Question
Further to the above, can the Chief Constable confirm he has access to and can report on the profile of the young people who have been subjected to a strip search, disaggregated by Section 75 categories, for each year in which records are held.
Answer
Strip searches may result from Stop and Search encounters or from Custody events.
Stop & Search
With regard to stop and search encounters, the section 75 characteristics that are currently recorded by the Police Service are gender, ethnicity and age. The Police Service has carried out significant work to explore how to record the community background of those who are stop and searched under powers provided by Section 24(3) of the Justice & Security (NI) Act 2007 (JSA). The current status of this work is that the Northern Ireland Office have agreed to take forward enabling legislation with agreement from the Secretary of State, to amend Justice and Security (NI) Act 2007 legislation and the Code of Practice, to add wording that will allow the Police Service to collect community monitoring information when carrying out stop search encounters using this power.
Prior to the 6 October 2022 the services’ stop and search recording application (Origin) did not have the functionality to explicitly record whether or not a strip search was carried out as a result of a stop search encounter. Since 2017 and prior to June 2022 (noting the above limitations) we have identified three strip searches being undertaken against a person under 18 years old, as a result of stop search encounters. With regard to these three stop search encounters, the Police Service hold records of the searches which include a record of the person’s gender, ethnicity and age.
On 6 October 2022 the Police Service made improvements to its stop and search recording application (Origin) enabling the recording of more granular data around rationale, age ranges, extent of clothing removed, presence of an appropriate adult, etc.
Note – There is no legal requirement (excluding section 21 of JSA – i.e. Identify & Movements) for a person who is stopped and searched, to inform the police of their name, date of birth, age or address and as per outlined in PACE codes of practise A “Officers should record the ethnicity of every person stopped according to the categories listed in Annex B. This should be based on the officer’s own perception of the person’s ethnic background.”
Custody
The section 75 characteristics recorded from detainees in custody are age, gender, ethnicity, dependents, disability, domestic status and religion. Should persons refuse to supply details in respect of religion, they are then listed as “refused”. Strip search data is not held before 2020. Of those strip searched post 2020, the Police Service hold records in relation to the section 75 characteristics and can report accordingly.
With regard to the Custody setting, in the period October 2021 to October 2022 there were 26 strip searches of persons under 18. These included 21 males and 5 females. There were 20 seventeen year olds, 5 sixteen year olds and 1 fifteen year old. 11 of these young people identified as Catholic, 4 as Protestant, 3 other, 6 none and 2 refused details. All were single, identified as white and had no dependants.
There were two finds as a result of these strip searches, namely Class B drugs and a mobile phone.
Linda Dillion - Sinn Féin