According to publicly available information, 800 youngsters are subjected to strip searches by Met police officers each year, with 200 of those searches exposing ‘intimate parts’.
The data, which spans the years 2018 to 2021, illustrates the scope of a police practise that has come under heightened attention since the case of Child Q, a 15-year-old black girl who was strip searched while on her period at her east London school after being mistakenly accused of possessing cannabis.
The City & Hackney Safety Children Partnership (CHSCP) reviewed local child safeguarding practises and came to the conclusion that racism “was likely to have been an influencing element” and that the strip search should never have occurred.
Child Q’s case was just one of 6,000 to 9,000 strip searches that police officers do in London each year, according to a study done by The Conversation using Freedom of Information requests.
Nearly 60% of people subjected to strip searches under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 in London were members of underrepresented racial or ethnic groups, while only 3% were women.
Meanwhile, 100 to 200 of the strip searches conducted by the Met involved suspects who were underage, accounting for about 10% of all searches.
According to the report’s author, Dr. Matteo Tiratelli, a lecturer in political sociology at UCL, strip searches by police in London and elsewhere in the capital result in no further action in the majority of cases (58 percent), “meaning that people are being humiliated and degraded when they were completely innocent.”
With up to 35,000 people being exposed to the practise annually by London police, strip searches are most frequently conducted after an arrest and while the suspect is being held by the police.
Contrast that with strip searches conducted as part of a stop-and-search investigation when no arrest has been made.
Dr. Tiratelli of UCL, who conducted the study on police strip searches, noted that because of “a vast amount of missing data,” prison strip searches were far more difficult to analyse.
For instance, in some years, more than half of the instances were recorded without a mention of the victim’s age.
Nevertheless, it seems that roughly 60% of custodial strip searches target BAME people, 6% to 8% target kids, and 10% to 15% target women.
The police watchdog was referred eight incidences last month in which the Met Police’s officers subjected children between the ages of 14 and 17 to strip searches.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor made the following statement after the self-referrals were made: “We realise the pain and lasting impact these types of searches can have on people, especially young people, and understand the public’s concerns following multiple occurrences.
“As a result, we have already changed a number of the ways we operate to make sure that officers put the kid first and adopt a safeguarding strategy.”
‘We are also evaluating complaints of strip searches involving minors that have been made over the past three years,’ the statement continues.
This includes searches conducted outside of a secure setting when private areas are displayed.
“Strip searches in detention and searches that reveal more personal portions outside of detention are vital in guaranteeing the safety of the person being searched as well as protecting communities from drugs and weapons,” says the American Medical Association.
But of course they have to be done correctly and in accordance with our rules.