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People Just Do Something is a relaxing and possibly enraging podcast about people who might self-identify as activists. Join professional busybody Isaac Kneebone-Hopkins, The Bristol Cable’s in-house Columbo, Priyanka Raval and a special guest each week as they attempt to untangle the means of effecting change in Bristol, broken Britain and beyond.
Episodes release ever other week with the first season spanning 6 episodes.
To secure the future of the show and The Bristol Cable, head to www.thebristolcable.org/join
This is The Bristol Cable.
Speaker 2:Sorry. I had a a gob full of water there. Welcome to People Just Do Something. This week, we've got Sean standing in for pre. Hello, Sean.
Speaker 2:How's it going?
Speaker 1:Hello. Yeah. I'm good. I'm good.
Speaker 2:So we are we're talking about police stop and search powers. So, like, Sean, you you went to this police training where they were sort of talking about how to do searches.
Speaker 1:I should say that I wasn't training to be a police
Speaker 2:officer. No.
Speaker 1:No. I I was there observing what was going on just to make that really clear.
Speaker 2:You are wearing giant aviator sunglasses now, though, so maybe I'm a little bit suspicious. But you say you're there you're there covering this. You were invited, which makes the way they behaved even more bizarre, the fact that they kept in their weird jokes. What was your experience of being at this police training in their new, you know, we're we've solved all our problems. We're gonna do this sort of targeted policing in a better and nicer, happy faced way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was really bloody weird, actually. Like, firstly, I was quite late, and they decided to hold off starting the presentation until I was there. And this is a room of about, you know, 30 to 40 offices, maybe more, in this lecture theater. I felt like I was back at uni.
Speaker 1:So that was a bit daunting. Them all turning around to see me. And I was expecting, you know, as you would imagine, they've invited a journalist who's covering this kind of thing. You know, the scrutiny on the disproportionality of stop and search powers and institutional racism in the police force. I'd expect the tone to be, you know, a very serious one, but it was really light.
Speaker 1:And from the offset, there was a bit of trivia completely unrelated to policing. I can't remember what it was now. But whichever officer got a question right, the officer holding the presentation would chuck them a little chocolate bar. Yeah. It was it was really bizarre, and that kinda set the time.
Speaker 1:And then I I should say as well that I went to this training day after holding a round table with young people who had really traumatizing experiences of stop and search and just the police generally. So then to hear them making jokes, talking about it in this way that was trivial Yes. And introducing the topic in this way, it was made my blood boil at points, and I just had to pinch myself and thought, why the hell have they let me into this place?
Speaker 3:Security. I've always supported trans rights to fairness and equality.
Speaker 2:You are a liar.
Speaker 3:Just selfish, self centered violence. You are
Speaker 2:a liar. I was not suggesting they had the right to cut off water or fish. You're a liar.
Speaker 3:I've been an environmentalist all my life.
Speaker 1:Liar. Liar.
Speaker 3:Well, you can't grow concrete. You can. See you, Cameron. Cheerio.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 3:think I ever wanna talk to any
Speaker 2:of those people, but we do. This is People Just Do Something, a podcast from the Bristol cable. It's a podcast about people on the frontline of political movements. Our aim is to, like, expand the definition of what an activist is. With me today is Shawn Morrison standing in for Priyanka Raval.
Speaker 2:And I am Isaac Niebuhn Hopkins, your regular host. Episodes of People Just Do Something come out every other week. You can get them early on a Friday if you are a cable subscriber, or you've gotta wait a sad and lonely weekend till Monday for general release for everyone else, which can be found on any podcast player of your choice. This first run is only 6 episodes, and you can subscribe to people just do something on podcast apps. And, yeah, give us those 5 star reviews so more people see it and share it around.
Speaker 2:We also ask you to join the Bristol Cable. It is a member led organization. You can set what we're going to be talking about, and you can do that at the Bristol cable dot org forward slash join. Let us know if it was a podcast that made you sign up when you do it. And that way, they can see that we're reaching out to people.
Speaker 2:We're bringing them in, building the movement, and all that.
Speaker 1:So today, we're talking to Habib Kadiri. He is the executive director of Stopwatch, which is a leading stop and search charity in the UK about stop and search, about disproportionality in the police force, and this comes off the back of the cable's reporting on a section 60 operation in Bristol by the police. Section 60, is a a really controversial police power, which gives them the authority to search people without any suspicion at all that they've done something wrong. And Habib shares his experience of campaigning in this area. He gives us a history of how stop and search has changed over time under different home secretaries, under different governments in this country.
Speaker 1:He talks also about engaging and empowering communities to, 1, know what to do when they're stopped and searched, and 2, how to really push for change on this issue. Yeah. It's a really interesting and insightful conversation. You're gonna like it.
Speaker 2:Hello, Eve. How how's it going? How are you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Not bad, yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good, I think. You know, it's also it's one of those weird ones researching something like this where you're like, oh, yeah. This this is bad, isn't it? Doesn't it?
Speaker 2:But hopefully, through this chat, we can kinda give people a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. See, I I guess, like to start, could you tell us about yourself and what kinda led you to sort of be involved in this work?
Speaker 3:I have been involved to stopwatch in some capacity or other for it's coming up to 6 years now. Initially joined as volunteer because I really wanted to make some kind of difference. Like, I typically, you know, kind of do a regular day job. And you think, but what else is there that I could do to improve things in the world? So I was turned on to stopwatch by my partner.
