Table of Contents
Type: Full Undergraduate Dissertation | Subject: Criminology | Level: Undergraduate | Word Count: ~9,600 words
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Overview: This model dissertation examines how the police power of stop and search shapes community trust in the Metropolitan Police, combining an illustrative survey of 212 London residents with ten semi-structured interviews. Grounded in procedural justice theory, it demonstrates how an undergraduate Criminology dissertation is structured, argued and referenced from abstract through to conclusion. All data are illustrative and generated for teaching purposes.
Stop and search remains one of the most visible and contested powers available to the police in England and Wales. While successive governments have defended it as a necessary tool for tackling knife crime and the supply of controlled drugs, critics argue that its uneven application erodes the confidence of the very communities it is intended to protect. This dissertation investigates the relationship between experiences of stop and search and community trust in the Metropolitan Police Service, with particular attention to how the manner in which a search is conducted shapes the way it is interpreted. A sequential mixed-methods design was adopted. An illustrative questionnaire was completed by 212 residents across four London boroughs, measuring self-reported contact with stop and search alongside trust, perceived fairness and the four dimensions of procedural justice. The quantitative strand was followed by ten semi-structured interviews that explored how respondents made sense of their encounters. The survey data indicated that respondents who had been searched reported lower overall trust than those who had not, but that the strength of this association weakened considerably once perceptions of procedural fairness were taken into account. The interview data reinforced this pattern: participants distinguished sharply between being stopped and being treated without respect, and it was the quality of the interaction, rather than the stop itself, that most strongly coloured their view of the police. Racialised suspicion, poor communication and the perceived absence of a credible reason emerged as recurring sources of resentment, while explanation, courtesy and a transparent rationale could leave even those who objected to being stopped with a grudging acceptance of police authority. The study concludes that stop and search is best understood not as an inherently legitimacy-damaging practice but as a repeated opportunity in which legitimacy is either accumulated or spent. The findings support procedural justice as an explanatory framework and point to practical implications for training, supervision and the recording of encounters. Limitations of scale and self-selection are acknowledged, and directions for larger comparative research are proposed.
Few policing powers in England and Wales generate as much public and political controversy as stop and search. The power allows an officer, on the basis of reasonable suspicion, to detain and search a member of the public in a public place for prohibited items such as controlled drugs, offensive weapons or stolen goods. For its defenders, it is an indispensable instrument of proactive policing that interrupts the carriage of weapons and signals that the streets are not ungoverned. For its critics, it is a blunt and socially corrosive practice whose benefits are uncertain and whose costs fall disproportionately on young men from minority ethnic backgrounds. Between these positions sits a substantial criminological literature arguing that the long-term effectiveness of any policing power depends less on its deterrent bite than on whether the public regards the police as a legitimate authority worthy of cooperation.
The Metropolitan Police Service, as the force responsible for policing Greater London, occupies a central place in this debate. London is both the most ethnically diverse part of the United Kingdom and the location of some of the highest recorded volumes of stop and search activity in the country. The force has also been the subject of repeated public inquiries and reviews concerned with the fairness of its relationship with Black and minority ethnic Londoners, from the Scarman Report following the 1981 Brixton disturbances through to more recent scrutiny of disproportionality and institutional culture. For many London communities, therefore, stop and search is not an abstract policy but a lived and frequently repeated experience, and it is through such everyday encounters that abstract judgements about the police are formed, confirmed or revised.
This dissertation situates stop and search within the broader question of police legitimacy and trust. Trust is treated here not as a vague measure of popularity but as a specific orientation: the belief that the police share the community’s values, will act with fairness and competence, and can be relied upon to use their powers appropriately. Understood in this way, trust is consequential. A sizeable body of research links trusting attitudes to a greater willingness to obey the law, to report crime, to provide information to officers and to accept police decisions even when they are unwelcome. If stop and search damages trust, the cost is not only reputational; it may undermine the cooperative relationships on which effective policing ultimately depends.
The rationale for this study rests on a gap between the volume of commentary on stop and search and the comparative scarcity of research that connects individual experiences of the power to the mechanisms through which they influence trust. Much public debate treats the relationship as self-evident: either stop and search alienates communities, or it reassures them. The reality suggested by procedural justice research is more conditional. It implies that the same objective event, a stop and search, can produce very different consequences for trust depending on how it is carried out and how it is understood by the person on the receiving end. Examining that conditionality in a specifically London context, and giving voice to the interpretive work that residents themselves perform, is the contribution this dissertation seeks to make.
The significance of the topic is heightened by its policy currency. Stop and search volumes in England and Wales have fluctuated markedly over the past decade in response to political direction, oversight regimes and concern about serious violence. Each expansion renews the question of whether the benefits of increased activity are offset by damage to community relations. A clearer understanding of the conditions under which stop and search corrodes or conserves trust is therefore directly relevant to decisions about how, and how often, the power should be used. For an undergraduate project, the subject also offers a tractable way of connecting a live public controversy to an established theoretical framework and a manageable programme of primary research.
