POLITICS and good governance is often about the middle.
It’s occasionally about finding the compromise between two disparate groups.
Sometimes it’s about the space in between what’s right, what’s effective and what’s popular.
That is where the Government find themselves with stop and search and under-18s.
When statistics showed hundreds of under-18s being affected by non-statutory or so-called consensual stop and search there was revulsion from politicians and the press.
Research by Dr Kath Murray showed that in 2010, children under 14 were searched 26,000 times consensually.
Among this 26,000 were 500 searches of children aged 10 or under, and 72 searches of children aged seven or younger.
Fewer than 10 per cent of these searches resulted in police turning up alcohol, drugs, stolen goods or weapons.
Despite insistence from top brass that targets did not exist, rank-and-file officers contended that they did, just euphemistically rebranded as Key Performance Indicators.
Those figures were the beginning of the end for consensual stop and search in Scotland.
So what now? Are current police powers enough?
If you talk to any police officer, they say no. They are annoyed at the loss of this crime-fighting tool. They say that often the whole point of stop and search is not to find alcohol or weapons but to disrupt criminals. If someone thinks there’s a chance they could be stopped by police then they don’t carry drugs, or alcohol, or knives. Then there are those who contend that this isn’t policing, it’s victimising. Huge swathes of young people being targeted because of their age.
What’s more important? That police can disrupt criminality or that young people can walk freely without having to fear the possibility of being targeted by police?
The answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
Police claim crime could rise if they are denied power to search children for alcohol
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