“Stop and search” is a common police tactic where officers can stop and question people they suspect of being involved in crime. While police employ “stop and search” to try and prevent crime, its use can have unintended consequences, including the erosion of public trust and unfair treatment of ethnic minorities.
This project will investigate the unintended consequences of stop and search practices and examine whether they contribute to reproducing social inequality. It will explore whether people who spent most of their adolescence in over-policed neighbourhoods are more likely to experience poorer educational outcomes.
To do this, the research team will link longitudinal survey data from the Millennium Cohort Study with detailed stop and search data from police forces all over England and Wales. This will allow the team to see if growing up in an area with a lot of police stopping people is linked to whether someone finishes school or goes to university later in life.
The study will show how much police tactics such as “stop and search” might cause wider problems for society beyond the criminal justice system.
Police forces are officially tasked with keeping the public safe. To do this, they sometimes use powers such as stopping, questioning and searching members of the public. While these powers can help prevent crime, they can also come with potential social costs, including the erosion of public trust, undermining police legitimacy, and negative impacts on mental health, particularly in disadvantaged urban areas. Therefore, police using these tactics need to balance the goal of public safety with the need to minimise unintended harm.
Policing scholarship has a good understanding of what reduces crime. However, there hasn’t been enough research on the negative social effects of more forceful policing tactics.
This research project aims to address this knowledge gap. It will assess whether growing up in over-policed neighbourhoods is associated with key life-course outcomes in early adulthood, such as educational attainment and engagement in criminal activity.
The hypothesis is that young people who grew up in heavily policed neighbourhoods are more likely to leave school early and less likely to go to university. This would mean that policing could make existing social disadvantages worse, continuing the cycle of social inequality. By using unique longitudinal survey data linked with publicly available administrative records, this research will explore unintended life-course consequences of proactive policing and investigate how it may reproduce social inequality.
This project seeks to understand some of the potential unintended consequences of the widespread use of stop and search powers. In particular, it will focus on the life-course implications for young people from disadvantaged and heavily policed neighbourhoods. By analysing the long-term association between the prevalence of stop and search practices in the neighbourhood during adolescence with Millennium Cohort Study respondents’ likelihood of dropping out of school and attending university, this project aims to explore the extent to which proactive policing exacerbates social vulnerabilities and reproduces social inequality.
This quantitative project will draw on longitudinal survey data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) linked with geocoded spatial data from police forces in England and Wales and the UK Census. The study will primarily use data from the Metropolitan Police Service — although, in partnership with the College of Policing, data from other police forces will also be potentially included.
The MCS is one of the large-scale, cohort-based, nationally representative longitudinal surveys housed by the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies. It surveyed around 19,000 young people born in the UK between 2000 and 2002, following their lives across eight waves of data collection until 2023. Sweeps of data collection were conducted when respondents were approximately 9 months old (2001), 3 years (2004), 5 years (2006), 7 years (2008), 11 years (2012), 14 years (2015), 17 years (2018), and 23 years (2024). The survey instrument includes respondents’ residential history during childhood and adolescence, personal experiences with police stops, measures tapping into educational motivation and attainment, and self-reported offending behaviour, among several other measures.
With the residential history of MCS respondents and spatially aggregated stop and search data from London (and potentially other areas) between 2015 and 2018, the research team will create a measure of cumulative neighbourhood exposure to stop and search during adolescence. Essentially, this will reflect the total amount of stop and search records in respondents’ Lower Super Output Area (LSOA) (a geographical area with a typical population of 1,000-3,000 people) of residence between 2015 and 2018, when they were 14 through to 18 years old. This measure will be used as the main explanatory variable in longitudinal models predicting the probability of adolescents dropping out of school and attending university.
Lead investigator
- Dr Thiago R. Oliveira (University of Manchester)
Project partner
- Dr Paul Quinton, College of Policing