Speaker 3:And when I started volunteering for them, I found I could do a bit seemed hard to hear about the police. I knew what the tense relationship was between black people and the police in this country. But even then, when you start looking into the actual facts of the matter, it's just an endless kind of stream of surprises and shocks until you get quite jaded by it. And I just got more and more absorbed into it. And right about the time of the pandemic lockdowns, Starbucks wanted to be able to expand a little bit.
Speaker 3:So, fortunately, I was able to get a job at them, and I've been with them since, yeah, looking into all the different things about some research. And, you know, I'm learning every day more and more things happening about stop and search, the kind of general history of stop and search, the underlying problems that are really deeply rooted in racial disproportionality and sexism, homophobia, all those things that is just not really shifting very much and how really intense the battle is and has been over time between communities that are over policed and the way that this law enforcement arm of the state behaves.
Speaker 2:So most of my interactions with the police have been around, like, organizing protests. Right? So there's, like, certain base knowledge that whenever you do something like that, you're right. Right. We have to inform them.
Speaker 2:This is what we can refuse to talk about. You know, that was was was your knowledge from, like, a history of doing activism? Was it just sort of a kind of general knowledge that sort of you'd picked up through life? Where where did that kind of knowledge come from that led you into the work?
Speaker 3:Originally, I'm from East London and living in areas where people had very strong and quite negative opinions about police, seeing them be at incidents where it seemed like their handling of it wasn't exactly the best. Also, members of my family, the direct interactions they have with police, not always positive. So, yeah, it's that kind of thing. Kind of it was always in the back of my mind, but then if you don't interrogate it further, you kind of still come with the best of intentions about the idea that the police are always in the all time signifying force, or normally of a 9th force and that they mean well or they are operating in the best interests of the people they serve. And, subsequently, the more, you know, you find out about them in a professional capacity, the less and less true that appears to be.
Speaker 2:And, like, yeah, I guess, like, the police is, like, an interesting kind of area of work in that sense. And that, like, with something like, say, climate change, if you choose to, you can kind of ignore that. Right? Whereas the police is it's not always your choice to to not think about like, you you cannot think about them, but they might think about you. I guess it's sort of there's a difference there.
Speaker 2:Right? Bringing this in then, and this sort of, like, mistrustful, this sort of awareness you built up through your work, what is stopwatch about? What do they try and do? How do they try and push for changes to policing?
Speaker 3:So what we do at Stopwatch is, obviously, we look at the evidence as you said before. We look at how police behave and look at from their own records to lock their time what's going on with the underlying trends of their relationship between, themselves and racialized communities or between themselves and women and between themselves and, other types of, communities that are surveilled and kind of marginalized. We also look at the way that they, as a unit, kind of behave themselves, how they treat themselves, how what instruction they get from the state as to how they should treat people, what principles don't deliver. And it's really important to go beyond just stats. Look at the actual things that are happening on the ground.
Speaker 3:So it's very important to look at incidents that happen and look at the psychology as well of how officers behave because it's very indicative of how they behave. What kind of person is attracted to both worlds? That's a real key point as to why these incidents keep happening and why actually, you know, things are not just about rotten apples. They're about what happens from higher command. Who is it that gets to the top of these organizations in place, and who gets to set the policy for the way that police treat certain types of individuals in a country.
Speaker 3:It's quite an interesting phenomenon in that respect, and it's one that we are trying to, in some way, change for the better, if not find solutions completely outside of that. And another key point, I think, that's related to all of that is how increasingly obsessed the police as a law enforcement agency are with controlling every area of society under its own idea of order, and how important that is in terms of, like, the clash between that and, like, the freedoms of individuals and how certain individuals are made to pay the price for that. Yeah. And it's just seeing through the Larry's of stop and search, kind of having to navigate all these issues to make sure that we have, like, a a really considered approach to dealing with the way the police are in society.
Speaker 1:And so, I mean, stopwatch as campaigners, the focus is on police stop and search powers. And, you know, of all the controversial police powers that there are, why do you think it's important that this is the the focal point?
Speaker 3:Stop and search is so crucial because it's an entry point for a lot of people into their relationship with the police. When you are living in any society, the police are not somewhere that you go to in the same way that you go to the shops to get things. You don't go to the mall. You go to your GP, you know, for a specific reason. I think the police think that people go to them for safety, but, really, safety is something that might be the normal order of things.
Speaker 3:And it's breached when somebody behaves in a way that is beyond reasonable. And when that happens, then there are different ways of dealing with it, and the police claim to be the best arbiters for that. It's a very weird phenomenon there where, actually, the police can escalate problems. And when they do that, then their position becomes incredibly contentious, and you kind of think, well, maybe there are other ways of maintaining safety and maintaining order without having to do without having to go to the police. There are other ways of maybe policing without having to actually call upon the police.
Speaker 3:And I think somsearch is one of those classic instances where it doesn't really happen because somebody commands it in terms of you know, it doesn't happen because you or I command it. We don't look for it to happen. What happens is some kind of idea of safety is breached, and then the police come in and assume a role on behalf of the state in terms of keeping order. But we need to make sure that they are behaving directly. Otherwise, they are gonna cause more problems than they are attempting to solve.
