the timeliness with which it is entered onto
the database to allow for analysis.
Some interviewees tended to downplay the intelligence value of stop-search records,
arguing that this was not their primary purpose. While emphasising the regulatory purpose
of recording, these interviewees noted that their departments encourage officers to
submit an intelligence report in addition to a stop record if they felt that a stop-search
had produced information that might prove to be useful:
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
31
“ We’d never consciously used, and don’t now use, stop and search as an
intelligence gathering tool. I mean, if you look at the purpose of stop and
search, it’s not to gather intelligence. Okay, it’s, I think, an acceptable by-
product of the process, but the principle aim is not for the police to gather data
and intelligence on individuals. So we have what we think is a decent system
for submitting, recording, accessing intelligence. So what we’re saying to cops,
if you do a stop and search and you think there’s something more needs to be
recorded than what’s on the form, submit an independent report, and that’ll
get assessed as an intelligence report, rather than a stop and search form.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
The evidentiary value of body-worn camera video is a matter of debate and has become
a focal point for competing anxieties about police stops. The private sector in the United
States advertises BWV as providing extensive evidentiary value.
60
Others find these
assertions both alarming and less than entirely persuasive. There was broad agreement
among the academic experts consulted for this report that video footage does not
constitute objective evidence. Even those who were generally supportive of cameras agreed:
“ Body-worn-cameras only give you one point of view and there’s an issue of
perspective bias. One camera facing in one direction gives you one portrayal
and this aects how people perceive things. If you record investigations
and you have one camera focused on the suspect this may give a dierent
impression than having one camera on the suspect and one on the interviewer.
That can’t help but be true in the eld as well. You will only get one perspective.
It’s so much better than no recording but you can’t ignore the fact that it’s one
perspective and has its biases.”
Academic, United States
BENCHMARKING AND ANALYSING STOP DATA
Collecting stop-search data is of little use without a meaningful analysis of that data and
a commitment to openly sharing and discussing the data collected.
61
In order to analyse
the data and determine whether stops are used in a fair, proportionate, and effective
manner, the data must be compared to a benchmark that supports the development of
appropriate comparisons.
There is often confusion as to what constitutes ethnic disproportionality and how it
is measured. One method of assessing ethnic disparities in stops is to calculate the
disproportionality ratio. This compares the rate of stop-search among black and minority
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
32
ethnic groups with that among whites. Such comparisons are based on rates of stop and
search per 1,000 people in a group: the number of stop searches per 1,000 black people
who live in an area is compared with the number of stop searches per 1,000 white people
who live in the same area. Using this approach, the 2018-2019 data for England and Wales
shows that black people were stop searched at a rate of 9.7 times and Asian people at a
rate or 2.7 times higher than those who identify as white.
62
Another method for analysing ethnic disproportionality in stop data is calculating an
odds ratio. The odds-ratio quantifies the probability that police will stop members of a
particular ethnic group as compared to other ethnic groups. Thus, the statistic can best be
understood by filling in the ratio in the following sentence, “If you are Black (or Arab), you
are x times more likely to be stopped by the police than if you were white.” For example,
a study of stops on the Paris Metro showed that a person of Arab origin was 13.24 times
more likely to be stopped than a white person in the Gare du Nord in Paris in 2008, while
a person of black origin was 6.7 times more likely to be stopped than a white person in the
same station.
63
The most commonly used benchmark, particularly for pedestrian stops, is census or
resident population data, where that includes ethnic data, as it does in the United
States, United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere, Comparing stop data to the census
data provides an overview of different ethnic groups’ overall experience of police stops
and searches
64
Census data is a broad comparator that has intuitive appeal by virtue of
being easy to understand. It can be used for benchmark data at the national, regional,
or city level and is relatively low cost. Census data allows reasonable estimates of
different ethnic groups’ overall experience of stop-search,
65
However, the residential
population may not accurately reflect the population that is available on the street to be
stop-searched because it does not take account of the transient population, changes in
population numbers that have taken place since the most recent survey, or differences
in the time that people spend in public places.
66
In response to these limitations, several
more statistically rigorous approaches have been developed to measure the ‘available
population’, meaning the group who police could stop.
In one such approach, researchers develop a picture through direct observation of who is
present in a location at specific times and thus eligible to be stopped by police, creating
benchmark data. Police stop data for the same areas and time periods is analysed against
these calculations. In the United Kingdom, several studies have found that the ethnic
composition of the available population differs markedly from that of the residential
population and that these differences go some way in accounting for the apparent
disproportionate use of stop and search against people from minority communities.
67
Intense debates around methodologies to measure available populations have arisen in
the United Kingdom. Academic commentators have argued that being available does not,
in itself, constitute sufficient grounds for a stop-search and is not a neutral criterion. The
nature of the available population is partly a function of police organisational decisions
about where and when to conduct stop-search.
68
To the extent that stop-search is
concentrated in neighbourhoods with large minority ethnic populations, members of
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
33
these groups are bound to be more ‘available’. As availability will inevitably also be tied
to structural inequalities, including unemployment, housing provision, and exclusion
from school, focusing on the available population may simply serve to legitimate the
uneven and potentially unjust use of police powers.
69
Another issue is that observational
methodologies only provide a snapshot analysis of a specific time, and stops take place
over time. But creating repeat observational benchmarks to examine trends over time
could be prohibitively costly.
Benchmarking becomes an even more complex proposition for traffic or vehicle stops.
Given that driving populations are inherently transient, particularly on motorways or
major roads, and that not every one of legal age can drive or owns a vehicle, it cannot be
assumed that local census data represents those using the roads. As with the available
population methodological approach, benchmarks have been developed through traffic
surveys which use direct observation to create a benchmark, including the ethnicity
of drivers and, in some cases, offending behaviour such as speeding, disaregated by
ethnicity. Stop data for the same road(s) can then be compared to the driver and offending
profile in the traffic survey benchmark.
70
Traffic surveys have not provoked the same
controversies as available population surveys of pedestrians, and have been accepted by
U.S. courts as a fair and accurate measure of disparities in police stop practices. However,
as with all surveys, traffic surveys are a time-specific snapshot, a significant limitation.
Other, cheaper, approaches rely on internal comparisons of stop data to identify variance
indicative of ethnic profiling. Examples include hit rate analysis
71
and ‘veil of darkness’
analysis (which is based on the understanding that officers have difficulty identifying the
race/ethnicity of drivers at night).
72
Every method has limitations, and in the United States
there has been extensive debate about the value of different approaches. One response to
the challenges of benchmarking has been to apply multiple methods, such as those used
by the U.S. state of Connecticut (see box).
73
Other jurisdictions have focused on analysis
of post-stop decision making, such as the decision to search, length and conduct of the
stop, use of force, and the outcome decision and how decisions correlate with the race/
ethnicity of the person stopped. Such analysis can identify bias in decision-making and
negates the need for benchmark data.
74
There are good reasons to seek narrower and more precise benchmarks, not least to be
fair to officers, but also to gain deeper insight into specific dynamics that can then inform
policy and operational responses. However, for residents who experience or perceive
policing as biased and unfair, the effort to narrow the benchmarks can appear to be an
effort to explain away bias with statistics. More complex benchmarks can be harder to
explain and more costly to develop, which could present a misuse of resources better
spent on engaging communities’ experience of unwanted police contact and finding ways
to police without a heavy reliance on proactive stops and searches.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
34
STATE OF CONNECTICUT TRAFFIC STOP DATA ANALYSIS
Under state law, all 93 municipal departments and the state police are required to gather data on their
stops and searches of vehicles. The Institute for Regional and Municipal Policy at Central Connecticut
State University analyses the data and issues regular reports. The analysis evaluates the vehicle
stop data for racial and ethnic disparities using (1) intuitive measures that compare the data against
uniformly applied benchmarks and (2) sophisticated econometric techniques that compare the data
against itself without relying on benchmarks.
The intuitive and descriptive tests identify police departments with consistent disparities across each
test in excess of a defined threshold through comparing stop data to three different benchmarks:
1. The statewide average comparison compares the percentage of black, Hispanic, and
minority (BHM) drivers stopped by each police department to the statewide average of each
category of drivers stopped, and against BHM population percentage. This identifies those
departments which are outliers with larger numbers of stops of BHM persons relative to the
percentage BHM resident population in that policing area.
2. The estimated driving population comparison is applied to the municipal police (not state
police, who only patrol highways and small towns). Stop data from peak commuting driving
hours is compared to the estimated driving population to develop ratios to compare BHM
and white drivers’ likelihood of being stopped.
3. The resident-only stops are compared to the local resident driving age population from the
state census.
The sophisticated econometric techniques are:
1. The Veil of Darkness test examines a restricted sample of stops to assess the relative
differences in the ratio of minority to non-minority stops that occur in daylight as compared
to darkness. The assumption informing this test is that police officers can more easily
discern the race and ethnicity of drivers during daylight hours, and differences in stops
conducted at night versus daytime will reveal profiling. The analysis is based on stop
records taken during specific hours in order to control for other factors such as varied road
use and is considered rigorous and broadly applicable.
2. Synthetic control analysis creates a unique benchmark for each individual department
using various stop-specific and town-level demographic characteristics, including ethnicity,
age, gender, and employment characteristics, and traffic stop data, including type of stop,
department and officer stop volume, time of day, and day of week and month, to analyze
disparities in stops of racial and ethnic minorities.
(Continued on next page)
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
35
STATE OF CONNECTICUT TRAFFIC STOP DATA ANALYSIS
CONTINUED
3. Hit rate analysis focuses on post-stop outcomes using an internal comparison of stop data.
The test assumes that police make decisions about which vehicles to search for drugs
or contraband based on the likelihood of detection, while motorists take into account
their likelihood of being stopped and searched when deciding whether to carry drugs or
contraband. Unbiased policing should equalise hit rates across observable categories of
drivers, and variance indicates bias.
Analysis can take a ‘deeper data dive’ and examine specific types of stops – speeding, distracted
driving, moving violations (running stop sign, etc.) and stops considered more discretionary, such
as defective lights, excessive window tint or display of license plate violation – and the post-stop
outcome disaregated by race in order to identify specific drivers of disproportionality that may
inform policy and practice changes.
Ross, M., Fazzalaro, J., Barone, K. and Kalinowski, J. (2017) State of Connecticut: Traffic stop data analysis and findings, 2015-16,
Connecticut: Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy. Available at: www.ctrp3.org
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
36
4. METHODS OF RECORDING
This section examines methods of recording stops and searches, including traditional
pen and paper methods, dispatch and radio-based methods, and technological data
capture including those based on mobile devices and body-worn cameras. Drawing on
the ABeC framework presented earlier, the analysis considers both the advantages and
disadvantages associated with each option, looking at the officer experience, data entry
and accuracy, supervisory value, geo-coding and mapping, the public experience, and the
cost of each method.
PAPER FORMS
Historically, officers recorded their stops on paper forms. This simple
means of data collection is familiar to the police, who typically use paper
forms for issuing fines and citations.
The Fuenlabrada police in Spain have highlighted the value of paper-
based recording. This small municipal department located in the Madrid metropolitan
area was one of three Spanish police agencies that participated in the STEPSS pilot.
Fuenlabrada police introduced paper-based recording of stops as part of a broader set of
reforms aimed at improving the use of stops. A recent evaluation of STEPPS found that,
while the reforms were broadly successful across the sites, some of the most pronounced
effects were evident in Fuenlabrada.
75
Ongoing commitment to the reform principles
for more than five years after the pilot saw continued reductions in stop rates, the
maintenance of lower rates of disproportionality, and continued improvements in hit rates.
Variations in the implementation of the pilot across the sites were linked to differences
in agencies’ commitment to reforms, staff resistance, and levels of external support.
Fuenlabrada was the only agency that substantially implemented procedures to manage
Strengths:
Easy to complete: officers are used
to filling in forms
The person stopped receives a
complete record of the stop at
the time, providing immediate
accountability
Affordable: stop forms can be
introduced without significant
financial investment in expensive
equipment
Easy for supervisors to review
Weaknesses:
Officers and the public may view
paper forms as old-fashioned
Requires double data entry, first to
complete the form and then enter
the information into the database
Poor handwriting can cause
inaccuracies in data entry
No geo-coding for location to
facilitate accurate mapping of stop
activity
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
37
stops based on data analysis, which may help to explain why it was also the only site that
showed consistent improvements in hit rates (see text box).
Paper recording was well suited to the emphasis that the Fuenlabrada pilot put on
improving relationships between police and citizens: the forms provided information
about citizens’ rights, including how to make a complaint, and were numbered so
that the issuing officer could be automatically identified. While there has been some
experimentation with electronic pens and ongoing interest in technological approaches,
the decision to use paper-based methods was pragmatic, reflecting the fiscal realities
facing a small police agency in a time of economic crisis.
DATA-DRIVEN STOP MANAGEMENT IN FUENLABRADA
In Fuenlabrada, collecting stop data strengthened police supervision and management. Officers
initially had problems completing the open field used to describe the reason for a stop, so
guidelines were developed that required them to choose from a fixed list of operational categories
(accompanying guidance listed examples of the grounds that would be acceptable in each case). In
addition to listing a category, they would fill out an open text field to offer more detail on the reasons.
The sergeant in charge of STEPSS analysed the data monthly. Paying attention to the reasons officers
gave for stops was helpful to senior officers in supervising frontline officers. For example, they were
concerned with officers who had chosen “other” or “attitude or suspicious behaviour” categories
as their explanation for stops because this allowed discretion for officers to act on stereotypes or
negative generalizations. Therefore, supervisors first ensured that officers understood the different
categories and the type of stops that fell into each, which resulted in a reduction in officers recording
“other” on the forms. The free field for recording “motivation” then allowed senior officers to monitor
the reasons given for stops under the “attitude and suspicious behaviour” category to ensure they met
the appropriate thresholds.
Senior officers also used stop data to guide personnel deployment. Although most crimes and anti-
social behaviour take place on the weekend, analysis showed that the greatest number of stops were
being made on Wednesdays. This was because officers tended to manage their schedules to work
more on weekdays rather than weekends. Similarly, when managers plotted stops by time of day for
October, they found times of day when few or no stops were conducted at all—apparently because
officers were all taking their breaks at the same times. Managers restructured break times to make
sure that officers were available at all times.
