StopWatch

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Passage reads: 'So, the final question is no longer just whether these systems are biased. The state’s own evidence already tells us that they are uneven, racialised, and dangerous in ways that map directly onto the disproportionality that StopWatch and other like-minded organisations have been documenting for years. The deeper question is simpler, and more political: who consented to this, and when?

If the consultation closes after the vans are funded, after the infrastructure is commissioned, and after the legal architecture is already being drafted around expansion, then this is not public consent. It is consultation theatre.'

Passage reads: 'By the time the consultation closed, the real decisions had already been made. The consultation promises clearer rules, new oversight, and more transparency. But it also explicitly says the new framework should 'support technological development' and make police use of these tools easier to justify and more future-proof. This is the new legal patchwork: not a pause for democratic consent, but a framework designed to stabilise and legitimise powers already being expanded.

Recent events make that even harder to ignore. On 24 February 2026, the Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner published his response to the consultation and warned that 'self-regulation and voluntary standards cannot be relied upon to safeguard human rights.' He argued that serious uses of facial recognition should face tighter legal restriction and, in some cases, independent pre-authorisation.

Two days later, it was reported that the Metropolitan police would begin a six-month pilot of operator-initiated facial recognition, with 100 officers using smartphone-based identity checks during stops. While the state talks about safeguards, facial recognition is moving closer to direct street-level encounters.'

Passage reads: 'While the public is being asked how (or if) facial recognition should be used, the authorities are barrelling ahead to embed it into everyday policing.

That is the real story here. This is not a neutral conversation about future possibilities. It is the managed public staging of a direction of travel that has already been chosen. The consultation itself, announced by ministerial written statement on 4 December 2025 and open until 12 February 2026, openly admits that police currently rely on a 'patchwork of common law, data protection, and human rights legislation.' It also proposes a new oversight body to set rules and check compliance. But now that the consultation window has closed, the public debate has effectively passed while the machinery of expansion remains in motion. The government is not asking whether biometric stop and search should be normalised. It is asking how to legalise what it is already scaling.

The January 2026 white paper simply extends that logic from pilot fleet to national model. What used to be framed as targeted, and exceptional is now becoming routine equipment. Suspicion is shifting from the officer on the street to the systems around them: the van, the watchlist, the algorithm, the database.'

A timeseries graph displaying 15 years of stop-search ethnic disparity ratios between white and Black people. In 2024/25, the differential was 3.8 times (Black people were searched 3.5 more often)

Table showing year-on-year changes in stop-searches, by outcomes and in total

Table showing year-on-year changes in stop-search volumes, by power and in total

Quote:

'The Board also elaborated on a tension between seeking to build trust and confidence in schools, and police interactions as the source of a
lack of trust and confidence overall. Members reflected that trust and confidence built through schools policing can be instantly undone when a young person encounters an officer in the community setting who does not approach them appropriately or does so in a procedurally unjust way, e.g., if they are stopped and searched
without reasonable grounds, or in a way that is traumatically invasive. For this reason, performance indicators used by MPS in the past such as the number of youth engagement events in schools or the number of police deployments in and around schools64 may not accurately measure the effectiveness of the police-school relationship'

Quote from interviewee 'YW1':

'A lot of people make professional choices to come into a borough. They kind of go, ‘Well, look, I could work in Kensington and Chelsea and, you know, find out I might be able to progress from there to another area. But if I work two years in Hackney? I could go for any job […] Let me get a piece of that.’ I hear that from teachers, from police, from all sorts. – YW1'

Quote:

“Analysis of the sample of 59 criminal investigations of Black children found that while No Further Action was an outcome reached in 90% of reports, exclusion or suspension from school occurred in 40% of reports. 25% of Black children charged were suspects in 10 or more subsequent reports following their charge and 15% received custodial sentences.”

Quote:

'Police forces should design SSPs such that school-linked officers do not have a regular presence within schools'

There is no evidence that a regular police presence within schools reduces youth offending or produces positive outcomes for young people.
Pre-existing evidence and this research indicate that a regular police presence within schools has had a harmful effect on some young people, especially those whose behaviours are recorded as crimes even where a policing response is inappropriate, due to the Home Office Crime Recording Rules. This research indicates that
police forces and schools can fulfil the aims of partnership working without a regular police presence in schools, to reduce the risk of harm
and disproportionality.

The highlighted parts of a two-diagrammed chart show that of 235 'weapons, point & blades' stop-searches in the London borough of Wandsworth in the six months to 28 February 2025, 46 of them resulted in 'positive outcomes'. We assume this means weapons were found.

StopWatch newsletter, November 2024: Postcode policing and the jackpot for justice

Table displaying police forces conducting s35 dispersal orders and resultant arrests, compared with stop and searches under s60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and resultant arrests, 2021/22 to 2022/23

Table compiling the number of s60 stop and searches conducted in the vicinity of football grounds compared with the number of times football crowds were dispersed under s35 powers, from 2017/18 to 2023/24

A table listing annual volumes of stop and searches under s60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and resultant arrests, England and Wales, from 2001/02 to 2023/24