Speaker 2:I was gonna suggest that we just sort of unpick exactly what we mean by stop and search. Because I I know before you were we were recording, you mentioned stop an account, but I've not heard that one before. And then we we're also talking about section 60 sort of in this discussion and and part of this what cable has been doing more widely as a sort of campaign. So could we, like, break down exactly what like, why can the police stop you? Or what are the reasons they have to give in these different scenarios?
Speaker 3:So police, I can stop you for a number of reasons in terms of trying to identify who did a crime. They can also stop you for reasons in terms of keeping them at peace, but the way in which they do it is important so that we, in some way, preserve our basic civil liberties. So a stop at account happens when the police community support officer level and above. They can just stop you on the street and ask you questions in the same way that anybody can. But at that point, when they're engaging you to you on that level, they don't necessarily need to identify themselves at that point.
Speaker 3:So at that point, they are no different from anybody else. And if you don't wish to engage with them, you are technically you are free to not do so.
Speaker 2:So Which is why we see these, like, YouTube videos of people saying, like, am I being detained. Right? They're like your
Speaker 3:Exactly. You absolutely do not have to answer any of those questions. And if they can't provide a reason to suspect you Yep. Then they don't have the power to detain you in any way. It's when they provide that reason and say, we want to search you, that's when the stumbling count is elevated to a stumbling search.
Speaker 3:Okay. So when a stop and search happens, then they need to give you reasons for why they are stopping and searching you. They need to tell you under what power, and most importantly, they are doing that.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And that's when you really have to comply with those commands. But, again, you don't necessarily have to answer every single question that they ask you. You do have to then start complying with some of the things that they want. So they need to conform to certain standards. So they need to provide that genuine suspicion, that reasonable genuine suspicion.
Speaker 3:They need to give you the reason. They need to give you the specific legal basis. They need to provide their ID. They can then start asking you, okay. Could you stand here in this certain way?
Speaker 3:We're just gonna pat you down. Those kind of claims.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:that reason could be like, a bike has been stolen. There's a white man, 6 foot, beard. They can get me and Sean then and say, look. We've been told this happened. You 2 look like this.
Speaker 3:Yes. Yeah. That kind of thing. The the gray area comes when they say somebody who matches your subscription wearing a same color shirt, and did you drink? I'm not wearing my shirt right now, as you can see.
Speaker 3:Those are quite difficult situations. That often happens with many of these cases of mistaken identity with black people, and it's very difficult at that point to kind of make that point known to an officer without coming across as though you are in some way disturbing the search in their eyes. So it gets very contentious there, but you do still have to comply in that sense there.
Speaker 1:And how are these searches monitored? Like, for instance, in Avon and Somerset, when it comes to section 60 stop and search powers, their lead in the police force says she reviews every single one of them via the body cam. The the police are required to turn on for each one. Is that the case across the country, not just with section 60 searches, which we'll get onto a bit later? But, yeah, like, how is accountability built into that?
Speaker 1:You know, beyond if you feel like you were wrongly searched, you can lodge a complaint, let's say.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So this is the really tricky bit because roughly about I think it's about 600,000 searches flaunt across England and Wales Peaceforce since every year, and that it's just not possible for them to witness every civil war. We're also assuming here that all of them we we just know it was recorded. Stubborn accounts do not have to be recorded, but stop searches do by law have to be recorded. But we just we know that they're not all recorded.
Speaker 3:So we are only working on the basis of the ones that are recorded. But even those which are recorded, they're not all viewed. What ends up happening is that there are scrutiny panels that look at randomly selected stops or maybe specially selected ones, the video of which end up, making social media, that kind of thing. And they they review random ones to kind of make sure that the officers' actions in that stop are kept on the check. Now there's a lot about the nature of scrutiny panels and who selects them and how far the force listens to those scrutiny panels when they scrutinize the evidence from the stop and search.
Speaker 1:Do you get the sense that police forces feel like they're doing stop and search well? Like, just to focus on Avon on Somerset again because it's our area. I was at a police training day when I was covering this for our section 60 campaign, And the officer who held the the presentation, she said that that the police get very little complaints about stop and search and how it's used. And she alluded to the idea that there's just this idea that there's problems with how officers do it. And in reality, like, it it's overblown, and that's kind of the view that she imposed on these officers that she's trying to retrain into doing stop and search properly as part of their anti racism plans.
Speaker 1:What's your feeling on that?
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 3:that they're not appreciating, again, these things that cannot be found in stats, which basically boils down to the psychology of stop and search. You have to appreciate that when you are confronted with such a display, such a raw display of power and control, it's not something that you report necessarily. If you follow that logic that the officer at that session said, if you follow that logic for anything else, you'll be justifying some very unsavory things. I think if you talk about unbalanced dynamics between people, then, you know, people who are subject to such force, such powers to control that kind of hierarchical relationship, the ones who are powerless are the least likely to complain. They have issues, but they they don't necessarily express those issues because they can't see the benefit of it.
Speaker 3:That's why people find it very difficult to actually raise a complaint. Right? They find it very difficult to then come to the table and be like, okay. Look. This injustice happened to me.
Speaker 3:How can I get this fixed? Because they know instinctively what they're up against. I mean, even as a bystander, you can find it quite frightening when you witness a stop and you see somebody who's unarmed facing several people who are armed, surrounding them and questioning them aggressively. It's just not something where you might feel empowered in any way actually to raise complaints. So it's it's quite difficult to get people to that stage in the first place.
