Stop and search data, in community hands
This is a free, public tool from Just Knowledge that lets anyone explore how stop and search powers are used across England and Wales.
Who we are
Just Knowledge is a UK non-profit working to make public data genuinely usable by the communities it describes. We build tools and analysis that move data out of closed reports and into the hands of residents, community groups, and the people most affected by the issues the data represents.
Why we built this
Stop and search is one of the most visible, and most contested, police powers. The underlying data is published openly, but it's scattered, technical, and hard to turn into a clear picture of what's happening in your area.
This dashboard does that work for you. Search a postcode or local authority and you can see who is being stopped, what they're searched for, what happens next, and how your area compares with others, including how stop rates differ between ethnic groups relative to the local population. For a quick read, there's also a one-page summary for every area.
It's built for residents wanting to understand their neighbourhood, community organisations, journalists, students, and anyone holding policing to account or generally interested in the use of stop and search powers.
What the data is — and isn't
This dashboard reflects what the police recorded, not necessarily everything that happened. A few things worth keeping in mind:
- It's police-recorded data. Stop counts come from data.police.uk, the official open release. Recording practices vary between forces and over time, so differences between areas can reflect how data is recorded as well as what took place. This is especially the case for recent data which is less reliable than older data due to forces 'refreshing' data over time.
- Rates use 2021 Census population. To compare areas fairly we adjust for population using ONS Census 2021 figures.
- Map locations are approximate, by design. To protect privacy, data.police.uk never publishes the exact location of a stop. Coordinates are masked by snapping to one of a fixed set of anonymous nearby points. This may mean that a small number of stops assigned to a particular borough or neighbourhood take place in an adjacent borough or neibourhood.
- Some stops have no location at all. Separately, a share of records arrive with no location recorded. This is a data-quality gap, forces not recording location consistently, rather than privacy masking. Those stops still count in totals but can't be placed on the map.
- Small numbers are hidden. Where a breakdown would rest on fewer than 30 stops we suppress it, to avoid unreliable figures and protect privacy. You may see gaps in smaller areas as a result.
- Two forces are missing from our source. Greater Manchester and Gwent supply no stop and search records to police.uk, so their areas show only stops made by other forces passing through. Their overall figures are published elsewhere — see when a force is missing from this data below.
- We group searches into broader categories. Police records use 20 different reasons for a search and a long list of legal powers. We collapse both into readable groups — see how we group powers and reasons below.
- A disparity is not, by itself, proof of bias. Differences in stop rates between groups are a starting point for questions, not a conclusion. Read them alongside local context.
How we group powers and reasons
Police records describe each search in two ways: the reason for it (what the officer was looking for) and the power used (the law the search was carried out under). Both come with more categories than a chart can usefully show, so we group them.
What they were looking for. The records use 20 separate reasons. We collapse them into six:
| We show | Recorded as |
|---|---|
| Drugs | Controlled drugs; psychoactive substances |
| Weapons | Offensive weapons; firearms; crossbows; anything to threaten or harm anyone |
| Stolen property | Stolen goods |
| Theft-related items | Articles for use in theft |
| Criminal damage items | Articles for use in criminal damage |
| Other | Everything else — including fireworks, cash, goods with unpaid duty, wildlife and hunting offences, and items related to protests |
"Other" also holds the gaps. Where a force recorded no reason, or recorded only that the detail was unavailable, the search lands in Other as well. So Other mixes genuinely miscellaneous searches with ones we simply can't describe, and it shouldn't be read as a category in its own right.
Which power was used. Search powers are recorded as the Act and section — we shorten these to the names people generally use:
| We show | Recorded as |
|---|---|
| Drugs (s23) | Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Requires reasonable suspicion the person is carrying controlled drugs. |
| PACE (s1) | Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The general power, also requiring reasonable suspicion. |
| No suspicion (s60) | Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Once a senior officer designates an area for a set period, officers may search anyone within it without needing grounds for suspecting that individual. This is why we single it out on Searches & Outcomes — it works on a different basis from every other power here. |
| Firearms (s47) | Firearms Act 1968. |
| Other | Less commonly used powers, grouped together. |
| Not recorded | No power recorded against the search. |
The reason and the power are recorded separately and don't have to agree: a search under s23 can be recorded as looking for weapons, and often is. We keep them as two independent questions rather than merging them.
