Racist and traumatising: inside a Section 60 suspicionless stop and search operation

Officers searched innocent children, disproportionately targeted people of colour and undermined their anti-racism reforms during a 48-hour police operation in February. Their narrative that it was an effective knife-crime deterrent, done with consent, is misleading.

Illustrations: Sam Knock

No to Section 60 7th August, 2024

Sean Morrison

Darrian Williams was stabbed in Easton on 14 February. The 16-year-old stumbled from Rawnsley Park to Stapleton Road before collapsing in Old Market, where passers-by rushed to help him before emergency services arrived.

He died at the scene, becoming the third teenage boy to be fatally stabbed in Bristol this year, after Mason Rist and Max Dixon, aged 15 and 16, were killed in Knowle West on 27 January. Since then, a 30-year-old man was also knifed to death in Grosvenor Road, St Paul’s, on 5 March.

At vigils, community meetings, and in the council’s chambers, there were growing calls for more to be done to end the violence. In response, Avon and Somerset Police increased the visibility of officers on the streets and began regular meetings with residents in the areas impacted.

But following Darrian’s death, they decide to make use of a power that’s widely condemned, not just by campaigners and watchdogs, but youth and community workers, as an ineffective tool that leads to human rights violations: racial profiling and traumatising children.

Police chief Sarah Crew, acknowledging this power’s controversy, said it was used with community consent and claimed, firmly, that it was an effective deterrent. This narrative, however, parroted by the then-candidates for the region’s Police and Crime Commissioner, is strongly disputed.

A radicalising event

Known as Section 60, the powers allow officers to stop and search people without any suspicion they have committed a crime. It’s rarely used in Avon and Somerset – elsewhere, like in London and Manchester, it’s more common – but the fact that it’s used at all is a concern for many.

The operation began at 5pm on 15 February, almost a full day after Darrian’s death, and lasted for 48 hours.The zone marked out for searches included the city centre, St Paul’s, Easton, Eastville, Ashley Down, Temple Meads and Fishponds. Most searches happened in Castle Park, but people were also stopped in Stapleton Road, Trinity Road and Goodhind Street – in and around St Paul’s and Easton.

A question on some people’s lips was: why use Section 60 now, in racialised communities where people already feel heavily overpoliced, and not weeks earlier in the majority-white area of Knowle West, when Max and Mason, two white boys of a similar age, were also fatally stabbed?

Before and after the operation, police held meetings in the local community, including at St Agnes Church in St Paul’s. Leigh Mckenna, a youth worker in the area, says police told meeting attendees that the power was used with the consent of the community – but that was far from the reality of the situation.

“[The church] was literally filled to the brim, and no one in that room was supportive of [Section 60] other than the police,” he says. “I don’t doubt that…some people…would have been, but they wouldn’t have if the police were transparent about how it’s ineffective, and the disproportionality involved.”

“If [police] suggest to parents, to community members, that it would be an effective measure, particularly when tensions are heightened, they will be desperate for any action to be taken, and of course they will believe and trust in the police,” he adds.

Black people are almost nine (8.7) times more likely to be searched than white people under suspicionless Section 60 powers, according to the latest Home Office data. Under regular stop and search powers, Black people are 5.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, the same figures show.

During February’s operation, police searched kids as young as 10, and the force’s own data shows they disproportionately targeted people of colour. Of the 33 people searched, 14 were white, 12 were Black, six were mixed heritage and one was Asian. They found no knives or other weapons.

“Traumatising young people who aren’t involved in the violence, with this arbitrary use of Section 60, it isn’t at all contributing to improving safety,” says Mckenna, who supported one of the young people who were searched. The teenager had been on his way home from school. 

“He got searched and nothing was found. It made him really angry, and when I asked him why, he expressed that the only reason he got stopped and searched was because he was Black.

“He had been a victim of serious youth violence less than a month before this,” Mckenna adds. “He explained he doesn’t always feel safe in the community, nor does he feel like the police are there to protect him.”

Mckenna adds that these searches can have a deep and lasting impact on young people: “It can create issues with power, it can be disenfranchising, to the point where they literally don’t feel like they are welcome in wider society. When young people don’t feel appreciated, they’re being unfairly targeted, they essentially lose some of their resilience, engage less with things that are positive, and conform to the labels and expectations given to them.

“Having these adversarial relationships with the police at a young age,” he says. “It can actually affect some of their own expectations of themselves in the longer term. Being stopped and searched, in a way that makes you feel dehumanised and traumatised, it can be a radicalising event.”

Mckenna says that, on these grounds, he would support a commitment from the police to not use Section 60 again. He points to a super complaint lodged by the Criminal Justice Alliance, calling for the government to repeal the “harmful, ineffective and unnecessary” power.

He feels there could be a place for stop and search more generally, though, if the disproportionality of it could be addressed, as the police have committed to do as part of their ‘Race Matters’ plan. Reforms to the tactic are being rolled out following the chief constable Sarah Crew’s acknowledgement last year that her force is institutionally racist.

But how meaningful can these reforms be, if police continue to use repressive tactics under Section 60, which is widely considered to be a racist power?