Speaker 3:That's probably a more common reason, I would think, why there are fewer complaints from Stops.
Speaker 2:Because it's about how the police are behaving. Right? Like, you can be searched. I've been searched for the police. I was in the train station.
Speaker 2:People are on the way to work. I was dragged over, and I was searched. You feel like a dick. Everyone's looking at you. But, like, actually, I mean, this is a very this I'm sure this is a very white experience of this.
Speaker 2:I knew I didn't have anything on me. You know, as much as, like, they're making me look silly, they were friendly enough while that was happening. And, like, you know, that tick in a box, search this guy, doesn't tell you, search this guy, and we're pretty nice to him even though he's pissing about compared to search this guy, and we took his pissing about as being obstructed. And, like, you know, that is that the sort of thing that you're losing in just, like, stats?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Exactly. So one thing is important to note is in an interaction, whatever the police officer says at that time, regardless of whether it's right or wrong, legal or illegal, where do they say it goes? It's very difficult for you to then spell out what your rights are and what they should and shouldn't be doing because they are quite likely to take it as an affront if they don't take it to you. Right?
Speaker 3:So how do you reflect that in stats? It it obviously does not get reflected, but this is these are all the nuances that you just can't ignore once you start thinking very deeply about how it's not research happens, actually happens,
Speaker 1:which
Speaker 3:is why we we can't just rely on the few complaints that happen. We'd obviously love to get more people complaining. But, again, it's not even really in the police's interests to do that.
Speaker 1:It also lies in who people would be complaining to. Right? Because you would fill out a form, and you would send it to the police force. Right? And it there's the first step is a an internal review that might come to nothing.
Speaker 1:I think then the next step is maybe the IOPC, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which we know is made up of a lot of former police officers. And these independent scrutiny panels, for instance, on them are police officers. They're, you know, they're not exactly independent of the police force, you know, just to speak to, you know, why it would be difficult to complain. Like, it would need a systems change for these stats to be reliable in any way.
Speaker 2:And they don't make it easy. Right? Like so many sort of parts of public life now, there's just these bureaucratic barriers that make it so unless you know the rules of the game, it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 3:It certainly adds to the sense of a challenge that individuals face if they want to make complaints. And it's, you know, it's partly, again, the reason why organizations like ours exist. We've created complaints guides. We revamped ours earlier this year. We to show people the ways in which they can complain, but we are very cognizant of the fact that it's incredibly difficult to get what you want from it.
Speaker 3:If you think that you might get, you know, something like capital j justice, like, it's it's very difficult to get that. You're gonna face a lot of hurdles, and a lot of it's gonna come from a place who should be doing their job and trying to make sure if they've done something wrong, that they can correct for it. But even the basics of, like, you know, getting accurate information, getting your own body worn video footage, they they will delay so much, and they will make the process a lot harder than it needs to be because they are basically in control of the whole thing. Mhmm. And that's why we can understand why people are reluctant.
Speaker 1:So just to pivot slightly because under police stop and search powers, there is, as I alluded to earlier, section 60, which empowers police to search people without suspicion. What is it about this power that's particularly controversial, and and could you give us a bit of a a history of it?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sure thing. So 60 is quite an unusual power in the sense that round about a decade into the creation of and implementation of section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, there was an argument for forces that they need to be able to be more immediately responsive in certain situations to stop people as and when they wish, not have to always give reasons for that in the moment because there's a they're anticipating the threat of violence or maybe to be in control of an area where violence has just happened. And so Section 60 slipped into the criminal justice and public order act of 1994. And ostensibly, it was about the most immediate kind of cases in which violence would fare, and they need to control those spaces.
Speaker 3:Commonly, that was regarded as football matches, something that needs to kind of deal with the scourge of hooliganism around football grounds in the UK. So we were the power comes into force in 1994, and they start using it. But it turns out that actually over time, the issue of hooliganism dissipates, but the power remains. And at some point, we find out that it's being racially disproportionately used. At that point, social 16 becomes this it comes as kind of a lightning rod defense for the police kind of saying, look.
Speaker 3:We need to be able to act quickly in dangerous situations. But when you looked at the situation when people looked at the situation, you realized, actually, this this is just happening a lot where ethnic minorities are congregated. Then the issue became quite racialized. And section 60 at that point, but just looks very racist in its use and in its effects. And from 2010 onwards, the people affected seemed to remain the same.
Speaker 3:It kind of all came to a head in 2010 with the case of Anne Roberts was stopped, and she started to raise a complaint. There was judicial review, and the judicial review found that section 60 was used fairly, but acknowledged that there may be some problems with its use, but in principle, it should remain. And the fact that it was taken to the Supreme Court and messages sent out to forces is that, look, the public's really had enough of this, and and the very fact that happened meant that it put pressure on police forces to revise their views of section 67 search. And around about that time, Theresa May became home sec, and for whatever reason, was arguably the home secretary that was most keen on being able to deal with this racial disproportionality in southern search and was in some way persuaded to make sure that the police had some standards to adhere to. So the creation of the best use of stop and search scheme under her watch meant that police forces really had to be held to higher standards in using powers like section 60, and that's what triggered a huge fall in the number of stops under that power over time, which has only started to creep back up since that scheme has been scrapped by subsequent home secretaries.
