Guest editorial: Police encounters

Abstract

At the heart of the interest has been the use of policing powers disproportionately against Black and minority communities, and particularly young men. Similar attention has emerged more recently in Scotland (Murray, 2014), Northern Ireland (Bradford andTopping, 2020) and beyond the English-speaking world (Delsol and Shiner, 2015;Oberwittler and Roch e, 2018;de Maillard et al., 2018). However, in many countries, the issue is not one that has prompted sustained interest.The papers in this Special Issue have emerged from an EU COST-funded Action on Police Stops (Police Stops, 2022). Our aim has been to raise the use of powers to stop citizens, to check their identity and, in some circumstances, to conduct a search as an issue of academic and public concern. We have sought to understand, in countries beyond the USA and the UK, how these powers are experienced, how policing practitioners are held accountable and the politics surrounding the use of these powers. This Special Issue reflects our additional concern to understand how police officers themselves understand and use their power to stop citizens.Historically, understanding the ways police make judgements and apply the law has been explored through ethnographic work, principally in the USA and the UK (Bittner, 1967;Cain, 1973;Holdaway, 1983;Manning and van Maanen, 1978). Ethnography is a powerful tool in the study of policing, albeit one that can be difficult to implement due to the heavy demands it can place on time and resources for the researcher, as well as the intricacies of negotiating access to active police practitioners. Once these obstacles are overcome, however, police ethnographies can reveal rich data on the nuances of face-to-face encounters with members of the public. Statistical assessments of the number of searches conducted and the demographics of those searched are important, though these are not routinely available beyond England, Wales and Scotland. These assessments reveal the disproportionate use of powers, particularly on young Black men (e.g. Home Office, 2021). What these data cannot reveal are the context in which an encounter takes place. How does an officer decide to stop a person? What is it that arouses suspicion? How does an interaction develop? What are the words exchanged, the facial expressions, the body language and the tone of voice? These, amongst other observations, are also powerful data to deepen our understanding of what "stops" mean in a particular jurisdiction and to the people involved. These insights can be employed to seek a better and more equitable use of the power, taking into account local context and social relationships.