The overarching aim of this dissertation is to examine the relationship between experiences of stop and search and community trust in the Metropolitan Police, and to assess the extent to which procedural justice explains that relationship. In pursuit of this aim, the study sets out four objectives:
The study is guided by one principal research question and three subsidiary questions. The principal question asks: how does the experience of stop and search influence community trust in the Metropolitan Police? The subsidiary questions are as follows. First, is there an association between having been stopped and searched and the level of trust that residents report? Second, to what extent do perceptions of procedural fairness mediate or qualify any such association? Third, which features of a stop and search encounter do residents themselves regard as most consequential for their trust in the police?
The remainder of the dissertation is organised into five chapters. Chapter 2 reviews the literature, developing the conceptual framework that links stop and search to trust through the lens of procedural justice and legitimacy. Chapter 3 sets out and justifies the mixed-methods research design, explaining the sampling, data collection and analysis strategies and the ethical safeguards adopted. Chapter 4 presents the findings from the survey and interview strands in turn. Chapter 5 discusses these findings in dialogue with the literature, drawing out the ways in which they support, qualify or complicate existing accounts. Chapter 6 concludes, summarising the contribution, offering recommendations for policy and practice, acknowledging the limitations of the study and proposing directions for future research.
This chapter reviews the body of scholarship relevant to the research questions. It proceeds from the specific to the general and back again. It begins by clarifying what stop and search is and how it has been studied, before turning to the concepts of trust, confidence and legitimacy that anchor the dissertation. It then examines procedural justice theory, the dominant explanatory framework in contemporary policing research, and considers the particular significance of ethnic disproportionality. The chapter closes by identifying the gaps that the present study addresses and by setting out the conceptual framework that structures the empirical work.
Stop and search refers to a cluster of legal powers that permit officers to detain and search individuals in public without first arresting them. The most frequently used power requires an officer to hold reasonable grounds for suspecting that the person is carrying a prohibited article; other powers, used more sparingly, permit searches within a designated area without individualised suspicion where serious violence is anticipated. Delsol and Shiner (2015) characterise stop and search as a power of unusual breadth and discretion, exercised at the very frontier of the police’s relationship with the public and largely beyond the reach of real-time supervision. It is this combination of ubiquity and discretion that makes the power both operationally attractive and normatively fraught.
Quinton (2011) draws attention to the cognitive process through which officers form the suspicions that justify a search. He argues that suspicion is not a neutral reading of objective cues but is constructed through working assumptions about who and what looks out of place, assumptions that are shaped by experience, by the culture of the shift and by the characteristics of the area being policed. This matters for the present study because it suggests that the distribution of stops is not simply a reflection of the distribution of offending but is partly a product of how officers interpret ambiguous situations. The subjective quality of suspicion opens the door to inconsistency, and inconsistency is precisely what members of the public are liable to experience as unfairness.
Research on the effectiveness of stop and search has produced equivocal results. Evaluations tend to find, at best, modest and localised deterrent effects that are difficult to disentangle from other influences on crime trends. Bradford (2017) observes that the evidence base is far weaker than the confidence of political advocacy would suggest, and that the burden of justifying an expansive use of the power cannot rest on effectiveness alone. If the crime-control case is uncertain, the social consequences of the power, including its effects on trust, assume correspondingly greater weight in any overall assessment.
Understanding the trust implications of stop and search requires some grasp of the legal and policy architecture within which the power sits. The principal power derives from legislation that permits a search where an officer has reasonable grounds for suspicion, and its exercise is governed by a statutory code of practice that specifies, among other things, the information an officer must provide before a search, the requirement to record the encounter and the prohibition on using personal characteristics such as ethnicity as the sole basis for suspicion. A separate and more controversial power permits suspicionless searches within an area designated by a senior officer where serious violence is anticipated. The distinction matters for the present study because the two powers rest on different justifications and are likely to be experienced differently: a suspicion-based search at least offers, in principle, an individualised rationale that can be communicated and contested, whereas a suspicionless search within a designated zone offers no such account and may for that reason be more corrosive of the sense that one has been treated as an individual.
Policy oversight of the power has oscillated over time between expansion and restraint. Periods of concern about disproportionality and about the low proportion of searches that result in further action have produced schemes intended to improve the recording of encounters, to tie the use of the power more closely to intelligence and to open the data to community scrutiny. Periods of concern about serious violence, by contrast, have produced political encouragement to use the power more freely. Delsol and Shiner (2015) observe that this oscillation reflects an unresolved tension between the crime-control and community-relations rationales for policing, a tension that stop and search brings into unusually sharp focus. The policy context is therefore not a neutral backdrop but an active influence on the volume, distribution and character of the encounters whose effects this study examines.
Trust and confidence are often used interchangeably in public discussion, but the literature draws useful distinctions. Jackson et al. (2013) treat trust as a relational attitude directed at the police as an institution and at officers as its agents. To trust the police is to hold expectations about their future conduct: that they will be effective, that they will treat people fairly and with dignity, and that they share and will act upon the community’s sense of right and wrong. Confidence, in their account, is a broader evaluative judgement that incorporates trust but also reflects overall satisfaction with policing in an area. The present study focuses primarily on trust, because it is trust, understood as an expectation about fair treatment and shared values, that procedural justice theory predicts will be most sensitive to the quality of personal encounters.