In the years following the STEPSS pilot, the agency has continued to use data in these kinds of ways.
In the subsequent period, rates of disproportionality remained lower than they had been at the
beginning of the pilot, stop rates continued to decline, and the hit rate for stops—which had already
improved during the pilot—continued to improve.
Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police Agencies,
New York: Open Society Foundations
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
38
Data collection process
In police departments using paper forms, each police officer carries a pad of stop-search
forms, and the officer completes one after conducting the search. The form typically
consists of a front sheet and a yellow carbon copy. The person searched receives the
carbon copy of the form at the time of the search or may be able to request it from the
local police station for a period after the stop.
It generally takes 3-5 minutes to complete the form. Supervisors review completed
forms and sign the back of them if they meet legal standards. The information on the
form is then entered onto an electronic database, usually by police staff. Some police
departments use electronic scanning equipment, which scans the data on the form and
puts it into electronic form. Police staff then check it for accuracy.
Officer experience
Interviewees widely disparaged paper-based approaches, variously describing them
as ‘the most basic process’, ‘a twentieth century process’, ‘outmoded’, ‘deemed not fit
for purpose’ and ‘the past’. Objections revolved around two principal themes: that it is
inconvenient for front-line officers and inefficient for the police organisation. For example:
“ One of the things police ocers traditionally don’t like doing is something
bureaucratic and writing anything down.… If you imagine the scenario,
it’s the middle of February, it’s pouring with rain and you’re trying to write
that out on a streaming piece of paper, getting the detail that was required.
It’s not user friendly.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
As well as the practical difficulties, interviewees identified a general reluctance among
officers to engage in paper work, which reflected implicit judgements about what
constitutes ‘real’ police work: ‘Police officers, they don’t join to fill forms in, do they? They
join because they want to go and engage with people, so it’s probably not our strongest
point’. This antipathy to form-filling was reflected in widespread claims that paper-based
methods increase resistance to recording among front-line officers who consider them to
be unnecessarily bureaucratic:
“ It’s an uphill battle with the rank and le—senior ocers are
reluctant to go down the pen and paper route because it’s asking ocers
to ll in another form.”
Police Ocer, United States
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
39
“It is possible to record the data using pen and paper, but you’ll get far less argument from
officers if you collect it electronically. Many officers complain about collecting data and
we’ve worked very hard to ensure empirically that it doesn’t take long to record the data—
one minute or less. I’d definitely recommend going electronic because my experience is
that you get far fewer complaints from officers.” (Academic, United States)
Data entry and accuracy
The inefficiencies associated with paper-based approaches were primarily related to
‘back office’ functions such as data-entry. Interviewees felt it was inefficient to have to
transfer hand-written information from paper forms onto electronic databases. If officers
were required to enter the information onto the database themselves they saw this as
encroaching on their other work:
“ The problem with the paper-based system is the dual recording aspect, you’re
recording it at the scene and then recording it subsequently…. You’re costing
an ocer maybe ve minutes out on the street, and then at the end of the day,
they’ve got to then go in and input that for another ve minutes, you know,
and it’s just a double cost for every single encounter.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Identified inefficiencies relating to data-entry included concerns about data accuracy and
the time-lag involved in getting information onto an electronic database. Others felt that
the need for ‘dual recording’ inevitably increased the potential for errors and pointed to
long delays in supervision and data-entry, which, they felt, severely limited the value of
the data once it was entered onto the system:
“ [Paper-based systems] bring all the sort of data quality issues you’d expect with
pieces of paper that are passed around a massive organisation like ours. And
what we were nding is that from the actual process of recording an incident
on the street to going through submission into a supervisor to check it—if
indeed it was checked—onwards into an administration department and then
being inputted onto a computer-based system, so I could at least look at the
data, could take six to eight weeks. Which is of absolutely no use to us when we
want to look at that data realistically on the same day, so we know who we’ve
stopped and searched and look at the accountability around that… So those
forms were deemed not t for purpose as they could be lying around for weeks
waiting to be signed o [by the supervising ocer], for example, and the data
quality was inherently poor and inaccurate.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
40
Supervisory value
One advantage of the paper form is that officers can hand the full physical record over
at the end of the shift to the supervisor for review. This was not always the case with the
electronic systems, some of which required sergeants to log in to check whether their
officers had done any stop-searches that needed their review. Paper-based systems
require the supervisor to sign the forms prior to passing them on for data entry into the
database. There is no clear audit trail for records that do not meet the required standards
and supervisors’ actions in response are not recorded.
Geo-coding and mapping
Paper forms allow officers to capture a general location such as a street, park, or building,
but not the specific geo-coded location that is necessary to use mapping technologies.
Technological data-capture automatically geo-codes locations in the stop-search record.
In the United Kingdom, the decision to move away from paper-based methods reflected
the need to provide accurate location data:
SAMPLE COMPLIANCE PROTOCOL FOR
PAPER FORM RECORDING
Connecticut has 106 law enforcement agencies of which 7 use paper forms. In 2015 and 2016, the
number of stops those departments reported declined significantly, and Central Connecticut State
University analysts conducted an audit.
Paper-based data collection is challenging to audit. The audit consisted of reviewing information
recorded in police dispatch logs to see if the information matched that reported in the traffic stop
data system. It also requested copies of all paper forms to determine the accuracy of the data being
reported. The audit was unable to determine the exact number of unreported stops, but estimated
that each department failed to record over 1,000 stops.
Based on these results, analysts recommended the standard operating procedures of the New London
Police Department as a model system to replicate in order to ensure that the majority of traffic stops
are properly recorded. These procedures state:
• At the end of each shift a supervisor must sign every traffic stop form, and verify that a form has
been completed for each stopped called-in to dispatch.
• The form should include a space to record a computer-aided dispatch number, which enables
cross-matching against the dispatch log when conducting a review.
Source: Ross, M., Fazzalaro, J., Barone, K. and Kalinowski, J. (2017) State of Connecticut: Traffic stop data analysis and findings,
2015-16, Connecticut: Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, p. XXIV. Available at: www.ctrp3.org
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
41
“ The problem with the ability to map is, if they use a paper-based system, the
ocers will describe a location as high street somewhere, which could be half
a mile long. So the ability to map it in a succinct manner and a meaningful
manner is really quite challenging if they don’t have an automated system.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
“ You’re never going to be able to do it with a form because the ocer knows the
name of the road and the town that they’re in; they’re highly unlikely to give
you postcode.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Public experience
A key advantage of paper-based recording over other technologically driven forms of data-
capture is the ability to provide on-the-spot accountability. Paper recording produces
a carbon copy of the record that officers can easily give to the subject of the search,
allowing the provision of complete information. Individuals are able to see the reason
for the stop-search and compare it with their perception of the situation, and with what
officers told them, and decide whether they feel the record is accurate. Technological
forms of data-capture make on-the-spot accountability more difficult because they do not
produce a physical record that can be handed over to the subject of the stop-search.
Cost
Affordability is a key advantage of paper-based recording systems . Paper-based recording
can be introduced without significant financial investment in expensive equipment such
as mobile phones or laptops and the cost of developing software. Paper forms will,
however, have some costs, including design and printing of the forms and data-entry.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
42
DISPATCH RADIOS
The use of police radios and computer-aided dispatch systems to record
stops is fairly well-established in the United States, largely because it
eliminates the need for officers to complete paper forms and builds on
existing communications practices.
76
Officers already call in their stops
to dispatch rooms either to log activity and location for officer safety,
or to request an identify check on the person stopped. The movement away from paper
recording in England and Wales has provoked considerable interest in the use of radios.
The Home Office is currently replacing the existing digital radio infrastructure, Airwaves,
with a 4G Emergency Services Network (ESN). This is creating interest in how the new
system might be used to capture stop and search data efficiently.
Warwickshire and West Mercia police illustrated the value of a radio-based data collection
system, developing a joint system based on a voiceover Airwave solution. Officers use
their radios to relay verbally all the information about a search to a member of staff in the
control room, who records the information on an electronic database. The main advantage
was the perceived reduction in bureaucracy for officers completing paper forms and
the efficiency with which the recording process fitted within the police check system. A
member of the department reported that officers welcomed the change:
“ We did a survey with sta. I think it was 94% of sta said they thought it was a
signicant improvement and they liked it. I mean it’s taken a 10-minute process
down to 2 to 3 minutes. It involves very little work for them. It’s easy, it’s ecient,
it takes other work away. So the user satisfaction of it is high…. Initially,
[control room sta ] were concerned about it in terms of demand. But if you’re
doing a person’s check and you’re using the information you’ve already got on
your system, the large part of the work is already done for them. And we’re not
actually asking them to record that much extra work. So there is extra work in it
for [control room sta ], but the benets outweigh the cost and demands.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Data collection process
In police departments using radio-based systems to collect stop data, each police officer
contacts the dispatch or control centre to provide information about the search. In the
United Kingdom, the process has developed over time. Early systems made a distinction
between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ data. Objective data includes things like the ethnicity
of the person being searched, the power being used, the object that is being searched
for, and the outcome of the search. Officers enter objective information directly into the
department database by pressing buttons on the radio to select appropriate options
from drop down lists shown on the display. The grounds for the search are defined as
subjective data and the officer relays them over the radio to an operator who enters it
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
43
onto an electronic database. In other systems, the officer provides both objective and
subject information orally to the operator. Where the person being searched is already
known to the police, their information automatically populates the record. There are
different systems for officers to call into the dispatch centre—most departments use their
police radios to reach the control centre as they would for any other non-emergency call,
while others use their radios in telephonic mode and some suest that officers call in
on mobile phones. The operator records all the information directly onto the electronic
database and then provides the officer with a unique reference for the stop record, which
the officer writes on a paper receipt for the person searched. The person can then use
the reference number to get the full record online or upon request from the local police
station, where it is kept for a specified amount of time.
It is estimated that it takes 2-4 minutes for officers to relay the information to the
operator, although there can be delays in getting through on the radio to the dispatch
centre before recording can start. In some systems, the transcript the operator recorded
is emailed to the officer to check and then submitted for supervision. In others, the
operator enters it directly into the electronic database and the supervisor receives a
notification to review. In some departments, as officers’ supervisors and colleagues can
hear the information officers supply on the call to the dispatch centre, which is live on the
airwaves, and could determine if they were meeting legal standards, interviewees felt the
radio dispatch recording offered simultaneous supervision.
Officer experience
Officers preferred the Airwave system to the paper-based system it replaced, considering
it more efficient, accurate, and effective. Interviewees estimated that the amount of staff
time a stop-search takes had fallen from 12 minutes to 4 minutes. An internal review
found extremely high rates of data accuracy and noted that supervision had improved
‘absolutely, no question’, and that the ‘failure rate’—indicating non-compliance with the
legal requirement—had fallen from four per cent to ‘virtually zero’.
Strengths:
Reduced bureaucracy (compared to
paper forms)
Easy integration with existing police
systems, which require officers to
call in their stops to log activity and
for safety reasons
Can integrate on-the-spot
supervision
Control room checks encourage
compliance
Weaknesses:
No full record for the person
stopped
Inconsistencies in data-entry as
information is relayed to and then
entered by control room staff
Can overload dispatch systems,
leading to delays and longer stops
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
44
User satisfaction with the new system was also reportedly high. An internal staff
survey indicated that 94 per cent of staff thought that the new system was a significant
improvement on previous practice. However, some interviewees noted that if the control
room was busy, the system could delay an officer in the process of a stop:
“ [It] required us to phone somebody. As a result, it was time consuming.
Although we can make an estimate and we have sta to answer the phones, we
do not know how much trac is going to come through. So an ocer is calling
through and the person who answers it is the same person who would be taking
101 [non-emergency] calls. As well as calls from the public, it would be lots of
stop and searches and PNC [Police National Computer] checks coming over the
phone, you could be [stuck] on the phone waiting 20 minutes for it to answer, so
it is a huge time restraint on the actual recording.”
Police Ocer, United Kingdom
Initial concerns focused on the additional workload for the control room, but it was noted
that the new arrangement did not create much extra work as control room staff could
quickly input information when officers would call in to conduct a person check.
Data entry and accuracy
In practice, the Airwaves system, which required officers to type into their radio codes to
record the stop-search, posed several problems. Officers did not always record objective
data at the time of the search and, as one interviewee stated, ‘quite a lot’ of recording was
happening back at the station. This made it difficult to match up the records and provide
a full copy to the subject of the search, particularly as identifying information—such as
names, date of birth, and address—is not recorded.
Systems that involved officers relaying information directly to the operator tended to be
perceived as more efficient and accurate. Control room staff enter the grounds for the
search using text entry. If a person was already known to the police, entering his or her
key information would populate other fields automatically, and drop-down menus had the
most frequently used options on top. Officers perceived this approach as fitting naturally
into the process of conducting a stop-search as the officer routinely checks the identity
of the person being searched via the control room.
Supervisory value
The records the control room created provide the basis for internal monitoring and
supervision. Officers can access the database to check their own records and supervising
officers can check officers’ searches. In most radio-based recording systems, once the
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
45
original stop-search record has been completed, the officer who conducted the search
receives an automatic follow-up email. The email asks for further information about the
stop-search—whether any outcomes were linked to the original grounds for suspicion,
whether any items of clothing were removed, and whether a strip search was conducted—
and if the officer agrees with the grounds that have been recorded. Officers can provide
further information about the grounds at this stage, but cannot alter the original record.
If the officer who conducted the search does not complete the record at this stage, he
or she receives daily reminders until it is complete. At that time, the supervising officer
receives an email informing him or her that there is a stop-search record ready to be
authorised. If the supervisor is dissatisfied with the information recorded on the stop-
search record, he or she can mark it a failure or send it back to the officer for clarification.
