The train stabbings: Could it have been prevented by stop and search?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:08From Global's newsroom at midday, a 32-year-old man has been charged over Saturday's knife attack on a train in Cambridge. Anthony Williams from Peterborough is accused of offences including 10 counts of attempted murder. He's also been charged over a separate knife attack at a DLR station in London earlier that day. It's hard to imagine the terror that people must have felt being stuck in a confined train carriage and someone produces a knife. The person has now been charged and a lot of love is flowing in the direction of the train staff who did seem to act heroically. But the political debate is already much, much more caustic.

0:49and at the heart of it is this question of whether dramatically increasing the use of stop and search would have stopped the suspect on that train or would just have isolated many young black men in our community. Is Chris Phelps, the Shadow Home Secretary, right when he calls for more stop and search or is it just opportunism knocking at the door? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:20The News Agents. After the horrific train attack that took place this weekend on a train heading towards London, which came to a very swift halt in Huntingdon, thanks to the quick actions of the train driver and the astonishing heroism of the train guard or one of the train staff that was on the train, A man has appeared in court charged with 11 counts of attempted murder following a knife attack on that train in Cambridgeshire. Anthony Williams, who's 32, has also been charged with one count of possession of a bladed article and one count of actual bodily harm. And there is a charge as well that relates to an earlier incident in London related to the light railway network, the DLR, the Docklands Light Railway, that took place in the early hours of Saturday morning.

2:11There was an entirely separate incident. And there's been obviously a lot of reaction to it from politicians, of course, expressing their shock and disgust at what has happened. But also, what should happen now to make something like this more unthinkable in the future? And that's where I kind of think we want to be right now as we talk about some of the reaction to it. Look, after any dreadful incident, there is always a something must be done contingent. And it is totally understandable that people are looking for the right policy, the right change, the right response to this. But there isn't always one obvious solution.

2:50And in the Telegraph over the weekend, Chris Philp, who's the Shadow Home Secretary, partly blamed what he called the left for limiting stop and search powers and said that following the attack, the use of stop and search had to dramatically increase. Is that a surprise? It isn't. Just last month in the Tory conference, he called for more police officers on the street and greater use of stop and search. And in this article, he says, are the left the left seriously saying that the perpetrator of the Huntington train atrocity should not have been stopped and searched if encountered. And I think you have to pause on that one for a moment and say, what is he saying?

3:30Like, how would you encounter that perpetrator? In retrospect, should the guy who went on to attack 11 people have been stopped? Of course, that is a no brainer. How would you have encountered this person and on what grounds? Would you have encountered them because they were a young male? Would you have encountered them because they were a young black male? Would you encountered them because they were getting on a train? You know, this is taking us back to kind of like not the nine o 'clock news sketches from the 1980s, where basically the power of the imagined, you know, perceived racist policeman was to stop any young black male because they might have been acting suspiciously.

4:13So what exactly is Chris Phelps saying in that article? And he was grilled on it by our colleague on the BBC this morning. And he couldn't really come up with what he was suggesting. You do say in your article, you're talking about the left saying that stop and search is wrong because those searched are disproportionately black. And you say, are they seriously saying that the perpetrator of the Huntington train atrocity should not have been stopped and searched if encountered? But as you say, we don't know anything about that individual. so why would they have been stopped and searched? Well because there are grounds for suspicion to stop and search someone and the police can do that.

4:50On the basis of what in this particular case? Because we only know the person's age, gender and ethnicity so if they were getting on a train what would be the reason to stop and search them? Well so firstly it would depend if there was an indicator of suspicion but I've actually said at our party conference a few weeks ago that in high crime hotspot areas there should actually be stop and search undertaken without suspicion. It is a high crime area. What a train station you're talking about here. Well, that's an example of a high crime area. I mean, the highest crime area in the country actually is the area around Oxford Circus Tube Station in central London, but other train terminuses are also high crime areas.

