As a police officer, I know stop and search is really about power | Anonymous Metropolitan police officer
Weed is not the problem, yet it lets us put our hands in people’s pockets. This is just one of the troubling things about the job
There have been a lot of questions about stop and search and, more recently, vehicle stops. One point that I think is often lost in the debate is that we do a job that is scary at times, and as officers we need to constantly take risk and our safety into account. When we stop and search, as long as we can justify our decision, we are using powers that we have been given within our communities. On each separate stop we don’t get much wrong; the problem comes when you realise that the individual has been stopped more than 14 times and we have never found anything. We can’t explain