A key insight from this literature is that trust is unevenly distributed and is not simply a function of victimisation or local crime rates. Bradford, Jackson and Stanko (2009) show that direct contact with the police, far from uniformly improving attitudes, can either enhance or damage trust depending on how the contact is experienced. They describe an asymmetry whereby negative encounters tend to damage trust more than positive encounters improve it, a pattern with obvious relevance to a high-volume, often unwelcome intervention such as stop and search. This asymmetry implies that forces cannot assume that the reassurance generated by a visible police presence will offset the resentment generated by intrusive stops.
Procedural justice theory provides the central explanatory framework for this dissertation. Developed most influentially by Tyler (2006), the theory holds that people’s willingness to accept and cooperate with authorities depends less on the outcomes those authorities deliver than on the fairness of the processes by which decisions are reached. Applied to policing, the theory identifies four elements that shape perceptions of procedural fairness: participation, or the opportunity to explain one’s side of the situation; neutrality, or the sense that decisions are made consistently and without bias; respect, or being treated with dignity and courtesy; and trustworthy motives, or the belief that the officer is acting out of genuine concern rather than hostility. Where these elements are present, encounters tend to build legitimacy; where they are absent, they tend to erode it.
Sunshine and Tyler (2003) demonstrated that procedural fairness was a stronger predictor of public support for the police than assessments of police effectiveness or the perceived risk of crime. Tyler and Fagan (2008) extended the argument to cooperation, showing that people who regarded the police as procedurally fair were more willing to help the police and to defer to their decisions. The implication for stop and search is important. It suggests that the legitimacy consequences of a stop are not fixed by the fact of the stop but are determined substantially by how the officer behaves during the encounter. A procedurally fair stop, even one that the person resents, may leave legitimacy largely intact; a procedurally unfair stop may damage it well beyond the proportion of the intrusion itself.
The theory is not without its critics. Tankebe (2013) argues that legitimacy is multidimensional and that procedural fairness, while important, is one component among several that also include lawfulness, distributive fairness and effectiveness. He cautions against reducing legitimacy to procedural justice alone and notes that the relative weight of these dimensions may vary across social and national contexts. Hough (2021) similarly insists that procedural justice should complement rather than replace a concern with the substantive fairness of how police resources and attention are distributed. These qualifications inform the present study, which treats procedural justice as a powerful but partial account and remains alert to the possibility that distributive concerns, particularly around ethnicity, operate alongside it.
No discussion of stop and search in the British context can avoid the question of ethnic disproportionality. Bowling and Phillips (2007) documented the persistent over-representation of Black and minority ethnic people among those stopped relative to their share of the population, and argued that this pattern could not be explained by differences in offending alone. They located the problem partly in the discretionary and suspicion-based nature of the power, which allows stereotypes to influence who is selected for a stop. Disproportionality matters for trust in two ways. First, it is a distributive injustice in its own right: a power that falls unequally on particular groups signals to those groups that they are objects of suspicion by virtue of who they are. Second, it shapes the interpretive lens through which individual encounters are read, so that a stop experienced by a young Black man may be understood not as an isolated event but as one instance of a recognised and resented pattern.
This points to an interaction between the procedural and the distributive. A procedurally fair encounter may still be experienced as unjust if the person believes they were selected for the stop on the basis of their ethnicity. Conversely, the cumulative weight of repeated stops may lower the threshold at which an encounter is perceived as disrespectful. The literature therefore cautions against treating procedural fairness as a complete antidote to the legitimacy costs of disproportionate policing. For the present study, this suggests that ethnicity should be attended to both as a background characteristic and as a feature of how respondents themselves frame their experiences.
The British model of policing is traditionally described as policing by consent, an ideal that traces its lineage to the principles associated with the founding of the Metropolitan Police and that locates police authority in public approval rather than coercive force. Within contemporary scholarship, legitimacy is understood as the property that converts raw power into recognised authority, such that people obey not merely from fear of sanction but from a felt obligation to defer. Myhill and Bradford (2012) show that forces can enhance public confidence by improving the quality of service they provide during encounters, lending empirical support to the idea that legitimacy is actively produced in everyday interactions rather than simply inherited.
Stop and search occupies a pivotal position within this model precisely because it is a point at which consent is tested. Each stop asks the person to defer to an exercise of coercive authority on the basis of a suspicion they may not share. Whether they emerge from that encounter with their sense of police legitimacy strengthened or weakened depends, the literature suggests, on whether the encounter is experienced as fair, reasoned and respectful. In this sense stop and search is a microcosm of the consent-based model, concentrating in a single brief interaction the larger question of whether the police can command authority without relying on coercion alone.
Three gaps motivate the present study. First, although the procedural justice literature is extensive, much of it relies on general survey measures of attitudes to the police rather than on accounts of specific, high-salience encounters such as stop and search. There is value in examining the power directly rather than inferring its effects from aggregate attitudes. Second, the quantitative and qualitative traditions have too often proceeded in parallel, with surveys establishing associations and interviews exploring meanings but with limited integration between them. A mixed-methods design can use each to illuminate the other. Third, while disproportionality and procedural justice are both well studied, their interaction, the way distributive and procedural concerns combine in the interpretation of a single encounter, remains comparatively under-examined at the level of lived experience. This dissertation addresses these gaps within the constraints of an undergraduate project.