If supervisors fail a stop-search record, they are required to record what action they
have taken to address the issues identified. As well as establishing a clear audit trail,
this system gives supervisors a visible reminder of what they need to do. As one officer
pointed out, paper forms are a visual indicator that it is necessary to do a task as a form
moves from one person’s tray to another. He noted that the system is ‘not an efficient way
of working’, but that replacing it with an electronic system requires a replacement for that
visible indicator, which the email provides. The system also allows chief inspectors in local
districts to log onto the stop-search database and do a secondary audit. This involves dip
sampling a number of stop-searches each month to look at the quality of the grounds and
the supervision and comparing results across the department.
Geo-coding and mapping
The location of the stop-search is automatically geo-coded by the Airwave radio, which
generates eastings and northings coordinates and transfers them into the stop-search record.
Public experience
Officers are expected to fill out a receipt or business card, which includes their
identification number and the time and date of the stop. When the record has been
completed, a reference number is relayed to the officer who writes it onto the receipt,
which is then given to the subject of the search. The receipt constitutes evidence that a
search has taken place, but does not provide a full copy of the stop-search record, which
may be obtained at a local police station or online at a later date.
Cost
Radio-based recording systems were generally viewed as more affordable than
introducing mobile data collection. Officers already have radios and the process can be
designed to fit into existing systems. Costs of building out the system include developing
software for data recording and the time and training for control room operators who enter
the data. Airwave itself was a source of concern to some interviewees. They felt that data
usage was ‘expensive’.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
46
AN EXPERIMENT WITH AUDIO RECORDING
REASONABLE GROUNDS
In an early iteration of Airwave radio recording, officers were encouraged to relay the
grounds for the stop and basic information about the search in front of the person
being searched as a way to promote transparency. These voice transmissions were
recorded as radio traffic and connected to the data file but were not transcribed.
Officers would then provide a receipt or business card, which included a unique
reference number for the stop-search as well as the date, time, and location of the
search. The person would then later be able to access the search record and the
audio record of the grounds using that unique reference number.
The distinctive feature of this department’s approach is the emphasis on real time
supervision, which was introduced to minimise bureaucracy: peers and supervisors
are expected to monitor the grounds as they are relayed to the communicator and
can intervene through private conversation over the phone (so as not to undermine
the officer in front of the person being searched). Several interviewees also spoke
positively about the verbatim recording of grounds, suesting that it encouraged
better articulation of the reasons for the stop-search and improved on-the-spot
accountability:
“ [Ocers] are required to verbally articulate in front of the subject the
reason why, the object that they’re looking for, and the reason why they’re
stopping, which I think is really powerful. Because when we did our public
survey [before the department adopted the Airwave], most of the people
who were stopped and searched weren’t really aware about why it had
taken place…. [I]f you are articulating the grounds in front of the person,
… they’re hearing what you’re saying, so it’s partly there, whereas with a
MDT [Mobile data terminal] you probably wouldn’t be doing that, so it’s
probably benecial to do that.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
(Continued on next page)
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
47
“ I quite like the fact that you can record the grounds over the radio.
It’s actually what you’re saying. Because the temptation in recording
grounds is to write just a very small number of words, and in the U.K.
that’s denitely down to the space that’s left on the form for you. These
little pockets pads give you space for about six words, which isn’t really
evidentially that strong if you’re talking about searching someone and
potentially using a power. So being able to describe what you’re thinking
and what you’re doing on the radio and having other whole conversation
captured is obviously more robust evidence.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Interviewees did raise some concerns about this form of recording grounds.
Interviewees suested officers may be reluctant to relay grounds in front of the
subject of the search or their colleagues, arguing that they might feel awkward.
They also expressed doubts that audio records of the grounds could be made
available to the subject of the search and that conducting supervision over the
radio is practical. On officers suested that ‘real-time’ supervision falls short of
the requirements laid down by PACE:
“ I think it’s a very generous interpretation that we’re achieving the aims
of PACE by listening to a radio conversation… People are in and out of
radio conversations; people turn their radio o at certain periods of the
day because they have to do things that are controversial or that are
private. I don’t accept that [interpretation] at all, and I wouldn’t accept
that…. I just don’t think that’s an ethical way of supervising stop search.…
I expect someone to sit down with whatever [the record of ] that search is,
either on screen or a piece of paper, look at it, consider it, quality assure
it and make a decision, is it ethical or not? You can’t do that listening to a
radio in my opinion.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
AN EXPERIMENT WITH AUDIO RECORDING
REASONABLE GROUNDS
CONTINUED
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
48
MOBILE DEVICES
The proliferation of mobile technology has created new possibilities
for the recording of police stop-searches. While the use of mobile data
terminals (MDTs) in police vehicles for this purpose is reasonably well-
established in the United States,
77
(reflecting the U.S. focus on vehicle
stops and widespread adoption of mobile data terminal or laptop
technology) it remains an emerging feature of policing elsewhere Many of the police
agencies involved in this study were using some sort of mobile technology or were in
the process of adopting it. For many agencies, the adoption of technological solutions is
part of a broader shift towards paperless ways of working. Arrangements for recording
police stop-searches were often being developed in the midst of considerable change
and several agencies were overhauling or reviewing their existing information technology
(IT) infrastructure. As a result, some of the processes that were being put in place were
stopgaps rather than ideal solutions.
The experience of the West Midlands Police in the United Kingdom highlights the value of
a stop-search app used by officers on their mobile phones. The department used paper-
based recording, then a radio-call in system, then moved to a stop-search app. Under
the upgrade, all officers received mobile telephones equipped with an app supporting
direct recording of stop-searches on the mobile phones. The department had previously
experienced difficulties with a radio-based data collection system, including extending
the recording time for stop-searches and inaccuracies on records. Officers reacted
positively to the mobile stop-search app and the department has seen an increase in the
numbers of stop-searches recorded, which they credit to improved speed and accuracy
of recording on the app. An officer we spoke to stated that officers had a better “overall
impression” of the process of recording stops when they started using the app because
“ They like the fact that they have the control over what they are recording.
We saw an increase in the numbers of stop and searches being recorded on
the system. Our [recorded] searches have jumped by 20-30 per cent. I think
that ocers have more time to be proactive. If before, they were conducting
two searches a day, and it took an hour on the phone to record them. Of
course, they are going to think, I don’t really want to search them, now they
have that hour back they can go and do things, search people and can record
it quickly with their ngertips. Ocers aren’t held up by the bureaucracy of
the radio call.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
49
Data collection process
Each police officer receives a mobile phone, laptop, or tablet, which contains a
programme or app for recording the details of each stop-search. The process of
completing the online form takes 2-3 minutes. Once the form is completed and submitted,
it automatically populates a centrally held database. The systems for supervision differ
depending on the design of the programme: some send a notification email to the officer’s
supervisor to prompt review; others expect supervisors to check the database regularly to
see if their officers have completed stop-search records that need review. The supervisor
checks the forms and makes a note either authorising the stop-search or noting problems
with the details recorded and the actions the supervisor will take.
Officer experience
The perceived advantages of using mobile technology were primarily related to efficiency
and the additional functionality that the technology provides. Officers reportedly
welcomed the new technology as easy to use and not requiring any new training:
“We basically just pushed it out to all our people: ‘it’s there, go and use it!’ It’s
easy to use. Everybody has a mobile phone.… Although the operating systems
are a little bit dierent, generally speaking, I know I press a home button, I
know how to use a keypad, I use my nger as a mouse. It is exactly the same
over all phones. People are so used to using smart phones. For some apps, they
require training, but this search app is so straightforward, you’ll be asked the
same questions that you were answering on paper forms or over the phone the
last few years in the same order. It’s very intuitive.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Strengths:
Officers view it as modern
Easy to use
Automatic data entry directly onto
the database, no double entry
Automatic geo-coding to support
mapping of stop activity
Built-in supervision options
Integration with other department
software
Weaknesses:
No full record for person stopped
Potentially significant financial and
start-up costs
Limits direct communication with
person stopped
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
50
Interviewees attributed the ease of the transition in part to an increasing familiarity with
this way of working as mobile devices were being used for other functions, including
taking witness statements and making crime reports. The stop-search application was
similar to these other applications and was designed to be ‘as intuitive and easy to use’
as possible so as to minimise the training costs. A PowerPoint presentation and a training
video were made available to officers in the pilot sites, but most had learned how to use
the application informally from other colleagues.
One police department claimed that an internal audit showed that officers who
had mobile devices were spending an extra hour a day on the streets and out in the
community:
“ Ocers love the tablets and handhelds because it promotes professionalism
and eciency. They don’t have to type things up when they get back into the
station and it looks more professional. The technolog is changing the way
people working—ocers are spending more time on the streets.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
As well as potentially speeding up the encounter for the person being stopped, it was
suested that the greater efficiency and convenience afforded by mobile devices
mitigates officer resistance:
“ Once police come up to speed on the technolog they nd it helpful in reducing
the tedious paperwork. For such a long time, one of the biggest concerns has
been the paperwork and if you give police more paperwork they won’t ll it
out. I was told by a police chief that ocers don’t want to do stu that is not
fun, [stu other than] the kicking in doors and catching bad guys. So this is a
step forward getting them to do paperwork on technological devices.”
Academic, United States
The additional functionality of mobile devices brings a range of other benefits and was
likened to having ‘your office is in your hand’. A police officer said, ‘[w]e will record exactly
the same information [as we did before] but it’s done immediately. There is no need to
wait for somebody to answer the phone’.
78
Based on this success, departments were
exploring how they might use mobile devices to provide front-line officers with real-time
information, including crime maps, and to undertake real-time supervision through video-
chat applications.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
51
Data entry and accuracy
The main perceived benefit of using mobile devices to record police stops is that it
eliminates the need for ‘dual recording’: when an officer enters data onto a mobile device
it can be used to automatically populate a centrally held database. Interviewees noted
that the ‘whole point’ of mobile devices is that officers ‘don’t have to then go back and
waste time, sitting in a police station typing out forms’ and that ‘the big advantage for
the organisation is cost, because you don’t need to have a middle person recording the
details’. The electronic form on the app has been designed to make the process of data
entry as efficient as possible, with drop down menus for applicable areas and reminders
for officers to complete all boxes before they can submit the form. Interviewees also felt
that having the officers enter the data themselves improved the accuracy of the record
and eliminated errors:
“ Another issue that we potentially had, a regular complaint from ocers:
‘I told the controller that these are the reasons I did the search and the
controller typed something else.’ This came up regularly. I know from
personal experience, there have been times when I have told the controller
something over the radio and they have typed something else up. It’s that lost
in translation, trying to get through the record quickly. So the accuracy of the
records wasn’t always 100 percent. Changing a word very slightly in most cases
isn’t going to have that much eect but sometimes it could. So the emphasis is
now on the ocer entering the information.”
Police Ocer, United Kingdom
Supervisory value
Supervision needs to be built into the system design; otherwise, mobile devices may
limit officer accountability. Most police departments had built in a supervision process
that requires supervisors to authorise the stop-search record and indicate if they
are dissatisfied with any aspect on the record and what action they have taken, as
interviewees described:
“ We also obviously give guidance through our policy that it’s not just ticking
a box, there’s got to be active supervision, you’ve got to look at training if it’s
required, discipline if necessary, and it’s not just also checking that, it’s also
dip sampling the ocer’s records, if it’s your ocer. It is also getting out on the
street and supervising some of the encounters as well. So that’s the guidance,
it’s not just tick a box, there’s a lot more.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
52
“ As a supervisor, I will be checking the system for unsigned records. I will
go down it and I will be looking to check that everything has been lled in,
whether outcomes are completed and make sense. E.g., if it was an arrest for
stolen property then you expect to nd things found, otherwise why would you
be arresting them? Sergeants are given two options:
a) Meets standard
b) Doesn’t meet standard and what are you going to do about it? For
example ‘spoke to the ocer about a mistake on the form, ocer
understands and action plan is to double check all is stop and search
paperwork.’”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
One officer explained that his department has
“ Two layers of supervision. No one wants to explain themselves to the gaers
[bosses], so will ensure that they get it right. Could have three or four
sergeants dealing with somebody but the inspector will have the overview
and may have the same person fed in from dierent Sergeants. Most people
only muck it up the once!”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Geo-coding and mapping
GPS-enabled mobile devices can generate geocodes that are automatically entered into
the record, establishing the precise location of a police stop-search. Where this was not
possible due to a lack of available technology or limitations with the data-management
system, it was envisaged that officers would read their location from an app on the mobile
device and enter the co-ordinates into the database manually. It was perceived as a key
strength of the technological data collection, potentially making the stop-search data
more amenable to area analysis and comparison with crime and tasking maps.
Public experience
Mobile devices have several potential disadvantages. A notable difficulty is in providing
a full copy of the record to the person who has been stopped. The most common system
is to provide a paper receipt on which the officer writes a reference number that can be
used to get the full record online or upon request from the local police station, where it is
kept for a specified amount of time. This does not provide a full record at the time of the
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
53
stop, but the receipt can be used to obtain a full copy of the record after the encounter.
There has been some experimentation with the use of mobile printers to produce a
physical copy of the record at the time of the search to provide to the stopped person.
While this seemed viable for U.S. officers patrolling in vehicles, U.K. officers felt the
technology would be impractical, unreliable, and expensive. Some interviewees felt it was
unreasonable to burden officers with carrying another piece of equipment while out doing
foot patrol.
The use of receipts has generally been accepted but one officer in a national oversight
role argued it would not be consistent with the spirit of the U.K. PACE legislation. He
said that it was up for ‘debate’ whether it was ‘compliant with the rules’ due to privacy
concerns and a process of getting the full form that seemed onerous:
“ The problem is you’ve got a receipt number, but are forces checking that it is
the individual who was stopped who they’re handing over the information to
later? Will people bother, because the process is quite dicult to access that
information… my view is if they’re entitled to a form there and then, they
should be given a form there and then. Which pushes the debate back into ‘can
you lose the paper-based system?’ But the rules are the rules, and under the
current legislation they’re entitled to a copy. They should only be directed to
go to a police station and request one if it’s operationally… not practicable to
give it them at the time. The fact that they’ve changed the system to me isn’t
an operational reason for not doing so.… There’s no reason why the ocer
can’t either physically write out a small descriptive note of that rather than a
great big form, just making sure that they have sucient detail. I don’t think a
receipt with a number goes far enough to comply with the rule.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, officers also suested that mobile
devices might act as a barrier to effective communication with the public:
“ [Technological recording] has the downside of removing the understanding
that policing needs to be about interpersonal skills. … [You have] all these
young guys that like to play on the technolog but you can’t text ‘put your
hand up’. You need to have interpersonal skills that are often lacking from
young ocers.”