5:26What I'm trying to get to here is are you suggesting that this individual should have been stopped and searched purely based on the colour of their skin? Because that's what this article suggests. No, it doesn't. No, categorically not. I'm absolutely not saying that. I'm shocked you even suggested it. What I am saying, though, is that people on the left argue that stop and search should be scaled back or even abolished because of the demographics of those on average who are stopped and searched. But when you compare those demographics not to the general population, but to the offending population, the disproportionality disappears.

5:59And people on the left who argue against Stop and Search for that reason, or because they don't like the police exercising powers more widely, are putting the public at risk. What if it turned out that the alleged perpetrator of this terrible crime had been white? Would there have still been the call for an uptake in stop and search? And while we're talking about it, the person who has been charged was alleged to have got on the train at Peterborough. I don't know how many entrances and exits there are to Peterborough station. But what would stop and search look like on a Saturday evening at Peterborough police station?

6:35I'm going to say it's not going to be crawling with cops that are available to do that sort of work. I mean, we do live in an open society and no one is saying that stop and search has no role in policing. Of course, stop and search has a vital role. But the idea of it being some kind of blunt instrument that you can just stop anyone you suspect. And inevitably, the figures show that if you are black, you are four times more likely to be stopped than if you are white. So I don't think Chris Phelps could quite answer the question. He seemed very shocked that there should be any suggestion, that he was just suggesting that this person should have been stopped because he was black.

7:13But that's exactly what you're saying. I mean, it's interesting because she says, she asks him if it's about the colour of the skin, and he says, no, no, it's about demographics. Sorry. What? What? Like, either go there, either double down and say there is a greater chance that a young black male would have had a knife than a young white male. If you believe that, Chris Phelps, just say it. Say it out loud and then we can actually debate it and we can look at the data and we can see whether you might be right or you might be wrong. But what he's doing, and we see this so often, is pushing at a door to suggest something, but then running away as soon as it looks like it might be racist.

7:50Now, look, we are all alert to trying to stop somebody who wanted to attack 11 people on a train from carrying out that crime. Everyone's on the same page. And there is an argument that stop and search can be used as a deterrent. In other words, if you think there's an airport scanner, if you think there's something to walk through, if you think that somebody is going to meet you, you know, when you get on or off a train, if there are police, then maybe it works as a deterrent. but just put that into whatever that looks like in a practical context on the ground. Are the police at every single train station now?

8:24Are they stopping people getting on? And where does that stop and search happen? Does it happen when you're boarding a train? Does it happen when you're getting off a train? Does it happen because people... I mean, he wasn't on the police radar, right? Whatever happened this weekend, he wasn't on the police radar. As far as we know to date now, as we're recording this at one o 'clock on Monday, he wasn't on the police radar. So what grounds would they have used to stop and search? If you can find something that says you are going to find weapons on this man, stop and search them. Great. Absolutely great.

8:56100 percent behind it. But if you are stopping people without grounds and creating a climate whereby every young black man thinks he's being targeted by the police, that is not going to help you solve crimes longer term within a community. Well, let's speak now to Neil Basu. He was the former head of counterterrorism at the Metropolitan Police of Asian origin himself and is now presenter of the Crime Agents podcast. Neil, great to have you with us. Look, we've just heard that clip of Chris Philp. Is he right that you need to substantially increase the amount of stop and search taking place?

9:33Neil Basu:Well, I mean, he's conflating two issues with the horrors of this weekend, which, you know, my heart's with the 11 people and their families who are, you know, may never recover from the horrific experience. But if you want to take separately the issue of knife crime, that's been a key priority for policing for at least the last 20 years that I can remember since we had the last serious violence outbreak in the capital. So 2008, 2009, we were incredibly concerned about it, and we have been for the last five years or so. Conservatives, when they were in power, tightened legislation. There's been a lot of talk about how to get knives away from youngsters and off illegal sites where they're sold.

10:16Neil Basu:Stop and surge is important, but it's important that it's done well and forensically and in places where there are real issues with crime and street crime. So there's no doubt massively inflating the numbers of stop and search won't work. And it's happened before. And there's been a very low hit rate and a very low academic evidence base for it actually working to reduce crime. So it has to be dealt with extremely carefully because, of course, it has had a very disproportionate effect on the black community. It raises tensions where it's done badly. And in fact, London itself has been working very hard to try and improve the way stop and search is done.