Drawing these strands together, the study adopts a conceptual framework in which the experience of stop and search influences community trust through two principal pathways. The first is procedural: the quality of treatment during the encounter, captured by the four elements of procedural justice, shapes whether the stop builds or erodes trust. The second is distributive: the person’s beliefs about why they were selected, and in particular whether ethnicity played a part, condition how the encounter is interpreted. The framework treats trust as the outcome, the objective fact of a stop as the trigger, and perceptions of procedural and distributive fairness as the mechanisms that translate the trigger into an effect. This framework generates the expectation that any raw association between being stopped and lower trust will weaken once fairness perceptions are accounted for, and it directs the qualitative strand towards the features of encounters that respondents identify as fair or unfair.
The literature reviewed in this chapter establishes that stop and search is a discretionary, contested and only modestly effective power whose principal significance for policing may lie in its effects on trust and legitimacy. Procedural justice theory offers a compelling account of how those effects are produced, emphasising the quality of treatment over the outcome of the encounter, while critics remind us that legitimacy is multidimensional and that distributive concerns, especially around ethnicity, cannot be reduced to procedure. The conceptual framework derived from this literature guides the empirical investigation that follows.
This chapter explains and justifies the methodological choices made in the study. It sets out the research philosophy, the overall design, the sampling strategy, the methods of data collection and analysis, and the ethical considerations that governed the research. It concludes by reflecting on the reliability, validity and limitations of the approach. Throughout, the aim is to demonstrate how the research questions and conceptual framework developed in the previous chapters translate into a coherent and defensible programme of inquiry.
The study is positioned within a pragmatist research philosophy. Pragmatism holds that the choice of method should be driven by the research question rather than by prior commitment to a single epistemology, and it is therefore well suited to mixed-methods inquiry. The research questions in this dissertation are of two kinds. The first asks whether an association exists between stop and search and trust and how strongly fairness qualifies it, a question that lends itself to the measurement and comparison characteristic of a broadly positivist, quantitative approach. The second asks how respondents interpret their encounters, a question that calls for the interpretivist sensitivity of qualitative inquiry. Rather than treating these orientations as incompatible, pragmatism licenses their combination in the service of a fuller answer than either could provide alone.
A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design was adopted. In this design the quantitative strand is conducted first and establishes the broad patterns, after which the qualitative strand is used to explain and deepen those patterns. The survey was therefore administered first, generating the descriptive and associational findings reported in the next chapter, and the interviews followed, probing the meanings behind the numbers and giving particular attention to the fairness perceptions that the survey identified as pivotal. The design directly serves the conceptual framework: the survey tests whether fairness qualifies the stop-trust association, and the interviews explore the features of encounters that make them feel fair or unfair.
It should be emphasised that the data presented in this dissertation are illustrative. They have been generated for the purposes of a model project to demonstrate how such a study would be designed, conducted, analysed and written up. The design described here is nonetheless a realistic account of how the research would proceed if undertaken with live participants, and the analytical procedures are those that would genuinely be applied.
The target population was adult residents of Greater London. Because a probability sample of the whole city was beyond the resources of an undergraduate project, a non-probability approach was adopted. For the survey, a quota sampling strategy was used to recruit 212 respondents across four contrasting boroughs chosen to vary in their demographic profile and in their historical levels of stop and search activity. Quotas were set for age band, gender and ethnicity so that the achieved sample broadly reflected the diversity of the city, though no claim to statistical representativeness is made. Respondents were recruited in public settings and through community organisations and completed a short self-administered questionnaire.
For the interview strand, a purposive sampling strategy selected ten survey respondents who had indicated a willingness to be contacted again and who, between them, represented a range of experiences of stop and search, including those who had been stopped on several occasions, those stopped once and those never stopped. Maximum variation sampling of this kind is appropriate where the aim is to capture the breadth of possible interpretations rather than to generalise statistically. The characteristics of the illustrative survey sample are summarised in Table 1.
| Characteristic | Category | n | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age | 18–24 | 58 | 27.4 |
| 25–39 | 71 | 33.5 | |
| 40–59 | 55 | 25.9 | |
| 60 and over | 28 | 13.2 | |
| Gender | Men | 104 | 49.1 |
| Women | 105 | 49.5 | |
| Other / prefer not to say | 3 | 1.4 | |
| Ethnicity | White | 89 | 42.0 |
| Black / Black British | 61 | 28.8 | |
| Asian / Asian British | 41 | 19.3 | |
| Mixed / other | 21 | 9.9 | |
| Ever stopped and searched | Yes | 79 | 37.3 |
| No | 133 | 62.7 |
The questionnaire comprised four sections. The first recorded demographic characteristics. The second asked about experience of stop and search, including whether the respondent had ever been stopped, how many times and how recently. The third measured trust in the Metropolitan Police using a set of statements rated on a five-point agreement scale, with items capturing beliefs about fairness, shared values and reliability. The fourth measured perceptions of procedural justice, again on five-point scales, with items corresponding to the four elements of participation, neutrality, respect and trustworthy motives; respondents who had been stopped rated their most recent encounter, while those who had not been stopped rated their general expectations. Composite scores were formed by averaging the relevant items, and the internal consistency of these scales was checked before analysis.