Academic, United States
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
54
“ [With mobile devices] you’ve got the issue about not looking at and not
engaging with the person that you’re speaking to... street skills. So you’ve got
somebody in the back of your car. To identify who they are, you’ll ask them
questions like their name, date of birth, address. You’ll ask them about people
who live next door to them, which we check on the voters’ register. You ask
them what their star sign is and check if their birthday’s correct, whether
they’re lying to you. These are all the kind of questions that will funnel down….
They can add to the value of stop and search. Again, I don’t think doing stop
and search on those devices is what we should be doing, I think we should be
speaking to the member of the public, so we [meaning his department] didn’t
go for those [programs].”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Although most police departments were ‘device agnostic’ in the sense that they did not
favour a particular brand or type of device, interviewees raised concerns about the use
of laptop computers in police cars. A U.S. police chief described a mobile computer as ‘a
tether’ that ties officers to the car and preferred handheld devices for this reason. English
officers suested that laptops encourage officers to record stop-searches after the event,
which would undermine on-the-spot accountability:
“ We had what we call mobile data terminals…and it was possible to record a
stop and search on that, but it was clunky and awkward because, you know,
how do you record a search from inside a vehicle when you’re searching a
person outside the vehicle? And again it almost encouraged people to record
after the event rather than during the event.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Costs
A key disadvantage of using mobile devices to collect data is affordability. Technology-
based recording requires significant financial investment in expensive equipment such as
mobile phones or laptops, which will require replacing when lost or broken, and upgrading
at regular intervals. There is also the cost of purchasing or developing software. Some
interviewees mentioned additional costs such as having to pay for any ‘fixes’ or additions
to systems or to ensure compatibility between different pieces of software departments
might use.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
55
BODY-WORN CAMERAS/VIDEO
The use of body-worn cameras (BWC; also known as body-worn
video, BWV) to record police-initiated encounters is a relatively recent
development that has gathered rapid momentum. British police first
piloted BWV in the mid-2000s, primarily as a means of gathering
evidence,
79
but the use of cameras has proliferated in both the United
Kingdom and the United States in response to officer-involved shootings, and BWV has
come to be viewed as a tool to address concerns about police conduct and means to
improve police-community relations.
80
Use of BWV is spreading to the EU. There are now
over 60 types of cameras designed for police use.
81
The U.S. National Institute of Justice, in a primer on BWV notes that implementers
and citizens alike hope that it will ‘help capture a record of police-involved incidents
and provide increased transparency and legitimacy’. Other perceived benefits it lists
are ‘improved behavior for both police officers and citizens; expedited resolution of
complaints and lawsuits; improved evidence for arrest and prosecution; and opportunities
for police training’.
82
An early study in Rialto, California, in 2011, found that BWV reduced use-of-force incidents
by a remarkable 59 percent, and reduced citizens’ complaints by an even more remarkable
87.5 percent.
83
A European expert flaed that Rialto had a high-intervention model of
policing and results might not be easily generalizable. Subsequent trials and research in the
United States and elsewhere have been less conclusive. In 2015, George Mason University
analysed the results of 44 studies of BWV and found a range of results, including studies
with contradictory outcomes and studies showing no impact at all on police behaviour.
84
They did not identify a single study examining the use of BWV to assess the frequency of
stops or the ethnicity of the persons stopped. The focus of studies indicates an expectation
that BWV will assist with resolving complaints and lawsuits, citizen cooperation, and critical
incident review among other topics, but not bias or citizens’ perception of it.
85
Strengths:
Provides a contemporaneous
account of contact
Assists in resolving complaints
May enhance civility in encounters
May support training
Weaknesses:
Does not record quantitative stop
data
No record for person stopped
Risks of perspective bias
Cost, data storage requirements
Data editing for privacy required
prior to release
Regulation is required to address
BWV issues
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
56
Data collection process
Body-worn video is captured by small video and audio recording devices designed to
attach to a police officer’s uniform. Department policies differ greatly in terms of when
officers should turn cameras on and what types of incidents they are developed to capture.
Some cameras have a pre-record function that captures a defined amount of time before
the camera is turned on. At the end of the shift, officers upload the footage filmed on shift
onto the force system and can mark individual incidents for their evidentiary value.
Officer experience
Attitudes about the use of body-worn cameras varied quite sharply among the
interviewees included in this study. One of the U.S. experts described himself as
‘overall an advocate’, noting that the results in Rialto are ‘pretty stunning’: ‘If we came
up with another initiative that reduced complaints by 90 per cent they’d say we have
to do this’, he noted. Some of those involved in the day-to-day oversight of stop and
search in England and Wales described the use of BWCs as the ‘long-term solution’
or as ‘the answer worldwide’ for stop recording, suesting that other developments
around recording would become ‘redundant’. The primary benefit of BWC, according to a
supporter, is that they provide a contemporaneous record that is ‘much better than human
memory or a written record’ and can potentially be used to adjudicate between competing
versions of what happened:
“ [Cameras] have utility. There are some things that hopefully will be beyond
dispute if they’re caught on video. There was one case where a female ocer
said an elderly man had swung a golf club at her and she’d arrested him for
assault. The court subpoenaed the dash cam footage and it shows that at
no point was he swinging a golf club and she was suspended. It denitively
established that the ocer had lied.”
Academic, United States
But one of the British-based experts described BWCs as ‘a form of micro-management’
that signals supervisors do not trust officers and as a ‘stick’ that can be used to gain
evidence to prosecute or discipline them. The use of cameras is a much more familiar
feature of policing in the United States than in Europe; they are routinely installed into
squad cars in the U.S.
86
This has provided a reference point in discussions about body-
worn cameras in the United States:
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
57
“When we put cameras in cars there was resistance. Ocers were saying, ‘it’s
like having a sergeant in the backseat’, but after six months they wouldn’t go
out without them because they realised they’re good for them. I think we’ll get to
similar point with body-worn-cameras.”
Academic, United States
Data entry and accuracy
In contrast to the discussion of other data capture methods in this report, which focus
explicitly on generating quantitative data on police stop and search or identity check
practices, BWV is not structured to generate quantitative data on the use of routine
powers, such as stops or identity checks. The nature of BWV footage is inherently
different from the data gathered though other recording practices discussed in this report.
These limitations mean that BWV should not replace other forms of stop recording.
BWCs generate hundreds of hours of video footage. At the time of publication of this
report, there was no way to search and sort the data along specific variables, such as
the individuals’ information (including race or ethnicity), the grounds for or results of a
stop, without watching footage, coding it, and entering it into another database. This may
change, as the IT sector develops improved video analytics to automate video review and
analysis, incorporating new functions from facial recognition to biometrics, transforming
the use of data for intelligence-led policing,
87
although the analytics currently being
explored would not appear to address concerns with stop and search.
88
As one officer
explains:
“ The stop form takes you two minutes to ll out, [and] watching a video will
probably take 30-40 minutes to go through to identify when on the footage the
stops [occur]. And at no point have you got the ocer’s grounds. Has the video
captured what the person was saying? Is the camera 100 percent working? If
there is a slight fault in it and the microphone is not operating, I cannot hear
the name, the reasons, the grounds. BWV is supporting evidence. It supports; it
does not replace stop recording. It has no idea what’s going on in your mind.…
The camera is there to record actions in the same way a paper form would but
a paper form is more accurate and the camera denitely can’t replace forms
because, when can a camera smell cannabis?”
Police Ocer, United Kingdom
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
58
While police respondents were generally enthusiastic, civil rights activists and academics
examining bodycams raise concerns about a range of issues around privacy of witnesses
and victims of crime who are filmed, and the possibility of bias in footage filmed from the
officer’s perspective leading to ‘context collapse’. Referencing a high-profile police killing
of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 that spurred national protest an
interviewee said:
“ After Ferguson the rst question people were asking me is, where’s the video?
People were expecting it and the move towards these systems has taken on
much more immediacy. Police chiefs are saying they want cameras and there’s
been overwhelming interest. This is good but I’m fearful that it will be done
in a way that won’t maximise the benets. We need rules governing recording
in homes for example. When is recording required? If the cameras are just
going to be turned on when the police think it will useful, it won’t solve the
accountability issue. It may help the police, but unless we have a rule that says
all street encounters are recorded, we won’t get most of the benets. We need
to establish what the consequences are of not recording. We need to do all these
things, otherwise it’s going to be a bit scattershot.”
Academic, United States
Supervisory value
As with other aspects of BWV footage, the value to managers and supervisors remains to
be tested and assessed. A number of possibilities have been floated, including allowing
officers to submit positive encounters for consideration in their performance reviews, but
at this time, video footage remains primarily useful for checking the quality of individual
encounters, particularly in the event of complaints or use of force.
BWCs were also said to provide a valuable training resource. One of the U.K.-based
experts who had significant concerns about the use of cameras did note, however, that
video footage could be used to promote reflection and self-assessment, noting that
‘officers are often surprised when they watch themselves at what they’ve done and how
their conduct comes over’.
89
Geo-coding and mapping
BWV devices that include a GPS-locked clock can provide spatial and temporal coding of
the data. This can enable searches for video based on the time and place of incidents.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
59
Public experience
The rapidity of adoption of body-worn cameras was spurred by concerns about
accountability and the expectation that a contemporaneous view of events would enhance
external oversight. Among the 44 studies of the technology that George Mason University
reviewed, 21 explore the quality of officer-citizen interactions including the nature of
the interaction and communication, displays of procedural justice or professionalism,
misconduct or corruption. An additional 17 studies examine the impact of BWV on the use
of force. Early results are varied, as noted above, while other studies remain under way,
but the evidence for improvements in accountability thus far are inconclusive or far more
modest than hoped for.
If body worn cameras are to provide an accountability tool for accessing the lawfulness
and the conduct of police encounters, it is essential that the person filmed be allowed
access to the footage. At this time, the individual filmed has to make a request for the
footage; there is no on-the-spot accountability from BWV, although immediate sharing
would be possible with currently available technology. In the United States, anti-disclosure
bills restricting public access to BWV footage have passed in half a dozen states, generally
sponsored by legislators with law enforcement backgrounds.
90
U.K. police forces have
interpreted the law differently, with some giving both individuals and scrutiny groups
access to BWV footage while others will only allow the individual in the footage to access it.
In addition to their potential benefits, body-worn cameras have significant limitations.
Even those who advocate their use were keen to stress that they should not be seen
as a panacea. Interviewees highlighted the subjectivity involved in interpreting video
evidence as evident in the Eric Garner case. Mr. Garner died after a NYPD police officers
placed him in an apparent chokehold in what the Medical Examiner’s Office ruled to be
a homicide. Although the grand jury watched mobile phone video taken by at least three
bystanders, they refused to indict the officer involved. While BWV footage was not part of
the case, scholars have called the utility of the technology to check police violence into
question because of it.
91
An interviewee stated:
“ Initially I felt body-worn cameras were good thing… but I have since watched
the Eric Garner videos a few times and listened to the dierent interpretations
put forward. The footage still has to be interpreted and this was personal
recording so you can see the behaviour of the ocers and Mr. Garner but it
was still interpreted in such a way that the grand jury didn’t indict the ocer.
It’s amazing how divergent interpretations of the same footage can be.”
Academic, United States
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
60
As increasing amounts of video are filmed and made public, new concerns about privacy
have come to the fore in discussions of BWV. Civil rights and police think tanks have
grappled with privacy concerns alongside a host of wider issues: Should filming be
continuous or should cameras be switched on and off? If so, when? What exceptions
are permissible? Should filming be permitted when officers enter a private residence?
Do subjects need to be informed that they are being recorded? How can the footage be
protected against manipulation? How is the data to be stored and how long should it be
retained? What are the rules governing disclosure?
While recommended standards have begun to emerge,
92
interviewees noted that use of
body worn video is advancing faster than the legal and logistical infrastructure required to
ensure appropriate and effective use:
“ Body-worn video is a ash bit of kit that you use, but it’s the infrastructure
behind the body-worn video that makes it worthwhile.… You need to have the
infrastructure that allows you to capture, store, move, view, [and] delete the
les on the basis of an ethical process. So we’re buying at the moment a digital
repository that will allow us to do, to use digital evidence, including body-worn
video and documentation and other images, in a way that we can manage
it ethically. Because what we had before was body-worn video being used on
stand-alone systems in police stations, which meant you couldn’t transfer the
les. No one could audit them. You could put whatever you want on there. You
could leave it on there. [If ] you’d got [a] no deletion policy, you’re non-data
protection compliant. At the moment, we’re putting the infrastructure in.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Cost
BWV cost varies widely but can represent a significant investment for police departments.
In the United States, a leading BWV company offered ‘free’ cameras to police agencies for
a period, requiring payment for data storage only, but those costs can be considerable.
Interviewees noted both cameras and storage systems have significant start-up and
upgrade costs.
93
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS METHODS AND ISSUES
61
SUMMARY OF STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
OF EACH RECORDING METHOD
Provides
a full
record
Capture
individual
suspicions
Allow for
ethnic data
collection
Ease of
data entry
Accuracy Supervision Geo-coding
and
mapping
Cost Speed of
recording
KEY: High performance Moderate performance Poor performance or inconclusive evidence
Paper forms
Dispatch radios
Mobile devices
Body worn video
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
62
5. POLICY AND PRACTICE
The challenges posed by recording police stops go well beyond the technicalities of how
to make a record. These broader challenges are rooted in a combination of human and
system factors. Foremost among the human challenges is the need to combat resistance
to change. Resistance to recording stops within police agencies was a recurring theme
across the interviews conducted for this study, and interviewees emphasised the
importance of police leadership, messaging, and ownership as key factors in overcoming
resistance. System factors relate to the infrastructure required to create, store, and
use stop records for their intended purpose, and related questions about procurement,
software development, the role of corporate interests, and cost considerations. This
chapter focuses primarily on the human factors, with sections on resistance, leadership
and messaging, engagement and ownership, and procurement issues.