More bored than horrified

“You might be thinking that your chief [constable] is saying you’re all racist,” Chief Inspector Vicks Hayward-Mele tells a lecture theatre full of, as far as I can see, all white officers, referring to the chief constable’s announcement last year.

Hayward-Mele is Avon and Somerset Police’s stop and search lead. She authorised the Section 60 operation in February, and a subsequent one in June in response to another stabbing in Easton. The force also used Section 60 on 3 August, in preparation for a far-right demo and counter protest – but data on the outcome of this is not yet available.

“You might have experienced, during a search, someone saying ‘you’re stopping me because I’m Black,’” she tells the group, at the stop and search training session the Cable was invited to observe, at the force’s headquarters in Portishead.

“By the way, as well intentioned as it might be, please do not refer to the fact that you have a Black friend. It might seem like an olive branch but it isn’t.”

Her tone is a light one, and until now her presentation has been punctuated with occasional laughter. But suddenly it feels like she’s hit a nerve with some of the officers in the room.

Not everyone is on board with the direction the chief constable is taking the force in. The Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, said Crew’s institutional racism acknowledgement would “drive a divide between our officers and the communities this is intended to assist”.

So however well-meaning and progressive this new stop and search policy might be – it’s an attempt by the force to promote “fair and respectful” searches, addressing disproportionality and accountability in line with their anti-racism plans – surely it won’t mean much if the officers using it aren’t on board?

Hayward-Mele describes how some officers, in the wake of the chief constable’s statement last year, have been scared to search Black people. “We want you to use your powers with confidence,” she tells the group, adding that she would support officers fully if stops and searches are done by the book.

These training sessions are being delivered to all front-line officers, and scrutiny panels will review stop searches going forward, to identify learnings, using body-worn camera footage as evidence.

On Section 60 specifically, Hayward-Mele doesn’t say all that much. She tells the group that she reviews every single search performed during suspicionless search operations like the ones in Bristol in February and June. 

She throws out a trivia question on the number of complaints the force gets about stop and search. “Between 10 and 15 complaints a year,” is the answer. “That’s mad,” I hear one officer whisper to his colleague – it’s far less than anyone in the room expected.

“It might be because they don’t trust us so they don’t trust the complaints process, or it might be that there’s this myth that police get stop and search wrong all the time,” Hayward-Mele says. I get the sense she reckons it’s the latter.

There were moments in the presentation that made my blood boil, particularly during a section on strip searches, when the chief inspector made reference to the case of ‘Child Q’, a 15-year-old Black girl who was strip searched after she was wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis at her school in London in 2020.

Hayward-Mele, after opening this section of the presentation with a joke about how she never expected her career to take the direction of listing genital parts, added: “Don’t worry, we’re not doing role plays,” before going on to describe how officers had conducted strip searches in inappropriate places.

When the presentation was over, the floor was thrown open to questions. Not one officer in the room had any, and they left, back to their duties presumably, looking more bored than horrified by a lecture that covered police misconduct, racism, and the trauma involved when they get things wrong.

Systematic abuse of power

“Police should be given a better understanding of the history of policing, the generational trauma it has inflicted on Black people,” says Dayton Powell. He points to how the origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the “Slave Patrol” in the Carolinas in the early 1700s, whose objective was to squash slave uprisings and return runaway slaves to their owners.

Powell, 42, is speaking at a round table discussion with the Cable, on the topic of overpolicing of the Black community, specifically in Easton and St Paul’s, and the impact of stop searches and Section 60.

As a Black man and a father, he says he faces the dilemma of not wanting to traumatise his child by telling him the police are “out to get him”, while needing to prepare him for the reality. He says that while policing has improved since he was younger, racism in the force is still widespread.

He shows the group a video of a young Black boy being detained by police in St Paul’s during an unofficial Carnival event in July – held after this year’s event was cancelled. 

The teenager looks confused as he is surrounded by at least six officers and put in handcuffs, as onlookers shout “he’s 14”, and “it’s not him”.

Powell, who was present for the incident, says: “I heard people saying that the police had clotheslined him off his pushbike. There was one officer in particular being extremely aggressive, verbally and physically. I felt like the kid needed protection.”

A teenager at the roundtable adds: “This kind of thing is happening all the time, this is how the police are treating Black kids… pure victimisation.” 

A spokesperson for the police later confirmed to the Cable that, in a case of mistaken identity, officers tackled the boy, arrested and restrained him for ten minutes before letting him go. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating the incident.

“We understand and recognise that cases of mistaken identity can be distressing, especially when they involve children, and have a significant impact on the communities we serve,” the police spokesperson adds.

The police had mistaken the boy for a much older man, age 30, who had been banned from the area as part of a Criminal Behaviour Order. It was a clear case of adultification, which Black children are disproportionately victims of.

Disproportionality is present in all types of stop and search, and Jodie Bradshaw, Policy Advocacy Lead for police accountability group StopWatch says police forces have never been able to explain it.

On Section 60 specifically, she adds: “But in addition to that, it’s woefully ineffective, so there’s this really rather disconcerting inverse correlation between the volume of suspicionless searches and arrest rate.”