The interviews were semi-structured and guided by a topic schedule derived from the conceptual framework. The schedule invited participants to describe any encounters they had experienced, to explain how they had felt during and after them, to reflect on what they thought the officer’s reasons had been and to say how, if at all, the encounter had affected their view of the police. The semi-structured format ensured that each interview covered the core themes while leaving room for participants to introduce issues of their own. Interviews lasted approximately forty-five minutes and, with consent, were recorded and transcribed.
The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics summarised the distribution of trust and fairness scores. Group comparisons examined whether trust differed between those who had and had not been stopped, and a regression approach was used to assess whether any difference persisted once procedural justice perceptions were taken into account. The interest here was less in statistical significance for its own sake, given the non-probability sample, than in the direction and relative magnitude of the associations and in whether they conformed to the pattern predicted by the conceptual framework.
The qualitative data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis following the six-phase approach described by Braun and Clarke (2006): familiarisation with the transcripts, generation of initial codes, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming them, and producing the written account. Coding proceeded largely inductively, allowing themes to emerge from the data, while remaining sensitised to the concepts of the framework. The resulting themes are reported in the next chapter and illustrated with anonymised, illustrative extracts.
The study was designed to comply with the ethical standards expected of social research and would require approval from the relevant university research ethics committee before any fieldwork commenced. Several safeguards were built into the design. Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent, with participants given a clear account of the purpose of the research, their right to withdraw and the uses to which their data would be put. Because the subject matter could involve recollection of distressing encounters, interview participants were advised that they could decline any question and were signposted to sources of support. Anonymity and confidentiality were protected by removing identifying details, assigning pseudonyms and storing data securely. Particular care was taken with the recruitment of younger participants and with the handling of discussion that touched on ethnicity, so as to avoid reproducing the very harms the study sought to understand.
Reflexive thematic analysis requires the researcher to acknowledge the part they play in constructing, rather than merely discovering, the findings. In a study of a racialised and emotionally charged power, the researcher’s own background, assumptions and relationship to the police are liable to influence the questions asked, the rapport established in interviews and the interpretation of what participants say. A researcher perceived by participants as an outsider to their community might elicit more guarded accounts, while one perceived as sympathetic might invite accounts shaped to meet expectations. Rather than treating these influences as contaminants to be eliminated, the reflexive approach treats them as features of the knowledge-generating process to be reflected upon openly. In the present design this reflection was supported by the keeping of a research diary in which interpretive hunches and emotional reactions were recorded and interrogated, and by a deliberate effort to seek out accounts that did not fit the emerging themes. The aim was not an unattainable neutrality but a disciplined transparency about the standpoint from which the analysis was produced.
Several steps were taken to strengthen the quality of the study. The use of established scale items drawn from the procedural justice tradition supported construct validity, and the checking of internal consistency supported reliability. The mixed-methods design offered a form of triangulation, allowing the convergence or divergence of the two strands to be assessed. In the qualitative strand, the maintenance of an audit trail of coding decisions and attention to disconfirming cases supported the trustworthiness of the analysis.
The limitations are nonetheless substantial and are acknowledged candidly. The non-probability sample precludes statistical generalisation to the London population, and the modest sample size limits the power of the quantitative analysis. Self-reported measures of both trust and encounters are subject to recall and social desirability effects, and the cross-sectional design cannot establish the direction of causation: it is possible that pre-existing distrust shapes both the likelihood of being stopped and the interpretation of the encounter, as well as the other way around. The illustrative nature of the data means that the findings are intended to demonstrate method and argument rather than to document the real distribution of attitudes in London. These limitations are returned to in the concluding chapter.
This chapter has set out a pragmatist, sequential mixed-methods design intended to answer the study’s research questions by combining the breadth of a survey with the depth of interviews. It has described the sampling, data collection and analysis procedures, explained the ethical safeguards and reflected on the reliability, validity and limitations of the approach. The next chapter presents the findings.
This chapter presents the findings of the study in two parts. The first reports the quantitative findings from the survey, describing levels of trust and fairness and examining the association between stop and search experience and trust. The second reports the qualitative findings from the interviews, organised around the themes that emerged from the thematic analysis. The two parts are presented separately here and are brought into dialogue in the discussion that follows.
Overall levels of trust in the Metropolitan Police among the illustrative sample were moderate, with a mean composite trust score of 3.1 on the five-point scale. Trust varied, however, by experience of stop and search. Respondents who reported having been stopped recorded a lower mean trust score than those who had not, as shown in Table 2. The gap was more pronounced among those who had been stopped more than once, suggesting a cumulative dimension to the association.
| Group | n | Mean trust | Standard deviation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Never stopped | 133 | 3.42 | 0.78 |
| Stopped once | 44 | 2.86 | 0.84 |
| Stopped more than once | 35 | 2.49 | 0.91 |
The pattern of a raw association between being stopped and lower trust is consistent with the asymmetry identified in the literature, whereby adverse contact bears more heavily on attitudes than positive contact. The central question of the study, however, was whether this association was explained by the quality of treatment. To examine this, perceptions of procedural justice were brought into the analysis. Table 3 reports mean trust scores among those who had been stopped, broken down by whether they rated the fairness of their most recent encounter as low, moderate or high.
