Police powers and procedures: Stop and search and arrests, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2023 (second edition)

Prior to October 2021, statistics on stop and search and arrests were published as part of the annual ‘Police powers and procedures’ statistical bulletin, which covered other topics including the use of other police powers under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, fixed penalty notices and other outcomes for motoring offences, breath tests, pre-charge bail, released under investigation and detentions under the Mental Health Act. Given the volume and variety of topics covered, a decision was made in 2021 to split the release into two separate statistical bulletins.

This release is the first of the now 2 annual publications and contains statistics on the use of the powers of stop and search and arrest by the police in England and Wales up to the year ending 31 March 2023.

Stop and search statistics contain information from the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales, and the British Transport Police (BTP), including data on the:

• change in the use of stop and search throughout the years ending March 2021 and March 2022
• number of stop and searches carried out under a range of legislative powers, including:
  • section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) and associated legislation
  • section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
  • section 47A (previously section 44) of the Terrorism Act 2000
• reason for conducting a search
• outcomes following stop and search
• weapons found from stop and search
• ethnicity, sex and age of persons searched
• analysis of where stop and searches take place within Police Force Areas (also referred to as ‘hotspot analysis’)
• whether force was used in a stop and search

Arrest statistics contain information from the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales on a financial-year basis, including data on the:

• number of arrests for notifiable offences
• reason for which persons were arrested
• ethnicity, gender and age of those arrested

Following the first publication of this release, Dorset Police found an error in the year ending March 2023 stop and search data they initially supplied to the Home Office. This error caused their data on the self-defined ethnicity of persons stopped and searched in the year ending March 2023 to be misreported. The total number of stop and searches in England and Wales has also been revised down by 1 because of this re-submission. This second edition contains the revised data.