Speaker 2:I guess there's, like, there's an interesting lesson there because I think people could have been persuaded that, like, stopping football hooliganism. You know, I'm from Cardiff. We're a very violent, very racist firm. Unlike the way that these powers could be introduced for specific purposes. And then there's that mission drift.
Speaker 2:And then they can be reused as part of this sort of oppressive apparatus. Like, it is one thing stopping people getting murdered regularly or beaten the hell out of every weekend in Cardiff. Like, that was a problem. You know, I grew up there. You couldn't go to town.
Speaker 2:Like, you hate because it was incredibly violent. And that's what's happening now in Bristol with, like, there's been a spate of stabbings. And, yeah, that's awful. But then allowing this power to come back in because we have to be seen to be doing something, like, how do you kind of fight against that? That's, like, a difficult argument to have then.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:I think if I can just if I can just add on to that, you know, after a series of violent incidents on the streets as we saw in Bristol at the beginning of this year, you know, communities want the police to do something, and meetings are held. And section 60 is the answer for the police, and that's how they show that something is being done. But what's missing is, as the figures show, it's an ineffective power if if it's used as it was in in Bristol this year. Their purpose was to deter further violence and take knives off the streets. Right?
Speaker 1:They they took no knives off the streets, and and they can't prove the deterrent effect of it. And as we've seen with section 60, you know, it clearly does much more harm than good.
Speaker 3:I was gonna actually say to that that in the light of the 30 years of section 60, it's been 30 years, we are looking to produce the least work looking at the history of section 60, making the argument about section 16 being a human rights violation essentially that's been covered up by the idea of proportionately benefiting black people, which is a width as the status will show you. We're also working on a piece that kind of looks at all the counterarguments. And what I'm finding when I really go through it is, first, the police will justify the use of 6 to 600 rounds of efficacy, typically, as you should. Yeah. If you want to justify anything, you probably should justify it with whether it does work in some capacity.
Speaker 3:But then the the idea of it working is a very slippery notion because as you say, when you look at the stats, it does not work. When you find out that 95% of section 60 searches find nothing, 95%. I don't know anything else that has such a high rate of failure that we're allowed to continue as policy in any sector, then the argument is actually destroyed immediately. But then the argument becomes, well, actually, it was never about finding the knife. It was never about finding drugs.
Speaker 3:It's actually about anticipating violence, preventing. And on that basis, it works. It works because it saved lives. Well, 1, you have to prove that in some way, and that seems like an unprovable thing to be able to say, well, look, we've displaced activity. So there was somebody that was walking into town with a knife one day, and we stopped film without actually stopping them because we put a section 16 place and got rid of people, which meant that they probably would go somewhere else.
Speaker 3:There is no research that shows that the deterrent effect works. Right? Academics have tried looking at different types of factors, how section 60 can have that deterrent effect, and nobody's been able to prove
Speaker 2:that in any way. And, like, why do they have to do this stop and search? Right? Like, the line you always hear, Bobby's on the beat. Probably, you're not gonna do crimes.
Speaker 2:There's those police walking around. You're not gonna attack someone if you know there's a police officer there. Why is that considered not as effective as stopping people? What's the case that's made to, like, say, oh, this just being present is not as effective as a form of legalized harassment?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or just the regular stop and search powers Yeah. Where they're you have grounds for suspicion.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And they have other powers for this. Right? So since the introduction of section 60, they've had things like dispersal bodies, which can do the same job without having to perform searches. And on top of that, you can then use the section 1 powers based on intelligence and evidence that you actually gather and can act upon, which gives you a higher threshold to be able to do searches properly.
Speaker 3:You know, is not ideal, but it will be preferable because section 60 is doing so little for you other than supposedly controlling a space, which, again, dispersal orders could do anyway.
Speaker 2:We'll be back after this short break.
Speaker 4:This is an important Bristol cable announcement. We did it. Thanks to you, we raised enough through membership to unlock a £40,000 bonus grant, which will help us keep bringing you proper independent local news, telling your stories and holding power to account. Thank you, Bristol. If you haven't yet, become a member at the Bristol cable.orgforward/join.
Speaker 2:To sort of come to an example of Bristol, which was something that Sean was writing about, and it was that in in June in Eastern, they did an operation, and everyone they stopped was black or Asian. And I I sort of said this, and I I can't even sort of frame it in a non glib way. But it like, Eastern is not a place that there's no white people. They could've stopped some white people. They they chose not to stop.
Speaker 2:And they would do this. And, like, they must have reasons for stopping people, I guess. Even though they say they don't, it's it's doing it without a reason. And, like, how do they account for that? Yeah.
Speaker 2:What what are you
Speaker 3:driving at the heart of this? And I think the answer is too ugly for me to admit. Right? A few times they admit this, they admit it in the context of wider searches, which is there are certain types of people who need to be protected by police action. Right?
Speaker 3:And it's if you find that the figures for section 16 disproportionately, black people are more likely to be searched. Maybe it's because black people wanted to do crime. And it's like, well, wait a second. Do they actually do that? Then you look at the stats for the crimes that you claim they're involved in, and it's not quite the case.
Speaker 3:You're talking about very hyperlocalized areas. Those numbers are so small. When you're talking about country those kinds of populations, you cannot then extrapolate them to our whole city and then say, well, black people are more likely to do x y zed. There are very particular factors resulting in possible crime areas. So you do what you need to do for those areas, but you can't then make racialized assumptions.