RESISTANCE TO REFORM
Police occupational culture is typically conservative, pragmatic, and suspicious of
solutions that are developed elsewhere—all of which can block innovation.
94
Most policing
innovations originate from outside the police organisation, yet as Skogan notes, police are
‘sceptical about programs invented by civilians’ and ‘are particularly hostile to programs
that threaten to involve civilians in defining their work or evaluating their performance’.
95
As an interviewee stated:
“ There’s still plenty of resistance to: one, collecting data; two, collecting the
right data; and three, making it public. Anything that U.S. police are ordered
to do from outside is something they are less interested in doing and there will
be more push back. The closer we can get it to being internally generated—
police departments explaining why they’re doing it—police are more likely or
willing to do it. Court mandated changes generate a lot of resistance. Ocers
on the street probably don’t like it because it limits autonomy and they don’t
like being told what to do even if it’s their boss, but it it’s coming from within
the police organisation it’s seen as being legitimate.”
Academic, United States
Skogan’s research documents that outside interventions can be counter-productive when
they foster indifference or resistance within the police organisation and weaken internal
monitoring systems.
96
Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Justice has intervened in over
20 state and local law enforcement agencies through their powers to address ‘pattern and
practice’ of civil rights violations. These interventions have been criticised for being overly
legalistic and for focusing on substantive compliance rather than sustainable reform.
97
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
63
Interviewees suested it was ‘intuitive’ to resist change, particularly when it is ‘being
forced on people’, and identified various reasons why police may be reluctant to record
stops. As well as concerns about inefficiency and ‘unnecessary’ bureaucracy, they
identified the recording of stops as a source of considerable anxiety among officers, who
view it as a challenge to their autonomy, their sense of integrity and, ultimately, their
authority. An officer in Spain, where BWV is not common, explained:
“ The rst thing police believe is, if Spanish law does not require this and the
national police don’t have to do this, why must I? They think it must be two
things—either my bosses want to know how much I work or it might be because
I am a racist.”
Police Ocer, Spain
The focus of stop data collection on addressing racial bias tends to deepen officer
resistance, a factor many interviewees identified across all settings. The U.S. Department
of Justice noted that while recording police stops has many benefits, officers may resist
the implementation of the system because they feel insulted, particularly if they take it as
an accusation that they stop people based on their race.
98
“ Whenever you start to evaluate people, they will feel uneasy… The race issue
was a signicant factor in their reactions, but the two things go hand and
hand. The race dimension is there: ocers will go ‘you’re saying I’m racist’,
and it’s the law enforcement culture: ‘how dare you question me, we are
the police, don’t you trust me?’ Whenever you try and change things there’s
pushback, but the race dimension was an aggravating factor.”
Police Ocer, United States
There were similar dynamics in England and Wales, despite the introduction of statutory
legislation requiring recording. Fifteen years after the 1984 PACE Act, the inquiry into
the police investigation into the racist murder of 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence found a
combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism, and a failure of leadership
by senior officers.
99
The inquiry noted ‘inescapable evidence’ of a lack of trust between
the police and minority ethnic communities expressed in universal complaint about stop
and search as one of four areas where institutional racism was primarily apparent.
100
As part of its broad-based recommendations to create trust, the Lawrence Inquiry
recommended that existing regulations on stop and search be strengthened by requiring
that all police stops be recorded.
101
PACE was subsequently revised to abolish ‘voluntary’
stop-searches and to require officers to record stops in which they only ask the stopped
person to account for him or herself (actions, behaviour, presence, or possession of
anything). The reform agenda met with considerable resistance; many officers were
REGULATING POLICE STOP AND SEARCH
64
angered by the ‘accusation’ of ‘institutional racism’, which was widely considered as an
affront to their integrity and professionalism.
102
That anger extended to the new recording
requirement, which they saw as an externally imposed reform.
103
Police departments
effectively rebranded the recording of all police stops as an additional source of
intelligence rather than a way of improving monitoring and accountability.
104
Government-led attempts to reinvigorate the regulation of stop and search have prompted
the widespread adoption of technological methods of data collection across England
and Wales, reflecting a calculation that the perceived efficiencies of technical and less
bureaucratic approaches would lessen officer resistance. The transition to technological
approaches has, nonetheless, not been entirely straightforward, with concerns raised
about workload and timely data entry. An interviewee said:
“ There were two areas of resistance. One was the control room, because we’re
in a time where we’ve got lots of scal challenges for the public sector…
so decanting a new function into them which they don’t already have is
a challenge.… The other one was the ocers…. I think some ocers were
concerned that this was making a very simple thing more dicult to do for
them. And in a way it was, because in common with lots of forces, there were
quite a lot of shortcuts that ocers took to record searches, and quite often
they’d make a few scant details at the time in a notebook or something, and
then they’d add to those details later on after the interaction.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
However, these resistances did not prove decisive and were said to have dissipated as
officers and staff became familiar with the new approach: ‘now that officers have done it
[used a BWC] a few times and got used to it.… I think they’re relaxing into it and going, ‘do
you know this is fine, this is actually quite easy for us’.
Research conducted in the United States notes a similar pattern in which initial
resistance to the use of cameras in police cars gave way to widespread acceptance.
According to Harris, the use of ‘dash cams’ has become quite popular with police and
their departments as the benefits have become apparent: cameras have been found to
enhance officer safety, improve agency accountability, and reduce agency liability.
105
As
well as preserving evidence, officers report that recording increases their professionalism
in dealing with citizens and suspects. Interviewees anticipated that similar dynamics
would come into play with body-worn cameras.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
65
LEADERSHIP
A key factor in overcoming resistance is leadership. This was especially prominent in police
agencies that were recording stops where there was no external requirement to do so. A
case in which recording was introduced in one small Spanish police agency at the behest
of a then-sergeant, after he attended a presentation on racial profiling, illustrates this point:
“ We felt we had to learn from our mistakes to go forward. We said yes
because we are brave, we think nowadays police always have to rethink their
methodologies in all aspects; we have to innovate and develop.”
Police Ocer, Spain
The sergeant did not anticipate that skin colour would be the basis of profiling among
his agency: ‘A black person in [the city where he worked] is not a danger in the minds of
people in the same way as they are in the U.S. The stereotypes are different’. Rather, the
concern focused on stereotypes about dress and ethnicity with Arab people and Roma
people thought to be particularly vulnerable.
The sergeant adapted forms used in England and Wales to Spanish legal requirements and
began by piloting the forms with a small number of trusted colleagues. Although he noted
there was ‘a lot of resistance to the forms’, recording has been successfully embedded
into the life of the department: the form is covered in induction and training, officers
‘feel the form is part of the work’ and supervisors ‘tell their officers they have to do the
form’. This was partly achieved through performance management procedures: during the
implementation phase, forms were systematically checked against other records, including
fines and crime reports, and officers who had not submitted a form received a letter. Three
such letters in a single year became part of officers’ disciplinary records.
Similarly, an interviewee noted that resistant leadership can make reform difficult:
“ Often times this kind of activity is undertaken because of the threat of
litigation or because something happens in the community. This creates
a dierent dynamic, especially if the leadership feels it’s something they
shouldn’t do. If the leadership pushes it and feels you should be doing it—you
get resistance from ocer but you can mitigate it. If the leadership is dragged
to the table it’s a completely dierent dynamic.”
Police Ocer, United States
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
66
Changes of leadership may also present a significant threat to innovation and reform as
new leaders often bring their own priorities and may have little interest in completing or
maintaining projects implemented by their predecessors.
106
The experience of introducing
traffic stop recording in one U.S. city illustrates the point. Both the leadership of the
police chief and the voluntary nature of the initiative were identified as key factors in
overcoming resistance. A subsequent change in leadership lost much of the momentum
behind recording; data collection continued but was subject to little analysis and the
original emphasis on promoting internal and external accountability dissipated. Another
leadership change then reinvigorated the effort with greater sense of personal investment
revitalizing established procedures.
Similarly, in 2013, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services
noted non-compliance with PACE and ‘noticeable slippage’ in the level of attention
given to stop and search by senior officers since the 1999 Lawrence Inquiry report.
107
Subsequent reforms, including the requirement to map stop and search, have again
demanded the attention of senior officers, and some respondents suested that prior
defensive reactions were beginning to dissipate:
“ I think the thing is, we’ve now admitted, and I always use the [analog] of, if
you can’t admit you’re an alcoholic you can’t ever face it, and now at least
the job has admitted we had a problem with stop and search, and our senior
management at least has admitted it was a mess, and it is ltering down. It
was a humungous mess, and yes we are partially responsible.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Officers responsible for overseeing the implementation of the reforms noted that police
leaders set the tone for the organisation and helped ensure that officers and staff lived up
to expectations:
“ Well I think when you’ve got an ACC [Assistant Chief Constable] and indeed
the Chief Constable, the PCC [Police and Crime Commissioner] saying ‘we
need to get this sorted’, kind of everybody drops into line, because we are, at
the end of the day, we’re a hierarchical, disciplined organisation. The message
comes from the top and we get on with it.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
67
COMPLIANCE, MESSAGING, AND TRAINING
In addition to leadership, police agencies use a variety of approaches, often in
combination, to advance compliance and buy-in with the collection of stop data. These
range from strengthened auditing and oversight, sometimes through inclusion in existing
procedures, to more inclusive efforts to engage officers in the process to design and roll-
out new systems.
The use of technology can support compliance. Several police departments in England
and Wales used the push towards technological data capture as an opportunity to tighten
supervisory procedures and generate improved management information. Where stops
were recorded via the control room this was said to have the advantage of ‘closing off’
various ‘short-cuts’ because it meant officers had to complete the record at the time of
the encounter. In Spain, most of the agencies involved in piloting the recording of stops
established some quality control techniques to ensure completion, collection, and entry
of records, including comparing completed stop forms with records of radio calls made in
connection with police stops.
108
In one of the sites the control would routinely ask officers
for the number of the stop form when an identity check was being conducted, thereby
encouraging officers to complete the form when they called in the stop.
Disciplinary proceedings can also be used to enforce compliance, as long as stops and
forms are reviewed and officers held to account for failure to complete a form or to show
that they have met legal grounds for the stop. However, the use of disciplinary procedures
to motivate police staff may increase resistance to reform without wider efforts to support
officer understanding and acceptance of data collection. Policing reform processes have
highlighted the limitations of hierarchical, top-down structures and autocratic leadership
styles
109
in failing to enforce compliance and have raised questions about the quality
of interaction and communication between supervisors and officers, and its impact on
officers’ conduct. One U.S. officer reflected on this in his department: ‘We were very
matter of fact that officers had to do it. We worked through the command structure. I’d
do it a little differently now, I would do it more in partnership with staff, understanding
what their issues and fears are’.
110
This insight has led some to consider the potential of
procedural justice as a means of promoting change and encouraging compliance within
police organisations.
A study of an English police department, which focused on a community policing
initiative, found that an organisational justice approach enhanced officers’ identification
with the police organisation, increased positive views of community policing, and was
associated with greater self-reported compliance.
111
The authors concluded that ‘police
organisations might do well to give their officers and staff a voice in organisational change
programmes and ensure that managers and supervisors are seen to make fair decisions
and to communicate those decisions openly and honestly’.
112
A study focusing on the
use of force in Argentina found that officers’ perceptions of fair treatment by and trust in
supervisors were positively associated with (self-reported) compliance with regulations:
‘Our findings suest that a police force needs to ensure internal procedural justice in
order to be able to also function in a procedurally just way on the outside’.
113
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
68
Attempts to develop more cooperative approaches have led to a greater focus
on messaging, implementation processes, and training. For example, referencing
discrimination and racism can alienate officers. While the Lawrence Inquiry’s finding
of ‘institutional racism’ inflamed police opinion in England and Wales, police generally
endorsed the general principles underlying the recording of police stops. Many officers
supported the aim of increasing accountability, while those responsible for overseeing
stop-search could see the benefits of recording in providing people with a credible reason
for a stop and promoting fairness and efficiency.
114
It follows that initiatives framed as
promoting accountability more broadly are likely to gain greater cooperation from officers
than those specifically linked to discrimination and racism.
115
Similar concerns were evident in Fuenlabrada, where supervisors presented the recording
of stops to officers as a way of improving police/community relations by ensuring stops
were justified:
“The message to ocers was that the main target of introducing the form was
not to identify the roughest ocer but to improve relationships between police
and citizens. The rst message I gave out was that it doesn’t matter to me how
many people you ID check. Perhaps you have to check 100 or sometimes you
don’t do any. All that matters is you have a reason. If you have a reason—‘well
done’. There are two red lines we must not cross to ensure the form works. We
do not control your work through the form and we do not look for racist police
behaviour through this form. We do this through other means.”
Police Ocer, Spain
While other police agencies involved in piloting the recording of stops in Spain placed
greater emphasis on diversity and discrimination, Fuenlabrada’s distinctive approach was
identified as a possible reason for its success. An independent evaluation found that the
emphasis on improving the effectiveness of police stops and relations with the public
seemed to mitigate the potential for negative reactions from officers.
116
In addition to the messaging, agencies have adopted strategies to ensure that officers can
participate and have some voice in the development and implementation of new policies.
Fuenlabrada police piloted the use of the stop form and made adjustments based on
feedback from those involved before rolling out the policy across the department: this
process was said to have helped identify potential barriers to successful implementation,
including officers’ sensitivities about the implication that they might be racist.
An English police department created a practitioners’ group consisting of constables
and sergeants to develop the new stop-search form, which was much shorter and more
tightly focused on the regulatory requirement than the one it replaced. The West Midlands
and Warwickshire-West Mercia police implemented their new approach in phases,
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
69
enabling the project team to carefully manage the process and build support. In the initial
implementation phase, questionnaires were distributed to officers and radio operators in
West Midlands to gain feedback on the new arrangement and adjustments were made to
simplify the process.