Nothing is dropped in this grouping — every recorded search appears in exactly one category
on both counts, so the totals always match. If you need the ungrouped detail, the original
values are in the data.police.uk release and in
policedatR (below).
When a force is missing from this data
Every police force in England and Wales is legally required to send stop and search data to the Home Office, under the Annual Data Requirement — a set of returns demanded using the Home Secretary's statutory powers. Greater Manchester and Gwent both do this, and their force-level totals appear in the Home Office's published stop and search statistics.
This dashboard is built on something different: the record-level data published at data.police.uk, where each row is a single search with a location attached. That detail is what makes it possible to show figures for your neighbourhood rather than for a whole force area. Greater Manchester Police and Gwent Police have not supplied a single stop and search record to data.police.uk for any month this dashboard covers — every month from December 2022 onwards. The police.uk changelog records the reasons the forces have given: Greater Manchester has been moving to a new IT system, and Gwent is working through problems with its stop and search data. Those explanations have now stood for years, and we take no view here on whether they are adequate.
What is not in doubt is what it means for this dashboard: it does not mean no stops happen in these areas, it means the detailed records we would need are not available to us or any other member of the public.
What you can see in those areas is stops made by other forces operating on the same ground. Overwhelmingly that is the British Transport Police, which polices the rail network nationally and does supply its records — 95% of the stops recorded in Manchester are BTP officers.
So for these areas the figures here describe those forces' activity, not the local force's. A borough in Greater Manchester will appear to have a very low stop rate. That is a gap in the data, not a description of policing there, and comparing it with an area whose force reports in full will mislead you. We mark these areas throughout rather than hide them, so you can see exactly where the gap is.
If you want the real figures for these areas, the Home Office release above carries force-level totals, and both forces publish their own stop and search statistics. Those are whole-force numbers rather than neighbourhood ones, so they answer a different question than this dashboard — but for Greater Manchester and Gwent they are the figures to use.
The areas affected are:
- Greater Manchester — Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan
- Gwent — Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Monmouthshire, Newport and Torfaen
Where an area has so few recorded stops that a breakdown would be meaningless, we don't show rates or comparisons for it at all.
We re-check which forces are supplying records every time the data is refreshed. If Greater Manchester or Gwent start supplying them, these notices disappear on their own. Two further forces — Humberside and North Yorkshire — supply only some months, so their areas are undercounted rather than absent; we don't currently flag those.
Prefer to work with the data yourself?
If you're comfortable with the R language, you can pull the
same underlying stop and search data directly using policedatR — our open-source R
package that retrieves and tidies data.police.uk stop and search records into a reproducible,
analysis-ready format.
It's described in our open-access paper, policedatR: a comprehensive R package for stop and search data in England and Wales (Miles-Wilson & Okoroji, Crime Science, 2026), which walks through installation and worked examples.
policedatR on GitHub Read the paper →
How we're building this
This dashboard isn't built for communities at arm's length, it's built with them. Following our data democracy methodology, we're developing it primarily alongside young people from Tottenham, supported by Mind in Haringey / Black Thrive Haringey. Their priorities, questions, and feedback shape what the tool shows and how it shows it.
Funding
This work is supported by funding from Wellcome, as part of our wider data democracy programme on health, wellbeing, and Black communities.
Get involved
This is an early version and we're actively shaping it. If something is unclear, missing, or wrong — or if it's useful and you'd like to tell us how you're using it — we'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Share feedback Visit Just Knowledge →
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Stop and search records from police.uk; population from ONS Census 2021.