| Perceived fairness of encounter | n | Mean trust |
|---|---|---|
| Low fairness | 31 | 2.11 |
| Moderate fairness | 27 | 2.74 |
| High fairness | 21 | 3.38 |
The contrast is striking. Among those who had been stopped, trust was lowest where the encounter had been rated as procedurally unfair and rose steadily with perceived fairness, so that those who regarded their most recent encounter as fair reported trust levels approaching those of respondents who had never been stopped at all. When perceived fairness was entered into a regression model alongside stop and search experience, the independent association between having been stopped and lower trust weakened substantially, while perceived fairness remained strongly associated with trust. This pattern is precisely what the conceptual framework predicted: it is not the stop as such that depresses trust but the quality of treatment within it.
Two further observations deserve note. First, among the four elements of procedural justice, the items capturing respect and trustworthy motives were most strongly associated with trust, while the participation item, the opportunity to give one’s account, was somewhat less strongly related. Second, Black and minority ethnic respondents who had been stopped were more likely than White respondents to rate their encounters as procedurally unfair, consistent with the literature on the interaction between distributive and procedural concerns. The survey thus establishes the broad patterns; the interviews, reported next, help to explain them.
A final feature of the survey data is worth drawing out before turning to the interviews. Among the 133 respondents who had never been stopped, procedural justice expectations were themselves associated with trust, so that those who anticipated being treated fairly if they were ever stopped reported higher trust than those who did not. This suggests that the reputational effects of stop and search are not confined to those with direct experience of the power but extend, through reputation and anticipation, to the wider public who form a view of how the police are likely to behave. The finding should be read with caution given the illustrative nature of the data, but it foreshadows the theme of social transmission that emerged strongly in the qualitative strand and reinforces the argument that the legitimacy of the power is a matter of general public perception as much as of individual encounter.
The thematic analysis of the ten interviews generated four principal themes. These are presented in turn and illustrated with anonymised, illustrative extracts attributed to pseudonymous participants.
Participants consistently described particular stop and search encounters as vivid and durable memories that carried disproportionate weight in their overall assessment of the police. A single bad experience could anchor an attitude that persisted for years and overrode more neutral or positive contacts. One participant, a man in his late twenties, reflected that a stop he had experienced as a teenager still shaped how he felt whenever he saw officers on his estate. This durability echoes the asymmetry in the literature: the encounters were remembered not in proportion to their frequency but in proportion to the strength of the feelings they provoked, and negative feelings proved the most enduring.
The theme suggests that stop and search operates as what might be called a legitimacy event, a moment at which the abstract relationship between citizen and police is made concrete and in which judgements are formed that then resist revision. For the participants, the encounter was rarely experienced as a routine administrative act; it was experienced as a statement about their standing in the eyes of authority.
The most pervasive theme was the primacy of how participants were treated over whether they were ultimately found to have done anything wrong. Several participants who had been searched and released without further action nonetheless described the experience positively, because the officer had explained the reason for the stop, listened to their response and treated them with courtesy. Conversely, participants who objected most strongly did so not because they had been stopped but because they had been treated, as one put it, as though the outcome had already been decided. A woman in her thirties contrasted two encounters: in the first, an officer had explained what he was looking for and thanked her afterwards, leaving her reassured; in the second, an officer had been curt and dismissive, leaving her angry despite nothing having been found in either case.
This theme maps directly onto procedural justice theory and corroborates the survey finding that perceived fairness, rather than the fact of the stop, drove trust. Participants were, in effect, articulating the four elements of the theory in their own words: they valued being given a reason, being listened to, being treated with respect and being able to believe that the officer was acting in good faith. Where these were present, even an unwelcome stop could be absorbed without lasting damage to trust.
For minority ethnic participants in particular, the interpretation of an encounter was inseparable from the question of why they believed they had been selected. Several described a settled conviction that they had been stopped because of their appearance, and this belief transformed the meaning of the encounter from an isolated inconvenience into evidence of a pattern. A young man of Black Caribbean heritage recounted being stopped repeatedly in circumstances he could not reconcile with any plausible individual suspicion, and described the cumulative effect as a feeling of being watched and mistrusted in his own neighbourhood.
This theme illustrates the interaction between distributive and procedural fairness that the literature anticipates. Where participants believed that selection was driven by ethnicity, even a procedurally correct encounter could be experienced as unjust, because the perceived unfairness lay not in the conduct of the officer during the stop but in the fact of having been chosen for it. The theme suggests that procedural fairness, while powerful, cannot fully neutralise the legitimacy costs of a power that is believed to fall unequally.
The final theme concerned the role of communication and respect and the way attitudes were transmitted beyond the individual directly involved. Participants placed great emphasis on tone, body language and the simple courtesy of an explanation and, where appropriate, an acknowledgement at the end of the encounter. Small gestures were read as signals of respect or contempt and were recounted in detail years later. Beyond the individual, participants described how accounts of encounters circulated within families and peer groups, so that the children and younger siblings of those who had been treated badly inherited a wariness of the police before they had any direct experience of their own. One participant described warning his younger brother about how to behave if stopped, in terms that assumed an adversarial relationship from the outset.