“ When we implemented it, [the project-lead] and the guy who did a lot of work
on the actual system, they went out to each of the stations, so we rolled it out
one by one if you like, went out and worked in the control room alongside
the radio operator and said ‘this is how easy it is, look at it’, and they went
‘blimey, that’s it’.… It was a staged rollout. What we didn’t want was the
system to fail, by going live across the force on day one. So it was staggered
rollout… and obviously the word spread very quickly around the usability of
the system, how easy it was and there were no massive issues about rolling it
out in the contact centres.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
This inclusive approach was considered to have been crucial in supporting successful
implementation: ‘we’ve had absolutely nothing negative, there’s been a lot of positive data
out of the local police units—hugely positive’.
Police leaders advancing reforms emphasise that training alone will not change behaviour,
but that training is an important secondary reform tool. Police agencies have developed
training designed to promote recording and overcome resistance among officers. Early
initiatives in the United States were accompanied by training that explained the purpose
of recording to officers, focusing on the importance of professionalism and, in some
cases, providing reassurances that data would not be used to discipline individual
officers.
117
Training for all front-line officers supported the introduction of stop forms in Fuenlabrada,
covering how people feel when they are stopped, how police stops relate to human
rights, and why this is important to policing. Representatives from non-governmental
organisations, such as Amnesty International and minority associations, were involved in
delivering the training.
West Midlands Police developed a bespoke training programme to support the
introduction of its new approach. This programme was said to have ‘transformed the way
people saw stop and search and used it operationally’. A training video was developed
that demonstrated how the new system worked and was supported by a ‘really calm,
controlled message’ from the assistant chief constable, who said, ‘it’s not your right
to do stop and search. I want you to use it, but I want you to use it proportionately,
effectively’. Further, face-to-face training was delivered locally as part of the phased
implementation process. The training was developed in consultation with practitioners
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
70
from West Midlands and other forces as well as local community representatives. The
content included a ‘massive focus on being civil’ because ‘a lot of complaints’ concerned
rude conduct by officers and attention was drawn to the various national and local
bodies involved in scrutinising police conduct. Local officers—‘peers’, sergeants, police
constables and inspectors—and community members selected as credible messengers
delivered the training. An officer who attended the training said:
“ [It is] really emotional to eectively be told [by your peers] ‘you’re doing it
wrong, mate. You might think you’re a good street cop, but actually you aren’t
doing it right. To some extent, you’re breaking the law’. And then I think really
the icing on the cake was, where we could, we brought in people from local
communities.… We had a black guy who’d grown up in [name of local area],
you know, openly said that until he was about 23 he didn’t trust the police. And
he said this is what it feels like in my neighbourhood when you do stop and
search. This is what it means to us.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
PROCUREMENT AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
The movement towards IT platforms for an all data and records management is an
inexorable trend in modern policing, and the use of technology appears to enhance police
buy-in to stop data collection systems more than paper or radio dispatch systems do.
While some data collection may continue to use paper forms or radio dispatch-based
systems, it seems reasonable to expect that apps and other IT systems will dominate,
raising some challenges around the procurement and development of IT infrastructure.
If mobile devices are going to be used to create the records, officers require hardware
(unless they already have it), software, and data storage. Police departments are either
purchasing ready-made products ‘off-the-shelf’ or contracting services from external
vendors. In either case, police agencies are having to adapt and act like ‘customers’. As an
officer noted:
“ In the past, police have probably been too quick to buy o the shelf products
without really knowing what we need. We’re trying to replicate what you have
in smart technolog at home for policing and are becoming better informed as
the customer. We understand what the business user requirements are, rather
than trying to shoehorn our needs into existing products.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
71
Purchasing mobile devices was considered to have the disadvantage that they quickly
become outdated. As one officer noted, ‘the forces that invested in BlackBerry [devices],
well, where’s that left them now? You’re left in the past, aren’t you?’ Interviewees
suested that police forces are increasingly contracting services or writing equipment
upgrades into contracts to avoid this problem. But they noted that there is no real way
to avoid paying for upgrades; these measures just write the costs into the arrangement.
Some police departments have explored ne the possibility of encouraging officers to
use their own personal devices (e.g. mobile phones) at work in return for part payment
of the bill. Although in the United States, at least some forces have determined this is
unacceptable because an officer’s entire mobile phone, including personal data, could
become ‘discoverable’ during an investigation into misconduct.
Contracting external suppliers to provide and maintain bespoke databases has also
caused problems. Complaints focused on the difficulties of making adjustments to the
database because of the cost and time delays. One of the English forces involved in the
early piloting of technological data-capture needed to make changes to deal with errors
at the data-entry stage and to ensure compliance with Home Office requirements. A
supervisor recalled that in response the external provider ‘quoted us a lot of money for
what was semantics’ and ‘we can’t justify spending public money in that way’. As a result,
the department considered going back to paper-based methods, and ultimately developed
a bureaucratic remedy for the problem they might have addressed technologically.
Another police department involved in the initial piloting reported a similar experience
when it wanted to amend its database to allow sergeants to authorise the record before it
was finalised:
“ [A technolog company was] involved in the design of [our system] and they
ain’t cheap at anything. So I went to the technical person [at the company]
and said… ‘Right, we’ve got to get a solution to this. What we need is a system
where the sergeant can access this and type in comments on the information
that’s provided’. And about nine months later I got a response saying, ‘yeah we
had a look at this’, and they’d got this massive report, huge report, and they
quoted us like £50,000. I said: ‘Well we don’t want a new system.… We just
want to know if the sergeant can go on it’. It was laughable.… So we couldn’t do
it… The cost prohibited it. It was £50,000 to put in a tick box.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Partly in response to such difficulties, other police departments had developed their own
databases internally:
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
72
“ Well I mean, in terms of developing this, we have deliberately not involved
any external organisation… because of cost and licencing and updates. [We
use] a system we’ve developed inside the force using our own assets, and I have
to say, given the experience we’ve had previously with… some companies…
it’s been a blessing.... I think my own personal experience is, if you involve an
external company, you’re beholden to them to a certain extent. You have to
pay annual update, licencing fees, update fees, if you want to change anything
there’s a cost to it. It isn’t going to happen there and then. So in some ways it’s
restricted. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t work with that, but we made the
conscious decision to go alone on this, and that has been one of the strengths.
Because it’s within our ability to deliver, we didn’t need anybody.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
One police department in the United Kingdom entered into a five-year partnership with
a large management consultancy in order to improve its information and communication
systems, noting that they were ‘a partner rather than outsource’. This is an easier option
for a large police department. Other, smaller, departments were coming together to jointly
procure services hoping to share the design-cost and strengthen their negotiating position.
MANAGERIAL AND OVERSIGHT VALUE OF STOP DATA
Recording does not, in and of itself, constitute a solution to the potential difficulties
associated with police stops. According to a senior officer with strategic responsibility for
stop-search across one of the English police departments:
“ I think we wrongly believed that introducing a new recording system would
solve all the lack of knowledge and training.... [But] you end up using the new
system as poorly as you used the previous one.”
Police Ocer, England and Wales
Recording stops is best thought of as the beginning, rather than the end of a process,
and much depends on what is then done with the resulting data. Records are often used
to promote supervisory and corporate accountability, and can have value for operational
decision-making. The extent to which records may be used as of intelligence is a matter
of debate (see chapter 2), but they can be used as a source of management information,
enabling managers and supervisors to assess how efficiently resources are being
deployed. Where the location of a stop is recorded, it is possible to map police activity
and compare it with distribution of reported crime, supporting assessments of whether
stops and searches are being conducted in the right areas and at the right time or appear
to be the appropriate response to the nature of the reported crimes.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
73
CASE STUDY: NORTHAMPTONSHIRE POLICE
REASONABLE GROUNDS PANEL
In 2014, the Northamptonshire Police (UK) introduced a “Reasonable Grounds Panel” (RGP) to monitor
and improve its use of stop and search. The panel represents an innovative approach to providing
accountability and operationalising the requirements that all stops meet ‘reasonable suspicion’ and
that communities are actively engaged in the process of review laid out in the national guidance. Most
notably, perhaps, the panel process involves community members in the assessment of individual
stop and search encounters and includes a clear set of organisational responses where use of the
powers is deemed unsatisfactory.
A selection of stop-search grounds that may fall short of the requirement for reasonable suspicion are
put before a panel of police officers and members of the public who deliberate and decide whether or
not each meets the requirement for reasonable suspicion. For each case, the grounds are presented
in anonymised form so members do not know the personal details or characteristics of the searching
officer or the person searched. The panel decides whether or not the grounds are ‘reasonable’ based
on a vote. Unfavourable decisions lead to action based on an escalating scale of development: (1)
an email outlining the causes of concern to the officer and his or her supervisor, (2) a one-to-one
coaching session with the officer, (3) suspension of stop-search activity until the officer can complete
a personal development plan and (4) referral to the Professional Standards Department.
The panel has established a mechanism for assessing the use and supervision of the powers and
encouraging a more circumspect use of the stop-search across the police department. It meets the
requirement for public scrutiny and feeds into a process of professional development for officers who
fall short of the expected standard. As well as providing greater oversight of stop-search, the panel
involves a range of community members in an active process of decision-making, operationalising the
principle of ‘policing by consent.’ By engaging police and public in a common enterprise, the panel
engendered mutual trust and confidence. Community participants describe valuing the sense of
involvement, while police participants said they came away feeling ‘supported’ and ‘appreciated.’ The
cooperative nature of the contact challenged public conceptions of the police and police conceptions
of the public, creating a greater sense of proximity and reciprocity.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services has highlighted the
Reasonable Ground Panel as an example of good practice.*
*Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services [HMICFRS] (2017a) PEEL: Police legitimacy (including
leadership) 2017 - An inspection of Northamptonshire Police, London: HMICFRS. https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/
wp-content/uploads/peel-police-legitimacy-2017-northamptonshire.pdf [Accessed February 10, 2018].
Open Society Justice Initiative (2018), Regulating Police Stop and Search: An Evaluation of the Reasonable Grounds Panel, New
York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: http://osf.to/RGP
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
74
While stop data is often viewed as a managerial tool, the key rationale for and function
of stop data collection is to support efforts to address the frequency and nature of
contact with members of the public. In order for stop data to serve this purpose it must be
shared with the public, and structures must be created for engagement and discussions,
including a public role in holding police to account for their use of stop-search powers.
“ We wanted to do more than collect and analyse data. If the information
indicates people are being targeted, what do you do? We introduced training to
help sta stop doing it. We developed a community engagement strateg, but
there was no road map. Collecting the data was a jumping o point. We aimed
to promote a more accurate conversation with the community.”
Police Ocer, United States
In the United States, one department developed a workshop format to find solutions
to the challenge of racial profiling by promoting what a police officer called ‘an open
and honest dialogue between law enforcement and the communities they are sworn to
serve and protect’. In Spain, a local police force accompanied internal monitoring and
statistical analysis of stop records with ongoing dialogue with citizens’ associations,
minority associations, and non-governmental organisations. In England and Wales, PACE
requires that stop-search records facilitate accountability (see chapter 1), although Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that practices
for community engagement varied greatly between police departments. In 2013, half the
police departments were doing nothing, and many outreach efforts were characterised as
typically corporate in their approach: circulating department-level statistical information
through the media or department web sites, public meetings, and scrutiny groups
with community groups with little structure for feedback or deeper engagement and
accountability.
118
Accountability of individual officers is typically treated as an internal
matter and little room is left for community members to call individual officers to
account over specific incidents. However, there are several police departments that have
developed innovative scrutiny panels that allow members of the public to use stop data
to consider broadly how stops are being used across the department area and assess
individual records to review the quality of specific stops.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
75
6. CONCLUSION
The recording of police stops is an important mechanism that can promote accountability.
Police agencies wishing to document their use of ID checks, stops, and searches in order
to monitor and improve the fairness and effectiveness with which they use these powers
may use any of the three methods discussed here: pen and paper forms, radio dispatch
systems, or mobile devices. Body-worn video however, will not address this aim, as it does
not generate the disaregated quantitative data needed to analyse stop practices.
Although often viewed as ‘old-fashioned’, paper and pen methods of recording represent
a simple and relatively effective way of collecting stop data. The clear benefit of paper-
based systems is the ease with which the officer can provide a full copy of the record
to the person stopped at the time. This offers reassurance that the person is not being
unfairly targeted and conveys a message that their rights are being respected. As well as
supporting on-the-spot accountability, paper-based recording has the added advantage
of being affordable. Unless the necessary equipment is already available, technological
approaches involve significant set-up costs. Where police agencies are unable to make
such an investment, paper-based methods provide a viable alternative.
Radio dispatch-based systems have the advantage of exploiting existing technology
and practice, while fitting more naturally into the process of conducting a stop. Officers
typically call dispatch and control rooms prior or during a stop, so data collection systems
can be integrated into existing behaviour. While there are still start-up costs to integrating
new features, and increased demands made of control room staff, those involved in
implementing this approach felt it was workable, efficient, and replicable. Radio systems
encourage officers to make a record at the time and to fully articulate the grounds in front
of the person stopped; they also give police agencies the option of recording exchanges
between officers and back office staff, providing immediate supervision.
Police agencies increasingly use mobile phone apps and IT systems to collect stop data
and represent a streamlined, real-time method of data capture. Police officers view
them positively and they allow for automatic geo-coding and direct data entry improving
accuracy. These approaches were said to promote tighter supervision and management.
However, creating an infrastructure to support the recording of stops presents a number
of challenges around system design, cost, software development, and the role of
commercial interests.
Both radio dispatch and mobile technological data collection approaches are less well-
suited to providing on-the-spot accountability to members of the public. Technological
approaches do not produce a physical record that officers can easily present to the
subject of a stop. Alternative arrangements can be made to enable those stopped to get a
complete record of the stop-search after the event, but they typically increase the costs
of accessing the information and potentially compromise privacy (where people need
to give personal details to access the record). Making a full copy of the record available
electronically and/or by providing a receipt that includes a written summary of the
grounds for the stop may offset these weaknesses.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
76
In a practice related to, but not an effective substitute for, stop recording, the use of body-
worn cameras to record encounters between the police and the public is an emerging and
increasingly common practice. Video footage may help to resolve disagreements over what
happened in specific incidents, but the scope of its value for accountability remains under
assessment. Body-worn cameras are not well suited to generating statistical information
about police stops or to providing the person stopped with a record of the encounter,
which is why other forms of recording are necessary to capture this data.
