Stop posturing over stop and search

It was somehow inevitable that shortly after Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick announced a fall in violent crime, there would be an absolute horror-show of death across the capital. The ‘weekend of bloodshed’ began on Friday 14 June with the murder of 18-year-old Cheyon Evans, knifed by teens in Wandsworth. A few minutes later Eniola Aluko was shot dead in Plumstead, then three men were hospitalised in Clapham, another dead of knife wounds in Tower Hamlets, and another an hour later in Enfield. In Stratford the next day, by the Westfield shopping centre, more than 100 young men attacked and injured a handful of police officers. A section 60 order (which gives police the right to search for weapons) was issued and a socking great blade, of the sort you might use to gut a moose, was discovered and confiscated.

It’s sad but not surprising. What did alarm me, though, was the way that weekend was reported the following Monday. ‘Fears have been raised that the increased use of stop and search powers will cause disorder,’ said the Times. ‘There are concerns that as the school summer approaches, stop and search will lead to new clashes.’ I read this a few times, blinking like a frog. Four dead men in morgues, any number hospitalised with stab wounds. There are five people attacked with a knife every day in London, and the worry is that the police are doing too much to prevent it?

That Sunday afternoon, two days after poor Cheyon and Eniola met their ends, Labour councillor Mete Coban tweeted his reaction: ‘Just came across four police officers at Stratford station searching two young black boys for no reason. When I asked them why are you searching them, one of them told me “I have to stop these people getting stabbed.”