Dissertation Creation - The UK's original provider of custom dissertations and dissertation help...

Free Dissertations - Criminology Dissertations

Substantive Law On Stop And Search The Placing Of A General Stop And Search ...


Substantive Law on Stop and Search
The placing of a general stop and search on a statutory footing was only achieved by s.1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE). However, the power has been in existence in some manner since the nineteenth century in order to empower the police to ‘harass marginal sections of the population'. PACE gave the power to the police to stop and search anybody that they reasonably suspected of carrying prohibited articles for example a weapon or stolen goods. A similar statutory power had also existed before then but had been limited to drugs under s.23 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Again this section takes the format that where an officer ‘has reasonable grounds to suspect that any person is in possession of a controlled drug' then they have a power to stop and search that person.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (CJPOA) 1994 also provided that an officer of superintendent rank or higher may authorise stop and searches where that officer reasonably believes there may be incidents of serious violence likely to occur in the police authority area. In recent years the model in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 has been extended into the Terrorism related statutory measures. In particular The Terrorism Act (TA) 2000 s.44 extended stop and search powers so that, where authorised by an assistant chief constable or higher, then police officers could search people for anything that could be used in connection with terrorism, importantly can be exercised ‘whether or not the constable has grounds for suspecting the presence of articles of that kind'. It is worth noting that the s.60 power under the CJPOA, above, also allows for the constable to stop where there is no reasonable suspicion.
However whilst the CJPOA and TA are obviously of importance to fight specific types of crime such as terrorism, football hooliganism and gang fights the powers under PACE are considered to be the more widely used and more general of the powers in that it can apply to ‘stolen or prohibited articles' with the latter having a very general definition in s.1 (7). This naturally means that the level of discretionary power devolved on the individual constable is directly related to the judicially regulated phase ‘reasonable suspicion'. It is clear that the courts are willing to police this test for example a ‘reasonable' suspicion will not include a vague assertion by another police officer as per DPP v. French nor will an order from a superior officer count as per O'Hara v. Chief Constable of The Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Please note: The above dissertation snippet was written by a student and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their work to us.