As this research shows, each of the methods of recording have different strengths and
weaknesses. The choice of recording system will reflect both the priorities and dynamics
of the given context, and the reasons driving the adoption of stop recording. If a police
agency is upgrading its IT infrastructure, there may be clear value to including stop
recording in that process and embedding it in the agency’s core business processes.
If recording is primarily focused on public accountability to the persons stopped, pen-
and-paper has the important advantage that it provides a full record at the time of the
stop, despite seeming old-fashioned to many officers. Whichever system a department
implements, it must be carefully be analysed not only for its feasibility and to make sure
that the system’s weak points (and every system has them) are understood and explicitly
compensated for in the process of design and implementation. The design process should
reflect considerations around accountability (‘on-the-spot,’ supervisory, or corporate),
bureaucracy, and compliance from the beginning.
Recording police stops should not be seen as a narrow technical exercise. Effective
recording depends on a broader set of human and system factors, including leadership,
active management, and officer compliance. Regardless of how stops are recorded,
some level of resistance should be anticipated. While the support of police leaders is
essential to generate organisational ownership, hierarchical and top-down methods
of implementation are unlikely to ensure active compliance across the board. There is
emerging evidence that procedural justice—the belief that fair procedures support fairer
and more widely accepted outcomes—provides a useful means of promoting change
and encouraging compliance within police organisations. Regarding the recording of
stops, this means that management must think carefully about associated messaging,
as well as including practitioners in development and design processes, negotiating
with those responsible for implementing new policies and practices, ensuring that the
implementation process is manageable and sustainable, and clearly communicating the
rationale for the changes to front-line officers.
Research has shown that the public, particularly those from ethnic minority communities,
value stop recording as a means of enhancing accountability and creating possibilities
for making complaints. Implementation of recording systems must equally reflect
communities in the development and design processes. It is essential that systems are
based around a solid understanding of local community concerns so that the system
designed can begin to respond directly to those concerns. For example, in jurisdictions
where there are concerns about ethnic profiling, stop data collection systems that do
not collect ethnic data will not respond to those concerns and are likely to exacerbated
mistrust. The collection of personal data, particularly ethnic data, is complex and must
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
77
be negotiated with local communities to respect the right to self-identification and build
public confidence in the data collection process.
Simply making a record of police stops does little to address the potential problems
with such encounters and much depends on what departments do with the resulting
information. Giving a copy of the record to the person stopped at the time of the
encounter provides on-the-spot accountability and offers a practical way of achieving
some of what procedural justice demands. Stop recording can structure consistency and
promote a discussion about use of stops to ensure impartiality and neutrality. Providing
information about how to complain can support those stopped to feel they have a voice
in the process. Records also support internal monitoring and supervision. Records can
ensure that police leadership have a greater understanding of how their officers are using
stop-searches to manage both individual officers’ use of their powers and departments’
strategic management of their resources and focus. External accountability is often
framed in corporate terms, prompting policies in which agencies simply distribute general
statistical information with little meaningful exchange about what that data means and
little incorporation of community feedback into police practices. Ideally, stop data should
be used as the basis for a discussion of local policing practices and priorities.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
78
APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1: RESOURCES ON DATA COLLECTION
• European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Preventing Unlawful Profiling
now and in the future: a guide, Luxembourg, Publications Office, December 2018,
http://fra.europa.eu/en/publication/2018/prevent-unlawful-profiling
• Hopkins, T. (2017) Monitoring Racial Profiling: Introducing a scheme to prevent
unlawful stops and searches by Victoria Police, Victoria: Flemington and Kensington
Community Legal Centre. Available at: http://www.policeaccountability.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2017/08/monitoringRP_report_softcopy_FINAL_22082017.pdf
• Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in
Reform from Five Spanish Police Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations.
Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/fair-
effective-police-stops-20160208.pdf
• Open Society Justice Initiative (2013) Reducing Ethnic Profiling in the European Union:
A Handbook of Good Practices. Available at: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/
publications/reducing-ethnic-profiling-european-union-handbook-good-practices
• Open Society Justice Initiative (2009) Addressing Ethnic Profiling by Police—A Report
on the Strategies for Effective Stop and Search (STEPSS) Project, New York: Open
Society Foundations. Available at: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/
addressing-ethnic-profiling-police
• Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling
Data Collection Systems: Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: U.S.
Department of Justice.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
79
APPENDIX 2: SAMPLE STOP FORMS
STOP FORM—Fuenlabrada Municipal Police, Spain
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
80
STOP FORM—Northamptonshire Police, United Kingdom
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
81
STOP FORM—Northamptonshire Police, United Kingdom (contiued)
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
82
STOP FORM—Northamptonshire Police, United Kingdom (contiued)
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
83
STOP AND SEARCH APP—West Midlands Police, United Kingdom
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
84
ENDNOTES
1 Tyler, T. R. (2006) ‘Legitimacy and Legitimation,’ Annual Review of Psychology, 57: 375–40; Tyler, T., Deutsch, M.,
Coleman, P.T., and Marcus, E.C. (2006) The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice, San Francisco:
John Wiley and Sons.
2 Stone, V., and Pettigrew, N. (2000) The Views of the Public and Stops and Searches, London: Home Office.
3 Delsol, R., and Shiner, M. (2015) Stop and Search: The Anatomy of a Police Power, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
4 StopWatch (2011) ‘‘Carry on Recording’’: Why Police Stops Should Still be Recorded, (London: StopWatch) at:
6. Available at: http://www.stop-watch.org/get-informed/research/carry-on-recording [Accessed September 29,
2015].
5 Tyler, T.R. and Huo, Y.J. (2002) Trust in the Law: Encouraging Public Cooperation with the Police and Courts,
New York: Russell Sage; Hough, M., Jackson, J. and Bradford, B. (2013) ‘Legitimacy, Trust and Compliance: An
Empirical Test of Procedural Justice Theory Using the European Social Survey’, in J. Tankebe and A. Liebling (eds)
Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: an International Exploration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6 Tyler, T. R. (2006) ‘Legitimacy and Legitimation’, Annual Review of Psychology, 57: 375–40.
7 Jackson, J., and Sunshine, J. (2007) ‘Public Confidence in Policing: A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective’, British
Journal of Criminology, 47(2): 214–233; Sharp, D., and Atherton, S. (2007) ‘To Serve and Protect? The Experiences
of Policing in the Community of Young People from Black and Other Ethnic Minority Groups’, British Journal of
Criminology, 47(5): 746-763.
8 Jackson, J., and Bradford, B. (2010) ‘What is Trust and Confidence in the Police?’ Policing: A Journal of Policy and
Practice, 4 (3): 241-248.
9 Stone, V., and Pettigrew, N. (2000) The Views of the Public and Stops and Searches, London: Home Office.
10 MORI (2004) The Views of the Public on the Phased Implementation of Recording Police Stops, London: Home
Office.
11 Greater transparency around complaints made about police conduct generally do not generate more complaints.
In Spain, where stop forms have been introduced with a receipt providing information on how to make a
complaint, complaints did not increase (Open Society Justice Initiative (2009) Addressing Ethnic Profiling by
Police: A Report on the Strategies for Effective Police Stop and Search Project, New York: Open Society Institute).
12 Shiner, M. (2006) National Implementation of the Recording of Police Stops, London: Home Office (unpublished).
13 Shiner, M. (2010) ‘Post-Lawrence Policing in England and Wales: Guilt, Innocence and the Defence of
Organisational Ego’, British Journal of Criminology, 50(5): 935-953.
14 Reiner, R. (2010) The Politics of the Police, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Shiner, M. (2010) ‘Post-Lawrence
Policing in England and Wales: Guilt, Innocence and the Defence of Organisational Ego’, British Journal of
Criminology, 50(5): 935-953.
15 Scarman, L.G. (1981) Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 2001, London: HMSO at: para. 3.110.
16 The idea that the people give their consent to be policed is a corner-stone of British policing philosophy since the
advance of modern policing in 1829 under Robert Peel.
17 Scarman, L.G. (1981) Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 2001, London: HMSO at: para. 4.50.
18 Reiner, R. (2010) The Politics of the Police, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at 212.
19 Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office, at
para. 1.1.
20 Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office, at:
para. 1.1.
21 Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office, at:
para.2.2.
22 Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office, at:
note. 28A.
23 Home Office (2015) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Codes of Practice, Code A, London: Home Office, at:
para. 5.4.
24 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: US Department of Justice.
25 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary [HMIC] (2013), Stop and Search Powers: Are the Police Using Them
Effectively and Fairly? London: HMIC.
26 May, T. (2014) ‘Stop and Search: Comprehensive Package of Reform for Police Stop and Search Powers, Oral
Statement to Parliament, April 30, 2014; https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-secretary-launches-best-
use-of-stop-and-search-scheme [Accessed October 8, 2015].
27 27 Reiner, R. (1985) The Politics of the Police, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
85
28 The End Racial Profiling Act or ERPA, has languished in the US Congress since 2004. If passed, this bill would
address the practice of racial profiling by law enforcement on five levels: first, it clearly defines the racially
discriminatory practice of racial profiling by law enforcement at all levels; second, it creates a federal prohibition
against racial profiling; thirdly, it mandates data collection so it will be possible to fully assess the true extent of
the problem; fourth, it provides funding for the retraining of law enforcement officials on how to discontinue and
prevent the use of racial profiling; and fifth, it holds accountable law enforcement agencies that continue to use
racial profiling.
29 Harris, D. (2013) ‘Across the Hudson: Taking the Stop and Frisk Debate Beyond New York City’, Legislation and
Public Policy, 16: 853-882.
30 Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).
31 State v. Pedro Soto, 734 A. 2d 350 (N.J.Super.Ct. Law. Div. 1996).
32 Wilkins v. Maryland State Police et al., Civil No. MJG-93-468 (D. Md.1993).
33 University of Michigan Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse at https://www.clearinghouse.net/detail.php?id=1044
[Accessed July 18, 2018].
34 Harris, D. (2013) ‘Across the Hudson: Taking the Stop and Frisk Debate Beyond New York City’, Legislation and
Public Policy, 16: 853-882.
35 New York Police Department training materials, cited in Office of the Attorney General (1999) The New York City
Police Department’s Stop and Frisk Practices: A Report to the People of the State of New York from the Office of
the Attorney General, New York: Office of the Attorney General, at: 64.
36 Harris, D. (2013) ‘Across the Hudson: Taking the Stop and Frisk Debate Beyond New York City’, Legislation and
Public Policy, 16: 853-882.
37 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: US Department of Justice.
38 Harris, D. (2013) ‘Across the Hudson: Taking the Stop and Frisk Debate Beyond New York City’, Legislation and
Public Policy, 16: 853-882.
39 The receipt is a business card with the name and badge number of the officer, and information on how to obtain
the body-worn camera footage and how to make a complaint (interview, 2018).
40 Harris, D. (2013) ‘Across the Hudson: Taking the Stop and Frisk Debate Beyond New York City’, Legislation and
Public Policy, 16: 853-882.
41 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: US Department of Justice.
42 Balko, R. (2013) Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, New York: Public Affairs.
43 Open Society Justice Initiative (2009) Ethnic Profiling in the European Union: Pervasive, Ineffective, and
Discriminatory, New York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/
reports/ethnic-profiling-european-union-pervasive-ineffective-and-discriminatory [Accessed July 18, 2018].
44 Open Society Justice Initiative (2009) Addressing Ethnic Profiling by Police—A Report on the Strategies for
Effective Stop and Search (STEPSS) Project, New York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: http://www.
opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/addressing-ethnic-profiling-police [Accessed July 18, 2018].
45 Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police
Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/
default/files/fair-effective-police-stops-20160208.pdf [Accessed July 18, 2018].
46 Police departments involved in the PIPE project include Pedrezuela, Castellón, A Coruña, Puertollano, Móstoles,
and Albacete.
47 Victoria Police Receipting proof of concept - evaluation report. Available at: http://www.police.vic.gov.au
retrievemedia.asp?Media_ID=123106 [Accessed July 18, 2018].
48 Rustin, M. (1991) The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture, (London: Verso) at
57.
49 Hopkins, T. (2017) Monitoring Racial Profiling: Introducing a scheme to prevent unlawful stops and searches
by Victoria Police, Victoria: Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre. Available at: http://www.
policeaccountability.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/monitoringRP_report_softcopy_FINAL_22082017.pdf
[Accessed: July 1, 2018].
50 Also see: Makkonen, T. (2016) European Handbook on Equality Data, 2016 Revision, Luxembourg: Office of the
European Union.
51 Hopkins, T. (2017) Monitoring Racial Profiling: Introducing a scheme to prevent unlawful stops and searches
by Victoria Police, Victoria: Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre. Available at: http://www.
policeaccountability.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/monitoringRP_report_softcopy_FINAL_22082017.pdf
[Accessed: July 1, 2018]; Lammy, D. (2017) The Lammy Review An independent review into the treatment of, and
outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System. Available at: https://
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/643001/lammy-
review-final-report.pdf [Accessed July 1, 2018].
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
86
52 Foster, L. Jacobs, L. and Siu, B. (2016), Race Data and Traffic Stops in Ottawa, 2013-2015: A Report on Ottawa and
the Police Districts. Available at: https://www.ottawapolice.ca/en/about-us/resources/.TSRDCP_York_Research_
Report.pdf [Accessed July 1, 2018]; StopWatch and the Open Society Justice Initiative (2013) Viewed With
Suspicion: The Human Cost of Stop and Search in England and Wales (New York: Open Society Foundations).
Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/viewed-suspicion-human-cost-stop-and-search-
england-and-wales [Accessed: July 1, 2018].
53 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: U.S Department of Justice.