Speaker 3:That sounds inherently racist to me. And after all that, children themselves and young people don't feel safe. There have been countless reports, some commissioned by the homeowners themselves, where black and Asian children get asked questions about carrying knives, and the reason they most commonly come out with is that they are protecting themselves. And the the police aren't doing the job of protecting women well enough if they are carrying knives themselves for protection. You know?
Speaker 3:A QUEST advisory report, published a couple of years ago found that, like, only 40% of black Asian feel safe arounds, at least compared with 75% of white changing. That's huge disparity there. And you just can't be ignored. That question's like the racial assumptions behind policing operations in using social 60 as power.
Speaker 1:There is overwhelming evidence about the ineffectiveness, the disproportionality that lies in a policy like section 60. And there's been over the last 10 years, under different home secretaries as we've covered, The the use of it has changed. It disappeared almost under Theresa May for a short period, and now it's making a comeback. But you can literally prove that it's not effective. How do we go about cutting through and make an impact and making this happen?
Speaker 1:You know, at stopwatch, what's the strategy for doing that? Not just for section 60, but, you know, affecting change more generally in this kind of sphere.
Speaker 3:Oh, for us, it's always very important to look at the legal side of things. In the time I've been in stopwatch, I am most convinced about the power of using the law to come to account because you cannot set laws and not be bound to them. And I think that's a principle that holds really strongly, actually. I think it's the reason why, again, you're able to hold judicial reviews over certain policies, and the government really do have to respond to them in some way. If not directly, by just straightforwardly adhering to whatever's passed, but then by kind of, in some way, maneuvering a policy so that it becomes more responsive before even the judgment's passed, which is what happened in the case of section 16 when the Roberts case happened.
Speaker 3:You know, it took 5 years for the verdict to come. And in those 5 years, clearly saw an opportunity and used that case as kind of leverage to be able to say, well, look. You need to raise your standards. Yeah. And that's, I think, a really key reason why the best use of stop and search scheme came about.
Speaker 3:And I think this can happen again. This can happen across the board. I take it as a very, like, positive example of how we need to make sure that we hold the police to account in different ways using the standards that they are set to make sure that we are preserving principles of our civil liberties. I think campaigning wise, it's really important to keep making that be known, whether it be in the media with your good selves. Like, you know, we're still capable doing great work on section 16, but, like, keep holding the force to account using the organ of the local media to come and say to everybody, like, this really bad thing is happening.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And make sure that argument is made and heard. Does make a difference. It does put the police under pressure.
Speaker 2:No. Jay Jobs is a trade unionist. Right? And I have a sort of it's from that as a sort of healthy suspicion of legal roots. I feel like they often aren't set set up in our favor as working people, working class people, whatever you want us us for like and and and it was accessible.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, is there something say so we got Eastern. Section 60 used there most recently. Or actually, it was most recently used in the sort of protest against the far right. But is there something say, Eastern Fields were being over policed, the policing here.
Speaker 2:Is there something that the community there can do to try and resist on that localized sort of level?
Speaker 3:I think it's very important to know exactly what the rules are. So, like, I I know you say about the you have a healthy distrust of the way the law is used. You know, there's nothing to suggest that it can't be used the way you want it to. Right? And at that point, it becomes very much a tussle between, like, who gets heard.
Speaker 3:And that's where you need to yeah. Maybe you need to have friends in the right places. But there's nothing to suggest that, like, if you can show and expose the hypocrisy or the contradictions and the use of the power by the police, use of powers by the police on a community, then that can be a very useful defense. I think the biggest problem actually with community solidarity is well, the idea of togetherness is making sure everybody's on the same page. It's really difficult.
Speaker 3:Like, as as as Sean was saying, I was in, eastern area this year. And with people from that community, obviously, different people think different things. They might act in different ways. And the problem is the police seem to have picked their own community leaders to listen from. And that's a tough thing to get over, but we need to be able to really shout louder when it comes to making the case.
Speaker 3:And I think it was really important that Bristol Cable were there, making sure that the the particular needs of those community leaders was being heard. I think it was really important that Black South West Network and Bristol College Health event to make sure that that particular community's needs were being discussed and could come to some kind of conclusion. And I think it's very important to stopwatch as a national charity, you know, in Bristol and in other places, supports those voices being heard because at the end of the day, it really does come down to that. It's accruing that knowledge and asking about that knowledge and making sure that you have that base of togetherness and solidarity when you make the case against police overreach.
Speaker 2:Is there a role that police and crime commissioners police and crime commissioners, people don't know, are, like, elected non they're not police, but they're elected to kind of hold the police accountable. They're very limited powers. They're they're kind of their main powers are they can either fire the chief constable or sort of put pressure on budgets. They can be elected to sort of directing. There's sort of various examples where this is had a positive effect.
Speaker 2:There's a place in Teesside where basically they've, like, right, there's a openly running kind of cannabis community cafe because the police climate commissioner and chief constable have agreed they have deprioritized cannabis. Same in Bristol. Right? In Bristol, most people are not getting arrested for possession of cannabis because that has been deprioritized. It's a a choice that's been made by the police, and they've told people that.
Speaker 2:You know, these are places where people are elected, not pretty low majorities. People could come around and push for candidates, say, I'm going to ban section 60. Like, is there a role? Is there examples of police and crime commissioners having a role as people who are actually accountable, directly accountable to their constituents, which are the sort of other community. Right?
