Confronted by someone you believe could be carrying a knife, gun or enough drugs to kill a group of addicts, as a police officer what would you think is the best way to proceed? To be professional and polite, but nevertheless firm and unyielding?
Or to ensure you were “less aggressive” and were “not bringing bad energy” as you sought to search them?
In this new mad world of appeasement to criminals and a hobbled judiciary, you won’t be surprised to hear that it is decreed to be the latter, which was also granted fresh impetus last week with the publication of a new ‘charter’ concerning the vital policing tool of stop and search.
The hugely questionable idea of this charter was one of the toxic results of the review carried out in 2023 by Baroness Casey which, in the eyes of many, did for policing what unlimited effluent does for our water supply.
She decreed the Met was over-policing but also under-protecting London’s black population.
Predictably, the response to the findings of this career ‘quangocrat’ appears to have bowed to pressure from minority groups and “community leaders” who complain that these powers also “unfairly” target black and mixed-race, mostly male youngsters.
However, they seem to blithely ignore the tragedy that the majority of victims who lose their lives to knife and gun crime on London’s streets — and in many other cities across the country such as Birmingham and Manchester — are young black males and, according to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Mark Rowley, it is black people who ask him the most often to ramp up stop and search.
“I’ve had the parents of young black males who have lost their lives weep as they plead with me to increase stop and search for the safety of their other children,” Sir Mark hauntingly told me on my breakfast radio show late last year.
Candidly, these so-called “experts” and others who choose to tell the police how to do their jobs are likely to have zero experience of actually doing the job and probably couldn’t nick themselves shaving — but that doesn’t stop them handing down their dodgy directives and ill-informed advice.
The reality is, not for the first time, to be found in the numbers. As the number of stop and searches fell in London by 17% to the year ending in January of this year, the number of people losing their lives to knife and gun crime increased. And in the last four years the Met reports 17,500 weapons have been seized through stop and search.
Does no one get the significance of these figures? Or do they REALLY want those thousands of knives and guns still out there? The tragedy is that all too often it is the life of a young black male that ebbs away on a street of the city as these hand-wringing apologists pause and pontificate.