This theme points to a social multiplier effect. The consequences of a poorly handled stop are not confined to the person searched but ripple outwards through the networks in which experiences are shared, shaping the expectations with which others approach their own future encounters. It suggests that the legitimacy costs of stop and search may be understated if attention is confined to those directly stopped.
The findings from the two strands point in a consistent direction. The survey established a raw association between stop and search and lower trust that weakened substantially once perceptions of procedural fairness were taken into account, with respect and trustworthy motives emerging as the most influential elements and minority ethnic respondents more likely to rate encounters as unfair. The interviews explained these patterns, showing that participants treated encounters as defining moments, prioritised the fairness of treatment over the outcome of the stop, interpreted encounters through the lens of racialised suspicion and attached great weight to communication, respect and the transmission of attitudes through social networks. The next chapter discusses these findings in relation to the literature.
This chapter interprets the findings in the light of the literature reviewed in Chapter 2 and the conceptual framework that guided the study. It is organised around the study’s research questions, considering in turn the association between stop and search and trust, the mediating role of procedural fairness, and the features of encounters that respondents regarded as most consequential. It then reflects on the interaction between procedural and distributive fairness and on the wider implications for the consent-based model of policing.
The first subsidiary research question asked whether there was an association between having been stopped and searched and the level of trust that residents reported. The survey findings answer this in the affirmative: respondents who had been stopped reported lower trust than those who had not, and the gap widened with repeated stops. Taken on its own, this finding would seem to support the view that stop and search is corrosive of community trust. It is consistent with the asymmetry thesis advanced by Bradford, Jackson and Stanko (2009), according to which adverse contact with the police damages attitudes more than positive contact repairs them, and with the broader observation that high-volume discretionary powers carry reputational risks.
However, the discussion would be incomplete, and potentially misleading, if it stopped there. The cross-sectional design means that the direction of the association cannot be established from the quantitative data alone. It is plausible that those with lower prior trust are both more likely to be stopped, perhaps because distrust is concentrated in the communities that are most heavily policed, and more likely to interpret any stop unfavourably. The raw association is therefore better read as a starting point for analysis than as a conclusion, and its interpretation depends on the further question of what explains it.
The second and most important subsidiary question asked to what extent perceptions of procedural fairness qualify the association between stop and search and trust. Here the findings are clear and theoretically significant. The survey showed that, among those who had been stopped, trust rose sharply with perceived fairness, and that the independent association between being stopped and lower trust weakened substantially once fairness was taken into account. The interviews reinforced this, with participants repeatedly distinguishing between the fact of being stopped, which they could accept, and the manner of being treated, which they could not. The convergence of the two strands lends weight to the interpretation.
This is strong corroboration of procedural justice theory as developed by Tyler (2006) and Sunshine and Tyler (2003). It suggests that the legitimacy consequences of stop and search are not determined by the intrusion itself but are produced within the encounter by the quality of treatment. The practical importance of this cannot be overstated. It implies that the damage to trust commonly attributed to stop and search is, to a significant degree, avoidable, being a function of how the power is exercised rather than of its existence. A force that attended systematically to the fairness of encounters might retain much of the operational value of the power while reducing its legitimacy costs. The finding that respect and trustworthy motives were the most influential elements further refines this message, directing attention to the interpersonal conduct of officers rather than to procedure in a narrow, box-ticking sense.
The third subsidiary question asked which features of an encounter residents themselves regard as most consequential. The qualitative themes answer this richly. Participants identified explanation, listening, courtesy and good faith as the features that distinguished a tolerable stop from an intolerable one, articulating in lay terms the four elements of procedural justice. They treated encounters as defining moments whose emotional charge gave them lasting influence over attitudes, consistent with the idea that legitimacy is formed and revised through concrete interactions rather than abstract evaluation. And they drew attention to the role of communication and tone, showing that the signals of respect or contempt conveyed in small gestures were read closely and remembered long.
These findings extend the literature in a modest but useful way. By grounding the abstract dimensions of procedural justice in detailed accounts of specific encounters, they show how the theory’s elements are actually experienced and recognised by members of the public. They also surface a dimension that is less prominent in the survey tradition, namely the social transmission of attitudes, suggesting that the consequences of encounters extend beyond the individual to the networks within which experiences are shared. This chimes with the observation of Myhill and Bradford (2012) that confidence is built or eroded through the quality of service, while adding the insight that the audience for a stop is wider than the person searched.
A recurring thread in both strands was the significance of ethnicity, which must be read against the work of Bowling and Phillips (2007) on disproportionality. The survey showed that minority ethnic respondents who had been stopped were more likely to rate their encounters as unfair, and the interviews revealed that, for these participants, the meaning of an encounter was bound up with the belief that they had been selected because of their appearance. This points to an interaction between the procedural and the distributive that qualifies a purely procedural reading of the findings. Where selection itself is believed to be unjust, procedural correctness during the encounter cannot wholly repair the sense of grievance, because the injustice is located prior to the officer’s conduct.
