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Fitzgerald & Sibbitt Also Did An Empirical Study On This Issue Which ...



Fitzgerald & Sibbitt also did an empirical study on this issue which similarly found that ‘based on their presence in the population overall ethnic minorities are more than four times as likely to be searched than whites'. It was pointed out in that study that the problem was difficult to judge just on the sorts of statistics because; it doesn't take into account the difference in the level of usage by different forces thus for example the Metropolitan Police account for approximately 46% of all stops recorded. This meant that whilst the national average may be four times as likely, as stated above, the actual ratio in individual forces were with the exception of one lower than that. Furthermore it fails to distinguish between ‘stops as such and the searches which follow from these steps'. In their study Fitzgerald & Sibbitt exhort the view that there must be a clear picture of what is going on in stop and searches. In attempting to do this they divide the issue into operational and administrative factors which influence PACE searches.
The conclusion is that on the whole stop and searches are not random but tend to be lead by intelligence from crime reports relayed over radio or in the context of specific targeted operations. This leads to a skewing of patrolling constables so certain locations and individuals on the ‘Prominent Nominals' list were more likely to attract attention and thus they concluded that ‘the numbers of stop/searches may vary quite markedly from one police beat to another for entirely legitimate reasons'. However, they noted that official statistics were also skewed or distorted by Administrative factors such as non-recording of stops and a lack of clarity over the powers which the police actually have. In particular the failure to report stops was argued to probably be very great based on the researchers experience particularly because there was little to no incentive to report a stop which resulted in nothing being found and which contained no incidents. The results were also skewed because there was widespread disagreement about what constituted a voluntary stop. Interestingly, haven studied this area the researchers noted that the correlation between stops and ‘intelligence' from crime reports was in effect passing on an already inherent bias in the ethnicity of reported criminals. However, as with other studies they discovered that there was a great deal of stereotyping that occurred towards non-white groups. Overall the picture presented was one where it was incredibly difficult to see whether or not discrimination occurred and they concluded that whilst race may be a factor it may not be anymore of a factor than some socio-economic factors.

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