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What Dworkin Called ‘strong' Discretion. The Substantive Provisions Highlight ...

What Dworkin called ‘Strong' discretion. The substantive provisions highlight this precise quality at the lowest level of the police hierarchy: the constable has discretion and it is the most visible to ordinary members of the public. It is this reason that many commentators have chosen to focus on the use of this discretion: ‘It is quintessentially a ‘low visibility' decision, immune to effective accountability mechanisms, for, if officers do not record stops, then they are unlikely to come to light'. Furthermore, as Waddington et al. make the point that the decision of a police officer not to stop provides opportunities for abuses of discretion which are virtually undetectable.
Thus from a very basic point such discretion is difficult to square with ‘the standards of the legal-analytical view of the decision process' that should be applied by social actors who exercise legitimate power over members of the public. However, we wish to look at how this power is being exercised by studies however we cannot look at this from every angle; Discretion can be analysed from numerous angles such as how it isn't applied in a uniform manner, for example discretion in sentencing, or how it disproportionately effects certain sections of society such as women or ethnic minorities. It is the latter use of discretion that we are interested in this work because clearly stop and searches in order to meet their purpose will be applied randomly and on the vague ‘reasonable suspicion' criteria so uniform application is not an issue. We will now look at the empirical evidence on all aspects of the stop and search debate.
Empirical Evidence on Stop and Search
There is a wealth of empirical evidence on this issue due to it having ‘been at the forefront of research into policing , in Britain and elsewhere' and we will attempt to look at much of the statistics as possible in order to get a holistic picture of how the stop and search discretion is being used by constables. The major source of empirical information on this issue has been from the Home Office both in its Annual Report entitled ‘Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System' and the six reports produced by the Policing and Reducing Crime Unit that did a variety of studies into different issues concerning Stop and Search. We will look at these studies initially in order to get a general overview of the situation.
The Home Office Statistics for 2005 show, one is tempted to say ‘as usual', that there is discrimination in the outcomes of stop and search statistics. Under PACE powers it was reported that Black people were 6 times more likely to be searched than White people and Asians were nearly twice as likely.

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