Dossier: stop and search

Stop and search is to frisk someone without a concrete suspicion. Mayors can designate an area as a security risk area for a certain period of time. Within such an area, the district attorney may order stop and search to be conducted on individuals, and vehicles and luggage to be examined for weapons and such. Citizens are searched without being suspected of a crime.

Municipal law grants two grounds on which a preventive search can take place: article 151b and article 174b.

space for police to act.

The effectiveness of preventive searches is around 2%. This means two in every hundred searches result in finding a weapon. This number is derived from a multitude of stop and search campaigns. Recent examples include Zaandam and Rotterdam: in cooperation with high schools, police searched thousands of school lockers in Zaandam. Three illegal weapons were found. Police additionally searched 3.038 people in Zaandam, which led to the confiscation of 74 weapons. This boils down to a yield of 2.5%. In Rotterdam, police searched over 10.000 people in 2017, which yielded 210 weapons (2%).

No one knows how many weapons are in circulation in a given city. In order to truly measure the effectiveness of searches, we have to know how many weapons are currently in circulation. Since there is no way to know this, any objectives on taking weapons off the streets are immeasurable.

Besides, the logic of preventive searches is unfalsifiable. Did they find loads of weapons? It worked! The city is now safer because all these weapons no longer circulate. Did they find nothing at all? It worked! People are leaving their weapons at home thanks to a very effective policy.

It is unknown whether stop and searches help reduce gun incidents. Measuring this must include a clear research design with measurable indicators and a baseline assessment. This assessment should be done on a city-wide scale, as should the assessment that takes place after the intervention. Safety risk areas tend to be limited areas within a large city, which people move in and out of continuously.

Preventive searching combines a high risk of racial profiling with a low probability of finding weapons. Research by Amnesty International shows the risk of stop and search is high. If a designated security risk area has a high percentage of resident with an immigrant background, this risk increases further.

Furthermore, additional legal frameworks to facilitate stop and search is unnecessary, as police already have the legal capacity to check for weapons. Articles 50 and 51 of the Weapons and Ammunition Act ( ‘Wet Wapens en Munitie’) grants police the ability to search people, luggage and vehicles if they believe there is “reasonable cause” to do so. Reasons may include weapon-related incidents having taken place at a given location, or concrete intel that a person is carrying a weapon. Thus, if there is concrete information on weapons circulating, the law already provides sufficient

Let’s stop doing stop and search. Adopt an information-driven approach and organize gun and weapon turn-ins. Deploy police for existing cases that currently remain on the shelf due to lack of capacity, rather than initiating new searches.

We suggest adopting an information-driven approach. We agree with Mayor Van Zanen of The Hague when he describes stop and search as an “impactful method that infringes on the privacy and physical integrity of civilians [that] requires restraint and care.” Van Zanen therefore concludes “it is preferable to use scarce police capacity for targeted investigations in response to concrete signs of arms possession, and where necessary and possible act on the bases of criminal law. This is more appropriate, effective and efficient than random searches.”

In all municipalities, police work with the person-centered approach. In larger municipalities and cities, hundreds of young people are subject to additional monitoring by police. Of the youths nationwide that are currently investigated as suspects in stabbing-related incidents, how many are part of such person-centered approaches? If a young person is already known to have been involved in weapons-related incidents and is also included in the person-centered approach, police already have the power to subject them to searches (articles 50 and 51 of the Weapons and Ammunition Act).

The cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam organized high-yielding weapon turn-ins. In 2019 in Rotterdam, 250 weapons were turned in. Amsterdam managed to take in 300 weapons. In 2021, a nationwide campaign against knives resulted into 3300 weapons being taken in.

The law prescribes preventive searches take place indiscriminately. This implies police should, in principle, stop and search every individual passing by. Since there are almost always more civilians than police officers in a given situation, officers will have to make a selection. If this selection is truly indiscriminate in nature, it would for example be a random selection where every third or fifth person that passes gets subjected to a search. However, clear guidelines on how the police should make these selections in practice don’t exist, resulting in (un)conscious bias in selecting people on the bases of skin color or ethnicity.

Should stop and search nonetheless happen, guarantees ought to be in place to ensure equal treatment in the designation of security risk areas. Qualitative and quantitative monitoring mechanisms need to be in place to ensure police adhering to the legal requirement of indiscriminate searches.