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Lord Steyn Went Onto Outline The General Proposition Which Applies To ...

Lord Steyn went onto outline the general proposition which applies to reasonable suspicion: there need not be outright evidence amounting to a case, therefore a tip-off from the public may be sufficient, and hearsay information may be perfectly valid but a mere command or vague beliefs will not suffice.
Thus the above clearly illustrates that there needs to be a subjective reason in the policeman's mind for the suspicion however there needs also to be an objective part which causes the subjective suspicion. Whilst O'Hara highlighted that an informed tip-off could suffice as objective grounds it is clear that ‘a person's race, age, appearance or the fact that the person is known to have previous conviction cannot be used alone or in combination with each other as a reason'. In fact Code A of the Code of Practice for the exercise of the statutory stop and search powers specifically warns police officers of using such criteria as race or ethnicity because of the prohibitions in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. However, clearly the courts support the reasonable suspicion test as having a low threshold for satisfaction and as long as there hasn't been clear discrimination and the constable himself has other reasons then there is deference. This was more concisely laid out in Castorina v. Chief Constable of Surrey where Woolf, LJ highlighted the tri-partite nature of reasonable suspicion: The subjective part requiring there to be an actual suspicion on the part of the constable, whether it was reasonable which will be a matter of law for the judge and finally as long as it was reasonable was the discretion used in accordance with the famous principles laid down in Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v. Wednesbury Corporation. It is hard to see how the Wednesbury principle of ‘unreasonableness' fits with a judicially determined principle of reasonable suspicions: How could a constable have a reasonable suspicion and then use his discretion stop in a manner ‘so unreasonable that no reasonable authority [insert: Constable] could ever have come to it'. In any case there have been numerous cases on these issues but this appears to remain the core of the exercise of reasonable suspicion. It also seems as though the courts have been lenient towards the police in defining what was reasonable and what constitutes suspicion: ‘suspicion in its ordinary meaning is a state of conjecture or surmise where proof is lacking: ‘I suspect but I cannot prove'.'
The statutory powers are widely drawn and as the foregoing highlights the judiciary are reluctant to impinge on the discretion of ordinary constables. However discretion per se is not a bad thing, in fact it is necessary if a modern state is going to function. However, it is the empirically measured use of that discretion which is of the utmost concern to all scholars of the law.

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