Nationally, in the year ending March 2023, 5% of Section 60 searches resulted in an arrest, up from 3% the previous year. And in roughly 71% of stop and searches, the outcome was recorded as needing ‘no further action’, similar to in recent years.

“And the disproportionality in targeting Black children, young, racialised people, is nothing short of a human rights violation,” Bradshaw tells the Cable.

A misleading narrative

The Cable, after observing her stop and search training session, sits down with Avon and Somerset Police lead on the tactic to find out more – specifically in relation to the Section 60 operation she authorised in February.

Hayward-Mele says the powers were brought in following “consultation with stakeholders and community leaders” who told them they wanted the police to do more to keep young people safe. But did those ‘stakeholders’ and community leaders directly consent to the use of Section 60? 

Were they given the full knowledge that officers would likely disproportionately target people of colour, search children as young as 10, and that statistics show these searches are not just an ineffective deterrent, but don’t turn out weapons? 

“Look, I explained kind of what it was, what it meant,” she tells the Cable. “Would I say we had a consensus? No, there are some people who, and I completely understand why, who aren’t a fan of Section 60, so irrespective of the circumstances, wouldn’t support it, but there were people saying, ‘We just want you to find these knives and we want to stop people being stabbed.’”

Okay, but it didn’t work did it? You recovered no weapons, and the idea that it’s an effective deterrent, you can’t say that with confidence. Didn’t it just move the problem elsewhere, temporarily? The chief constable herself said someone was found carrying a knife, just outside the Section 60 zone, during the operation.

“I’m not a big believer…about the deterrent effect of stop and search,” Hayward-Mele says, separating herself from her chief constable on the issue. “It’s not Minority Report, you don’t know what crimes you’ve deterred because they never existed.”

She says the impact and effectiveness of the Section 60 operation would be “evaluated”. The data from February’s operation didn’t deter her or her chief constable, though, from using it again in June, in Easton. And this operation produced the same results: disproportionality – this time everyone stopped was Black or Asian – and no weapons. 

So considering the data that you published yourself, the disproportionality of it, the fact that you stopped innocent young people on both occasions, would you do the operation the same way again?

“I probably would, in the same circumstances, with the information we had [in February]: there was one piece of intelligence that I had that really worried me. I wouldn’t have changed that, but that doesn’t mean that going forward I want to use Section 60 more, it has to be on an individual circumstance basis.”

She says that after the 48-hour operation in February, young people had told her they felt they didn’t have to carry a knife because they knew nobody else would during that time. She adds: “But I can’t corroborate that, so I fully understand if you, you know, take that with a pinch of salt.”

She says that “organisationally”, Section 60 is something she wants to have “more conversations about”.

So what if the legislation that gives police the power to use Section 60 was repealed? What kind of impact would that have on the communities that Avon and Somerset Police serve?

“I know for a fact it would improve trust and confidence in the Black community,” she says. “But…there will always be elements of people who feel that policing should be tough on law and order, and that’s our responsibility.”

If you’re doing all this work on anti-racism, though, committing to reform your stop and search policy, to improving your relationship with the city’s Black community. Doesn’t running an operation like this undermine that?

Her chief constable fought back against this line of questioning in an interview with the Cable earlier in July. “We did it because we’re trying to save lives,” Crew said, bluntly, which might hold more weight if the operation took knives off the street, or if the force had a metric to prove that it was a deterrent.

“The constant retort [from police forces] that Section 60 is used to ‘protect’ Black communities in particular from ‘knife crime’ – a highly racialised term in itself – has been shown time and time again to be a lie,” accountability group StopWatch says in statement.

John Pegram, founding member of local police monitoring group Bristol Copwatch, agrees, saying the police’s justification of the use of the power was “dishonest”. 

“The use of Section 60 amounts to nothing but systematic abuses of police power. It should be scrapped.”

A window of opportunity?

But can we expect to see that happen, or to see any changes to the legislation at a national policy level, under Keir Starmer’s new Labour government?

“Section 60 was initially introduced to tackle violent conflict between rival football fans, and we’ve seen the loosening of legislative [guidelines] around suspicionless searches from about 2008 onwards,” says Bradshaw.  The exception to this, she says, was restrictions Theresa May placed on Section 60 powers as Home Secretary, which were lifted again by Priti Patel in 2022.

She says Starmer’s Labour party is using “comparable rhetoric” to the Conservatives on the issue of law and order. But, she adds, parties in opposition, namely the Lib Dems and the Greens, have called for an end to the routine stop and search, and have pushed back on the strip searching of children in particular.

“It might be a window of opportunity for putting a bit of pressure on,” she adds.

Use of Section 60 is an operational choice, though. Avon and Somerset Police could choose to commit to never using it again.

Sarah Crew followed the lead of other police forces, namely Police Scotland and the British Transport Police, in acknowledging institutional racism last year. She says she’s unafraid of taking bold steps to address it, so why doesn’t she show some real leadership and take this one?

If you have been affected by the issues raised in this story, if you have an experience to share, confidentially or otherwise, contact: sean@thebristolcable.org