This supports the cautions issued by Tankebe (2013) and Hough (2021) against treating procedural justice as a complete theory of legitimacy. Legitimacy, on this view, is multidimensional, and a power that is lawful and procedurally fair in individual cases may still be experienced as illegitimate if its overall distribution is seen as discriminatory. The implication is that improving the conduct of encounters, while valuable and achievable, is not a substitute for addressing the patterns of selection that determine who is subjected to the power in the first place. The two agendas are complementary, and neither alone is sufficient.
Read together, the findings illuminate the broader relationship between stop and search and the consent-based model of policing. If legitimacy is the property that allows the police to secure deference without relying on coercion, then stop and search is a recurring test of that property, a moment at which consent is asked for and either reinforced or withdrawn. The study suggests that this test is passed or failed largely on procedural grounds, but that the terms of the test are themselves shaped by distributive concerns that precede any individual encounter. Stop and search is thus best understood not as inherently legitimacy-damaging but as a repeated opportunity in which legitimacy is either accumulated or spent, and whose net effect depends on the manner of its exercise and the fairness of its distribution.
This reframing also helps to make sense of the apparent paradox at the heart of public debate, in which the same power is defended as reassuring and condemned as alienating. If the effect of stop and search on trust is conditional rather than fixed, then both characterisations may be accurate for different encounters, different communities and different manners of exercise. A power deployed sparingly, with clear grounds, with courtesy and in a manner seen to be distributed fairly may genuinely reassure; the same power deployed indiscriminately, without explanation and in a manner experienced as racialised may genuinely alienate. The policy question is therefore not simply whether to use the power but how to use it in ways that fall on the reassuring rather than the alienating side of that line, a question that places the quality of everyday practice, rather than the volume of activity, at the centre of the debate. This reframing has direct consequences for how the power ought to be governed, to which the concluding chapter turns.
This chapter has interpreted the findings in dialogue with the literature. It has argued that the raw association between stop and search and lower trust is real but substantially explained by perceptions of procedural fairness, that the features of encounters identified by participants map closely onto procedural justice theory while extending it towards the social transmission of attitudes, and that ethnicity introduces a distributive dimension that procedural fairness alone cannot resolve. The overall picture is one in which the legitimacy consequences of stop and search are conditional and, to a significant degree, within the control of the police.
This dissertation set out to examine the relationship between experiences of stop and search and community trust in the Metropolitan Police, and to assess the extent to which procedural justice explains that relationship. Using an illustrative mixed-methods design, it found that residents who had been stopped reported lower trust than those who had not, but that this association weakened substantially once perceptions of procedural fairness were taken into account. The interviews explained this pattern, showing that participants distinguished sharply between being stopped and being treated unfairly, and that it was the quality of treatment, explanation, listening, respect and good faith, that most strongly shaped their view of the police. The study also found that ethnicity introduced a distributive dimension, with minority ethnic participants interpreting encounters through the belief that they had been selected on the basis of appearance, and that the consequences of encounters were transmitted through social networks beyond the individual stopped. In answer to the principal research question, the study concludes that stop and search influences community trust not as a fixed effect of the intrusion but as a conditional outcome of how the power is exercised and how its distribution is perceived.
The contribution of the study is threefold. Theoretically, it offers strong, convergent support for procedural justice as an account of how policing encounters affect trust, while demonstrating the limits of that account where selection itself is believed to be unjust. Methodologically, it illustrates the value of integrating survey and interview evidence, using the quantitative strand to establish patterns and the qualitative strand to explain them. Substantively, it grounds the abstract dimensions of procedural justice in detailed accounts of how stop and search is experienced in a London context, and it draws attention to the under-examined social multiplier through which the effects of encounters spread. These contributions are modest in scale, befitting an undergraduate project with illustrative data, but they are coherent and theoretically located.
Several practical implications follow from the findings. They are offered as reasoned suggestions consistent with the evidence rather than as prescriptions, and they would require fuller evaluation before adoption.
The limitations of the study temper the confidence with which its conclusions can be held. The data are illustrative and generated for a model project, and so cannot describe the real distribution of attitudes in London. Even taken at face value, the non-probability sample precludes statistical generalisation, the modest size limits analytical power, the self-reported measures are vulnerable to recall and social desirability effects, and the cross-sectional design cannot establish causal direction. The qualitative strand, while rich, rests on a small number of interviews and reflects the perspectives of those willing to participate. These constraints mean that the study is best understood as an exercise in demonstrating a defensible design and a theoretically grounded argument rather than as a definitive account of the relationship it examines.
The limitations point towards a programme of future research. A larger, probability-based survey would permit genuine generalisation and more powerful analysis of the interaction between procedural and distributive fairness across ethnic groups. A longitudinal design, following individuals over time, would help to disentangle the direction of causation between trust and the likelihood and interpretation of stops. Comparative work across forces or across neighbourhoods with differing histories of stop and search activity would illuminate the contextual conditions under which the power conserves or corrodes legitimacy. Finally, research that extends beyond those directly stopped to the networks within which experiences circulate would test and refine the social multiplier suggested by the present study. Together, such work would build on the foundations laid here towards a fuller understanding of a power that will, in all likelihood, remain central to debates about policing by consent for many years to come.
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