Speaker 3:It's not impossible. And I think this is a conversation that stopwatch people had at the time when they were coming in in the early 20 tens. That it's entirely possible to have, given the low flight to turnout for those elections, it's entirely possible to gain assistance by having somebody in there who can have policies that are more favorable to communities that do not wish to be able to
Speaker 1:be able to be able
Speaker 3:to be policed. It's entirely possible. The problem is, again, it takes a lot of effort in the same way that coming together with that community in Eastern to talk about those problems and find some solutions, that also takes a lot of effort. And it takes more effort from the perspective of grassroots organizations than it does from the police's side to be able to get the candidate in the who's most aligned with your outlook. It takes so much coordination, which is why I think, it, you know, it some progress can be made in some areas.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, it takes a lot to sustain that. And I think, yeah, again, not against it happening and would be entirely supportive of the day a police crime commissioner comes along and says, you know what? I want to completely rethink the way we do this. But, again, the power comes from higher up as well. Right?
Speaker 3:I I note the case of Simon Foster in West Midlands who Yes.
Speaker 2:I was gonna talk about him. He's in yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Said a few years ago, I want my force to do stunts such a lot better or to have higher success rates in, you know, fines and arrests. And he got absolutely hounded to the point that the previous government thought that they could maybe abolish his position altogether in the place of the metro mayors. And when you get into that kind of messy policy, you're always filled for Simon Foster because he'd survived that was at what cost rate?
Speaker 2:And the West Midlands I mean, for Simon Foster had was elected on a making it so police would carry naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote. And, basically, it was just overruled by the chief constable, which chief constable can, in theory, do, and there was very limited powers for Simon Foster even though that was what he was elected to do.
Speaker 1:I just wanted to add to that really, like, the local context of the police chief here last year admitting the force was institutionally racist. Right? With the commitments to changing things that come with it, like an overhaul of their stop and search policies and the training that come along with it. But there was a lot of pushback from the police federation, you know, who said that it would just drive a divide between, the police and communities, which, you know, is is already there. And, yeah, and just to go back, to this, what I found was a really eye opening, training session with the police, which come out of, Sarah Crew, the chief constable's plans.
Speaker 1:I did get this feeling that the very fact that these training sessions were happening made officers feel, as the Police Federation put it, like the the chief constable is saying they're all a bunch of racists, you know, and they felt very uncomfortable about this change. So they maybe are resistant to it. You know, the the cultural shift has to happen gradually just to go back to section 16 stop and search with a change in government. What do you think the future holds for this kind of campaign and in this area?
Speaker 3:I have to say, I know the last government was so difficult to help, dissuade about anything that wasn't obsessively law and order. Mhmm. And it might make it this government in particular seem like a kind of a godsend or something. But I also think it's important to know historically that storm surge under the last labor government volume wise was much worse than it has been in the entirety of the last 14 years. And the person who was in that government, who is now the home secretary, was a Redcoop when it was, you know, in its millions every year.
Speaker 3:I just think it's very important to know that. I don't know what her feelings are on stuff and search now, but I do know that she is still as quite like the old new labor guy and obsessed with antisocial behavior, right, and wants to introduce more orders, mainly respect orders, which again is just, again, antisocial behavior orders wrapped up in yet more new fancy names. And there's every chance they could include stubborn search provisions, and we just don't need anymore. And I I worry about this, and I worry about the the fact that there's this assumption that stubborn search might improve in some way when I can't really see that until we get full concrete evidence that this government is not going to use stubborn search as the policy to all types of criminal justice legislation, and we'll we'll have to wait for the new criminal justice bills to come through to kind of show that. And I'm on the fence about it, to be honest.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess there's the concern that, like, Labour need to prove that they're being tough on crime in a way that the Tories that's the sort of thing they would do. So, like Right. You know, I I grew up in the time of I suppose. That was a and that was what lots of your interactions with police were around that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:That was entirely labor idea of young people having the gall to exist outside. We've got one final question for you, which is the question we sort of ask everyone. What is one thing people should just do to sort of try and make a positive difference in their community or or national level? Like, yeah, if you could get everyone who's listening to just do one thing, what what would that thing be?
Speaker 3:Oh, gosh. Well, I was gonna keep it I was gonna keep it quite localized and and say, yeah, going back to press the pay book. I think the section 60 campaign is really important, and I think I believe in it because I think it's entirely possible to get even the Somerset Police back to a position where they're just not doing it. The fact they're not doing it. Obviously, they're not going to set policy where they, ban section 60 for it more.
Speaker 3:But they were doing it for 4 years, and you can't tell me that crime got better or worse or anything like that. Like, it it's just such an insignificant power on one level that if you don't use it, it doesn't make a negative difference for the police. But on another level, when you do use it, you are obviously more likely to end up in positions where you are intimidating people and seeing whom they are targeting, which is disproportionately young black people. It is very obvious to me that it can be willing to protect young black people flying over policing, that you get back to a position where social safety is de facto nonexistent. I think to support that campaign is absolutely paramount to making sure that the police are finding other ways of doing policing, doing it better, and doing it in line with this claim that they want to be anti racist because they're just not.
