Abstract
‘Stop and search’, ‘stop and frisk’, ID checks—these are aspects of police activity that have, like many other objects of criminological attention, all too often been seen through an Anglo-centric lens. This important collection of essays, previously published as a special edition of Policing and Society, widens our view of what has always been a key component of police activity viewed from the UK or USA, but which, it now seems, may have a much more widespread significance. The ten chapters (topped and tailed by an introduction and conclusion written by the editors) offer findings from a range of empirical and library-based research projects. Some of these were indeed conducted in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia: in other words, the Anglophone ‘usual suspects’, but they are joined by essays considering stop and search practices in South Africa, India, Japan, Hungary and the Netherlands. What is also most striking is the extent to which these diverse contexts and research methodologies (ranging from quantitative analysis to ethnographic approaches) generate highly congruent findings.
Three central themes cut across the chapters that comprise the volume. First, many examine the extent to which police stop/search is directed towards ethnic minority groups, in contexts as varied as Canada, the Netherlands, Hungary and Japan, as well as the USA and UK. This is noteworthy since officers working in these countries display striking regularity in the way they disproportionally target those who seemingly ‘stand out’, and whose mere presence in society has often been problematized. It is well documented that members of ethnic minority groups are constructed by social control agents as both requiring more surveillance and a higher level of intervention (Bowling, 1999; Bridges, 1983). Interestingly, this emphasis seems to transcend concerns about immigration, since, as we see in a number of the chapters, minority groups continue to find themselves the ‘special’ objects of police attention (see Wortley and Owusu-Bempah in Chapter 5 on the experience of Black people in Canada, and Toth and Kadar, Chapter 4, on Hungarian Roma).
Secondly, however, the relationship between stop and search and immigration is placed on centre stage, and several chapters argue that police stops are used as an extended form of internal border maintenance. In Chapter 11, for example, Provine and Sanchez, in their account of Arizona’s notorious SB 1070 legislation, explore the extent to which policing has become oriented towards the search for ‘undocumented’ Latinos. Both Weber, in Australia (Chapter 10), and Namba, in Japan (Chapter 8), likewise report strikingly similar situations. Collectively, these works demonstrate that routine stop and search practice can be regarded as a police tool used not only against citizens who look ‘different’—ethnically, culturally or in some other way—and/or who need to be controlled, but also against non-citizens, who need to be removed.
Thirdly, several chapters explore the extent to which police stops are also aimed at those considered socially marginal, but in a sense wider than simply ethnicity, race or migration status. We see this most clearly in Marks’ account of the use of road-blocks in South Africa (Chapter 6), as well as Parmar’s study of the impact of anti-terrorism legislation on Muslims living in London (Chapter 3). Likewise, Quinton (Chapter 2) examines British police officers’ motivations for deciding whom to stop: while race plays a substantial role, so too does age, other aspects of appearance (e.g. simply looking ‘scruffy’) and being ‘known to the police’. In sum, these contributions suggest that what is taking place across these diverse contexts is, in fact, the policing of marginality and difference.
This latter point is reiterated by Bowling and Weber in their concluding remarks, where they note that stop and search has a corrosive effect on social solidarity (p. 133), but also that it reinforces, and is in some contexts actively intended to reinforce, existing social boundaries. In my view, this insight is the key contribution of the volume as a whole. Stop and Search in Global Perspective provides a wide-angle, although necessarily partial, view of a crucial police practice that exhibits marked regularities across multiple national and jurisdictional contexts. The apparently global reach of stop and search seems to be premised not simply on policy transfer (although this may sometimes be the case). Rather, it may instantiate something much more basic to the practice of policing itself. While stop and search practice is always mediated by local contingencies that may, for example implicate colonialism and post-colonialism (as we see in the legislative history of police stops in India), it also appears intimately related to not only the power of the police, but the police power. 1
Markus Dirk Dubber (2005) describes the origin of police power as both stemming from and comprising the effort of the state to maintain a diffuse notion of social order, defined in particular by a need to reproduce existing power relations and extant normative conceptions of propriety and right. The power to police, and the range of objects and events over which this power can claim interest or influence, is therefore essentially undefinable, since anyone, and anything, may pose a potential threat to the existing social order, and ‘police’ claim jurisdiction over all such threats. Bittner’s (1990: 249, emphasis in original) famous dictum makes a rather similar point: the police are the organization charged with dealing with any situation wherein ‘something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now’ is, indeed, happening.
The activity—the ends and the means—of policing is deeply implicated in an endless task of reasserting a particular version of social order, and police stops, I would argue, are an important element in the exercise of the ‘undefinable’ police power. Note, for example, the origin of the present-day police in the Night Watch and institutions such as the 18th-century prefecture de police in Paris: intercepting people, asking them to account for themselves, temporarily detaining them, conducting searches for illicit goods and substances. These are fundamental aspects of the practice of policing, deeply inscribed in institutional structure and organizational behaviour. ‘Stops’ serve as a multi-purpose tool that can respond to almost any circumstance and be turned to almost any purpose (crime control, order maintenance or the simple demonstration of power), a feature that could help explain the empirical prevalence of the practice across diverse policing contexts.
Yet, despite the diverse contexts in which stop and search is used, there are nevertheless, and as seen in Stop and Search in Global Perspective, startling patterns. The socially marginal are consistently targeted, as are minority ethnic groups and others who do not ‘belong’ in some way. Dubber’s concept of police power again offers an explanation. Policing, in his sense, was historically directed against vagrants, the workshy, ‘scolds’, misfits; in other words, those whose very existence threatened dominant notions of order.
Finally, to underline a point hinted at by Bowling and Weber, and made many times elsewhere (e.g. Loader and Mulcahy, 2003), the categories of citizen (or, non-citizen) which bear the brunt of police attention do not simply pre-exist it. Rather, these are categories created and reproduced by and through the practice of policing itself. Harcourt (2001), in his critique of broken windows theory, describes an analogous process. He argues that zero-tolerance, order maintenance or quality of life styles of policing are problematic in their assumption that ‘disorder’ and ‘disorderly’ people are naturally occurring or socially fixed categories to which police simply respond, suggesting instead that these categories are ‘constructed in part through lengthy processes of policing and punitive practices’ (ibid: 161). Police activity has an important generative aspect, and stop and search activity can both create and solidify the social categories that it seeks to corral and control. Central here is the idea that it is the category or the characteristics of the person that come to be marked as disorderly, and not the acts they may, or may not, commit. This brings us full circle to issues of ethnic and racial profiling, and disproportionality. To retreat to the British case, young Black men are more likely to be stopped/searched not because of what they happen to be doing, or because of individual racism among police officers, but because the category of ‘young Black man’ has been defined, over many years of police practice, as something worthy of officer’s attention, and as an important component of the cues they use to guide their behaviour.
Stop and Search in Global Perspective is a welcome addition to the literature because it prompts exploration of exactly these complex issues. The chapters provide insights into some significant patterns in police practice across multiple, international contexts that invite greater theoretical and empirical attention. The editors and authors are to be congratulated for their contributions.