A public safety exception to PACE is now essential

As I write this article, 23-year-old policewoman, Rachael Bown is fighting for her life in a Nottingham hospital. Rachael was shot in the abdomen whilst carrying out a stop check in the Lenton area of Nottingham shortly before midnight on Monday, February 13.

The shooting and the recent murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky have provoked outrage and re-ignited the debate as to whether the police should be routinely armed. Last Friday Gary Nelson was sentenced to life imprisonment for the cold-blooded execution of PC Patrick Dunne in South London in 1993 – a salutary reminder of the trend in police deaths.

I wish to contribute briefly to this debate, then to provide some commentary on the legal constraints regulating the use of stop and search powers and to suggest that officer safety should be given priority over the rights of suspected people.

Sir Ian Blair, ACPO and the Home Office reject suggestions that the police should be armed. Film director Michael Winner, who set up the Police Memorial Trust to honour officers killed in the line of duty, reminds us that the Trust has put up 35 memorials to officers who have died and asks how many more will die before we follow the American and European practice of arming the police. PC Norman Brennan, leader of the campaign group Protect the Protectors, believes officers should be balloted on whether they support routinely carrying firearms and a Police Federation spokesman supports this view.

Of course the views of serving police officers should be influential in such a debate. But, in the same way as the views of the British public are disregarded when considering whether capital punishment should be restored, there is no point in having a debate about it. The views of the usually silent who feel that society affords inadequate protection to the innocent will be vilified by the noisy minority who feel that the suggestion of routinely arming the police will change the relationship between the police and the public.

Serving police officers who patrol dangerous inner city areas are impotent in the face of the growth of cheap and illegal firearms, and random and casual shooting. They are temporarily appeased by the profound words of condemnation from ACPO and government ministers, and by an apparent increase in powers which prove to be as ineffective as they are complex.

By way of example let us consider the priority given to officer safety by the legal requirements before a suspected person may be searched. Put simply, the requirements of the law outweigh any question of safety, a position that should be remedied by creating a public safety exception.

The primary purpose of the use of stop and search powers, the PACE Code of Practice tells us, is to enable officers to allay or confirm suspicions about individuals without exercising their powers of arrest. Before a person or vehicle may be searched an officer must have reasonable grounds for suspecting that he or she will find stolen or prohibited articles which include weapons.

There must be an objective basis for the suspicion which is based on facts, information and/or intelligence which are relevant to the likelihood of finding an article of a certain kind or, in the case of searches under Section 43 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to the likelihood that the person is a terrorist.

In all circumstances where an officer who has reasonable grounds for suspicion detains a person in order to search, he or she must inform the person that they are being detained for the purpose of the search.

It is an absolute rule that before searching anyone an officer must inform the person concerned of the following:

(1) that the person is detained for the purpose of a search,

(2) the officer’s own name and the police station which they are from,

(3) the legal search powers being exercised,

(4) the object of the proposed search,

(5) the officer’s grounds for wanting to make it,

(6) that the person concerned has the right to ask for a copy of the record of search at the police station within 12 months.

These