Speaker 3:They're doing the exact opposite for what they claim they want to do. So, yeah, support support the campaign. Support Bristol Cable scrap 6060 campaign.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, hey. We we love it when it's on brand as well. So but,
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. It's over. I think this has been really interesting. I think people will be able to sort of take a lot from this, get a sort of lay of the land, and, you know, feel empowered in something that can often feel deeply disempowering. So, yeah.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for your time, Emmanuel. We'll speak to you very soon. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank
Speaker 3:you, Azarac. Thank
Speaker 1:you, Sean. One of
Speaker 2:the things we've sort of been talking about sort of around the recording today is that, like, at the protest against the far right that happened in Bristol, so there was the one on the Saturday where there was these real clashes and there was another one on the Wednesday in, like, Old Market. And I I was sort of involved there. I was sort of stewarding. I was sort of, you know, wearing a high vis, trying to kind of trying to make it as sort of effective as possible. Like, the police liaison people came up to us at one point, and we were sort of trying to make a thing of we weren't working with the police.
Speaker 2:That was something that sort of come up as criticisms and other kind of actions around this sort of stuff in recent weeks. But one of the things they said to us, oh, yeah. We're gonna be enforcing section 60, which is what we've been talking about. A part of that is about not being able to cover your face and demanding people remove their face coverings. The people who stood here were like, well, technically, actually, it's not.
Speaker 2:We don't legally have to, like, inform everyone on your behalf. That'd be your job to inform people. But, like, if you were asking us, it seems like a bad idea. It seems like a way to inflame. There's multiple reasons.
Speaker 2:I mean, in a post COVID world, there's probably good reasons to have your face covered anywhere, especially a mass of people. But also at a protest, protesting the far right, not wanting to be personally identified as having attended even if you're not doing anything illegal because you could then be targeted. That was something that, like, there was sort of weird real concerns about. It's legitimate to not be identified as someone sort of standing up to these people who we know have been willing to engage in quite serious violence in sort of defense of these sorts of beliefs that they've got. It's all a slightly different issue with this power, but it shows these sort of perverse outcomes that probably weren't thought of at the time when it was coming out with.
Speaker 2:That was pretty not something they were thinking of Mhmm. When they put these rules into place, but they can be repurposed to, like, be disrupted to perfectly do just some activities, I'd say.
Speaker 1:Another thing to consider as well because something after launching this campaign, say no to section 60 at the cable, that came before this police action to use section 60 at these protests. And in the buildup to the far eye violence that we saw on the Saturday, police announced that they'd be using the power. And the same people that I'd been talking to were saying, okay. In in this situation, I think it would be good to use section 60. There's there's something in that.
Speaker 1:Right? Because, yes, you would want the police to act. It's kind of the same. Right? It's like you would want the police to act to protect and prevent violence, prevent crime.
Speaker 1:Right? But this power, however it's used, whoever it's against, is ineffective. And and you're saying about the being asked to remove face coverings, which is under section 60 a a, which is a a slightly different power or a bolted on addition to the legislation. The outcome of that, what is it? What are they trying to do, and was it effective?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think lots of this, like, the power seems to soft to be used, but, like, look, we've done something. We've pulled the lever of this. You can't say we didn't do something. We pulled the lever.
Speaker 2:We've gone nuclear, whatever you wanna call it. And, like, it doesn't necessarily ever seem to be joined up with anything effective. We've seen so often in Bristol, like, the kill the bill protest is a really good example where I mean, I left one of them. I was at one of them. And I was like, it's not gonna kick off.
Speaker 2:Everyone just sat in the street singing our house in the middle of the street. It was like there was nothing going on. It seemed like such a tame, good natured gathering. And then I left. And after a certain time, they were like, you gotta go now.
Speaker 2:And then the police suddenly create this riot out of what was just people inhabiting a space. And, like, it's so easy, I think, especially with the way the police are viewed and the way that they interact with people, particularly, like, marginalized communities. But, like, you you know, it can be anyone. Especially if you are a protester, you kind of end up on the the sharp end of these things so often. The it's their interaction just sort of creates a problem that they say they're trying to avoid in the first place.
Speaker 2:This it's not very funny. We've not gotten the our usual jokes and japes around this one, have we?
Speaker 3:Have you got a pub joke?
Speaker 2:You can just drop it.
Speaker 3:I've got
Speaker 2:a pub joke. I can just drop it. I don't know. Do you have anything to add to that, Sean, while I slowly descend into a a quagmire of misery and despair?
Speaker 1:I guess I would return to what Habib was saying at the end of the interview. You know, if people do want to get involved with the campaign here in Bristol to stop police from using section 60, they can do by signing our petition, which is on our website. We're in the process of arranging an event, which will be next month, so keep an eye out for that. This has been People Just Do Something
Speaker 2:for the Bristol Cable. With me is Sean Morris, and I've been Isaac Niebuhn Hopkins.
Speaker 1:Morrison.
Speaker 2:Oh, it says Morris in my I wrote that. That's what it's wrong.
Speaker 1:That's my name now.
Speaker 2:With me is Sean Morrison, and I've been Isaac Niebuhn Hopkins. We really wanna sort of build this conversation and have more people part of it. We'd love to hear from you if you think there's anyone we should speak to. You can email us at content at the Bristol cable dot org, and you can also join the Bristol cable. It's a membership paper supported by its readers.
Speaker 2:You can do that at the Bristol Cable dot org forward slash join. Thank you very much again for joining us, Sean. It's been great, and we will, see you again next time. Goodbye. Bye.