54 Hopkins, T. (2017) Monitoring Racial Profiling: Introducing a scheme to prevent unlawful stops and searches
by Victoria Police, Victoria: Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre. Available at: http://www.
policeaccountability.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/monitoringRP_report_softcopy_FINAL_22082017.pdf
[Accessed: July 1, 2018].
55 Macpherson, W. (1999) Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence: Final Report.
London: The Stationery Office.
56 Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police
Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/
default/files/fair-effective-police-stops-20160208.pdf [Accessed July 18, 2018].
57 Delsol, R. and Shiner, M. (2006) ‘Regulating Stop and Search: A Challenge for Police and Community Relations
in England and Wales’, Critical Criminology, 14: 241-263; Fagan, J. (2016) ‘Terry’s original sin’ in The University of
Chicago Legal Forum, 43: 75-79.
58 Stone, V., and Pettigrew, N. (2000) The Views of the Public and Stops and Searches, London: Home Office.
59 Stone, V. and Pettigrew, N. (2000),The Views of the Public on Stops and Searches, London: Home Office.
60 Accenture BWV document, 2015. Available at https://www.accenture.com/t20160529T212029__w__/us-en/_
acnmedia/PDF-20/Accenture-Bodyworn-Cameras-Have-Arrived-Final.pdf [Accessed March 30, 2018]. Body-worn
cameras support the collection and documentation of evidence, recording what was viewed at a crime scene,
witness accounts, interrogations, and arrests. Officers can search video captured before, during, and after a
crime, providing an opportunity to look for further evidence or clues. Footage of faces and individuals at a crime
scene, or a vehicle license plate in the background, may reveal leads or guide police research. Video footage of
interviews with witnesses and suspects also creates an accurate record of what was said, which later can be
used in court. Police records made in their day-to-day work can be paired with video analytics to provide real-
time intelligence for officers in the field, supporting improved situational awareness, decision-making, and safety.
Data that officers capture about vehicles (make, model, colour, license plate number), as well as people (physical
features to attire), can be geocoded, timestamped and fed into a central operations data index. Combine this
data with analytics and you have a highly effective crime-fighting tool that can facilitate more effective response,
identify criminal patterns, and support preventive policing.
61 See Open SocietyJustice Initiative and Plataforma por la Gestion Policial de la Diversidad (2017), Toolkit for
the Analysis of Police Identifications: A guide to the practical analysis of police data in PIPE sites and beyond,
available at: http://osf.to/PIPE.
62 Home Office (2019) Police Powers and Procedures, England and Wales, year ending 31st March 2019,
London:Home Office.
63 Open Society Justice Initiative (2009), Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris,
New York: Open Society Foundations. Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/profiling-
minorities-study-stop-and-search-practices-paris [Accessed July 18, 2018].
64 Bowling, B. and Philips, C. (2007) ‘Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop
and Search’, The Modern Law Review, 70(6): 936-961.
65 MVA and Miller, J. (2000) Profiling Populations Available for Stops and Searches, Police Research Series Paper
131. London: Home Office; Ministry of Justice (2009), Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System 2007/08,
London: Ministry of Justice.
66 Delsol, R. and Shiner, M. (2006) ‘Regulating Stop and Search: A Challenge for Police and Community Relations in
England and Wales’, Critical Criminology, 14: 241-263.
67 MVA and Miller, J. (2000) Profiling Populations Available for Stops and Searches, Police Research Series Paper
131, London: Home Office; Waddington, P.A.J., Stenson, K. and Don, D. (2004) ‘In Proportion: Race, and Police
Stop and Search’, British Journal of Criminology, 44(6): 889-914.
68 Bowling, B. and Philips, C. (2007) ‘Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop
and Search’, The Modern Law Review, 70(6): 936-961.
69 Delsol, R. and Shiner, M. (2015) Stop and Search: the anatomy of a police power, (London: Palgrave).
70 See, for example, Lamberth Consulting, Analysis of Stop Data in Kalamazoo, available at: http://mediad.
publicbroadcasting.net/p/michigan/files/201309/KDPS_Racial_Profiling_Study.pdf [Accessed May 1, 2018].
71 Knowles, J, Persico, N. and Todd, P. (2001) ‘Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence,’ in Journal
of Political Economy, 109 (1): 223-209.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
87
72 Groer, J. and Ridgeway, G. Greg (2006) ‘Testing for Racial Profiling in Traffic Stops From Behind a Veil of
Darkness,’ in Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101(475): 878-887.73 Most recent report at file:///C:/
Users/rneild/Downloads/November%202017%20Connecticut%20Racial%20Profiling%20Report%20(1).pdf
[Accessed May 1, 2018].
73 Most recent report at file:///C:/Users/rneild/Downloads/November%202017%20Connecticut%20Racial%20
Profiling%20Report%20(1).pdf [Accessed May 1, 2018].
74 Novak, K. (2012) ‘Editor’s Introduction: Special Issue on Racial Profiling’ in Journal of Contemporary Criminal
Justice 28(2): 121.
75 Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police
Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations.
76 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: US Department of Justice.
77 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: US Department of Justice.
78 Police officer, England and Wales, Interview R.
79 Home Office (2007) National Manual of Guidance for the Police Use of Body Worn Video Devices, London: Home
Office.
80 Lum, C., Koper, C.S., Merola, L.M., Scherer, A., and Reioux, A. (2015). Existing and Ongoing Body Worn Camera
Research: Knowledge gaps and opportunities, Report for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Fairfax, VA:
Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, George Mason University.
81 National Institute of Justice (2012) A Primer on Body Worn Cameras for Law Enforcement, Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice.
82 National Institute of Justice (2012) A Primer on Body Worn Cameras for Law Enforcement, Washington, D.C.:
National Institute of Justice.
83 Ariel, B., Farrar, W.A., Sutherland, A. (2015) ‘The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and
Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial’, Journal of Quantitative Criminology,
31(3): 509-535.
84 Lum, C., Koper, C., Merola, L., Scherer, A. and Reioux, A. (2015) Existing and Ongoing Body Worn Camera
Research: Knowledge Gaps and Opportunities, Virginia: George Mason University Centre for Evidence-Based
Crime Policy.
85 Lum, C., Koper, C., Merola, L., Scherer, A. and Reioux, A. (2015) Existing and Ongoing Body Worn Camera
Research: Knowledge Gaps and Opportunities, Virginia: George Mason University Centre for Evidence-Based
Crime Policy. See detailed chart at 14—17.
86 See Harris, D. (2010) ‘Picture This: Body Worn Video Devices (‘‘Head Cams’’) as Tools for Ensuring Fourth
Amendment Compliancy by Police’, Legal Studies Research Paper Series, No. 2010-13, Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh School of Law.
87 Accenture BWV document, 2015. Available at https://www.accenture.com/t20160529T212029__w__/us-en/_
acnmedia/PDF-20/Accenture-Bodyworn-Cameras-Have-Arrived-Final.pdf [Accessed March 30, 2018].
88 See video analytics projections in: Video Analysis for Body-worn Cameras in Law Enforcement, Computing
Community Consortium, available at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.03130.pdf [Accessed March 30,
2018].
89 Police officer, United Kingdom, Interview H.
90 A database on U.S. state laws on BWV is available at http://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/
body-worn-cameras-interactive-graphic.aspx [Accessed July 18, 2018].
91 Glenza, J. (2014) ‘Body Cameras for Police Officers? Not so Fast, Say Researchers’, The Guardian, December 4,
2014; http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/04/body-cameras-police-eric-garner [Accessed October
29, 2015]; McLaughlin, E.C. (2014) ‘After Eric Garner: What’s Point of Police Body Cameras?’ CNN News, http://
edition.cnn.com/2014/12/04/us/eric-garner-ferguson-body-cameras-debate/ [Accessed October 29, 2015].
92 Useful U.S. resources include recommended standards for the use of BWV by the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) at https://www.aclu.org/other/model-act-regulating-use-wearable-body-cameras-law-enforcement,
and by the and the Constitution Project at http://constitutionproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/
BodyCamerasRptOnline.pdf. Also, the Leadership Conference (a coalition of civil rights organisations) has
developed a scorecard at https://www.BWVscorecard.org/ [All accessed July 18, 2018].
93 For example, the New York City budget included US$27.4 million over three years (2018—2020) to fund an
accelerated rollout of BWV. Funds cover purchasing body worn cameras, associated information technology
upgrades, and the build out of the space for the Body Worn Camera Units in the Risk Management, Information
Technology and Legal Bureaus. NYC official website of the City of New York, at https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-
the-mayor/news/071-18/de-blasio-administration-nypd-all-officers-patrol-wear-body-cameras-end-2018-#/0
[Accessed July 18, 2018].
94 Innes, M., and Chambers, M. (2013) Rebooting the PC: Using Innovation to Drive Smart Policing, London: Policy
Exchange.
THE RECORDING OF POLICE STOPS: METHODS AND ISSUES
88
95 Skogan, W.G. (2008) ‘Why Reform Fails’, Policing & Society, 18(1) 23-34 at 26; see also Reiner, R. (2010) The
Politics of the Police, Oxford: Oxford University Press and Savage, S. (2007) Police Reform, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
96 Stenning, P. (1995) Accountability for Criminal Justice: Selected Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto Press;
Skogan, W.G., (2008) ‘Why Reform Fails’, Policing & Society, 18(1) 23-34.
97 hanin, J., (2013) Implementing Pattern or Practice Police Reform: A Comparative Analysis, Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2208670 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2208670 [Accessed July 18, 2018]. More
recent interventions have in fact included greater attention to police-community relations and changes in
organizational culture.
98 McIntosh, T., and Harper, L. (2015) Backlash Develops Over Body Cam Footage, FreedomInfo, February 26, http://
www.freedominfo.org/2015/02/backlash-develops-over-release-of-body-cam-footage/ [Accessed October 29,
2015].
99 Macpherson, W. (1999) Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence, London: The
Stationery Office at. Para. 46.1.
100 Macpherson, W. (1999) Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence, London: The
Stationery Office at. Para. 45.6.
101 Macpherson, W. (1999) Inquiry into the Matters Arising from the Death of Stephen Lawrence, London: The
Stationery Office at. Para. 47.61.
102 Foster, J., Newburn, T., and Souhami, A. (2005) Assessing the Impact of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, London:
Home Office; McLaughlin, E. (2007) ‘Diversity or Anarchy? The Post-Macpherson Blues’, in M. Rowe (ed.) Policing
Beyond Macpherson: Issues in Policing, Race and Society, Collumpton: Willan; Shiner, M. (2010) ‘Post-Lawrence
Policing in England and Wales: Guilt, Innocence and the Defence of Organisational Ego’, British Journal of
Criminology, 50(5): 935-953.
103 Shiner, M. (2010) ‘Post-Lawrence Policing in England and Wales: Guilt, Innocence and the Defense of
Organisational Ego’, British Journal of Criminology, 50(5): 935-953.
104 Although the new recording requirement was dropped in 2011, a decade after the Lawrence Inquiry, the degree
of disproportionality in stop and search was even more marked. Bennetto, J. (2009) Police and Racism: What
Has Been Achieved 10 Years After the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report, London: Equality and Human Rights
Commission and Rollock, N. (2009) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry—Ten Years On: A Review of the Literature,
London: Runnymede Trust, and the HMIC (2013: 6) uncovered ‘alarming’ and ‘disturbing’ evidence of non-
compliance with PACE (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary [HMICFRS] (2013), Stop and Search Powers:
Are the Police Using Them Effectively and Fairly? London: HMICFRS.
105 Harris, D. (2010) ‘Picture This: Body Worn Video Devices (‘‘Head Cams’’) as Tools for Ensuring Fourth Amendment
Compliancy by Police’, Legal Studies Research Paper Series, No. 2010-13, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
School of Law.
106 Skogan, W.G. (2008) ‘Why Reform Fails’, Policing & Society, 18(1) 23-34.
107 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Service [HMICFRS] (2013), Stop and Search
Powers: Are the Police Using Them Effectively and Fairly? London: HMICFRS, at 8.
108 Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police
Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations.
109 Haas, N.E., Van Craen, M., Skogan. W.G, and Fleitas, D.M. (2015) Explaining Officer Compliance: The Importance
of Procedural Justice and Trust Inside a Police Organisation, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 15(4): 442-463.
110 Police officer, United States, Interview L.
111 Bradford B, Quinton P, Myhill A, and Porter, G. (2014) ‘Why do ‘‘The Law’’ Comply? Procedural Justice, Group
Identification and Officer Motivation in Police Organizations’, European Journal of Criminology 11(1): 110–132.
112 Haas, N.E., Van Craen, M., Skogan. W.G, and Fleitas, D.M. (2015) Explaining Officer Compliance: The Importance
of Procedural Justice and Trust Inside a Police Organisation, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 15(4): 442-463, at
457.
113 Haas, N.E., Van Craen, M., Skogan. W.G, and Fleitas, D.M. (2015) Explaining Officer Compliance: The Importance
of Procedural Justice and Trust Inside a Police Organisation, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 15(4): 442-463, at
457.
114 Shiner, M. (2006) National Implementation of the Recording of Police Stops, London: Home Office (unpublished).
115 Delsol, R. and Shiner, M. (2006) ‘Regulating Stop and Search: A Challenge for Police and Community Relations in
England and Wales’, Critical Criminology, 14:241-263.
116 Open Society Justice Initiative (2015) Fair and Effective Police Stops: Lessons in Reform from Five Spanish Police
Agencies, New York: Open Society Foundations.
117 Ramirez, D., McDevitt, J., and Farrell, A. (2000) A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems:
Promising Practices and Lessons Learned, Washington: U.S. Department of Justice.
118 Delsol, R. and Shiner, M. (2006) ‘Regulating Stop and Search: A Challenge for Police and Community Relations in
England and Wales’, Critical Criminology, 14:241-263.
The Open Society Justice Initiative uses the law to promote and defend justice and human
rights, through litigation, advocacy, research, and technical assistance. Working as part of the
Open Society Foundations, our staff are based in Abuja, Berlin, Brussels, The Hague, London,
Mexico City, New York, Paris, Santo Domingo and Washington DC.