10:53Neil Basu:So it's not that it's not important, but it's not the panacea. So when the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, says we have to dramatically increase the use of stop and search, is he wrong or is he right? I mean, do we have to dramatically increase it? Well, there's no evidence that that works. So he talks, I heard him talking this morning on the radio and talking about the 60 % reduction in London. That's largely because it's been used much more forensically in hotspot areas, which he also agrees with. My understanding from the interior that he was quoting a policy exchange report. Well, policy exchange has some very good reports, has some very good people and researchers working for it.

11:32Neil Basu:But I think even policy exchange would say there is no strong academic evidence for how effective stop and search is. Where it is effective is where it's used very forensically on very high crime areas in very specific localities against very specific people who are known to carry knives. it isn't the panacea neither is live facial recognition neither is the legislation neither is working on lots of other things in our community such as mental health provision and addiction what is a panacea is all of that wrapped together not just individual soundbites of this will work and this won't it's hard to see how that would have necessarily worked in this case for instance because presumably peterborough railway station would not you would think be considered as a crime hotspot that must be targeted in that way?

12:22Neil Basu:It's highly unlikely. I mean, the only place that has the kind of airport-style security that might stand a chance is the Eurostar. I mean, we're not going to put that on tens of thousands of miles of rail network in this country. Neither are we going to be able to put, you know, armed policing on every railway in this country. We need to avoid, in horrific circumstances like this, making policy judgments because we're highly emotional and something horrific has happened. Just bear in mind that for the public at large, it's millions to one about being involved in an incident like this. Whether it's a terrifying incident with a very violent person or whether it is a terrorist attack, it's millions to one.

12:59Neil Basu:You have to be very careful and proportionate in the responses we come up with. This doesn't sound proportionate at the moment. It sounds like, you know, a knee-jerk response to a horrific incident. And I can understand the emotion. It's just not a very sensible way to do policy. I mean, this is the point at which people say, well, wouldn't stop and search, you know, I mean, remove it from this particular instance, but wouldn't stop and search? Wouldn't something more targeted have had a massive impact in that sort of situation? Yeah, I mean, certainly stop and search has had a good impact in areas that I've described, where it's been deployed against the right people at the right time in the right kind of crime area, where the removal of weapons is definitely something that has worked, but it has been overused in the past.

13:41Neil Basu:So the idea that we would just go to massively increasing the number of stop and search, and that would automatically help, is not true. Or certainly it's not been academically proven. It's a bit of a leap of faith. Now, the idea is that that would provide a deterrence. So if you know that you're stop and search, you're likely to be stop and search walking down the street, you're less likely to carry a knife. Most criminologists will tell you it is the fear of being caught that really counts rather than the sentence or what will happen to you afterwards. To do that, you need a lot more police officers, but you still need reasonable grounds to stop people.

14:16Neil Basu:I mean, I think the argument that we rapidly increase stop and search in high-crime areas and we take away the reasonable grounds to suspect is a very dangerous move. And there is a lot of history in policing about effectively winding up communities in those circumstances because you're going to end up stopping an awful lot of very innocent people. And it is an incredibly humiliating thing to happen to you. You yourself have been stopped multiple times. I mean, in your role in the Met, right? I'm probably the only chief constable of the last 10 years to have been regularly stopped and searched as a kid, a teenager, an adult and a serving police officer.

14:52Neil Basu:Yes. And what does it do to you? Just take us inside that mentality because like, are you thinking, I get it, you're just doing your job, you've been told to do that or are you boiling with rage inside? Well, there's a little bit, I mean, because you have to have reasonable grounds to stop somebody, when I have been stopped and searched by colleagues, I can tell you for an absolute fact that they would have struggled greatly to come up with a reasonable grounds to stop and search me. You have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the right, wrong clothing, behaving suspiciously doing something very strange to be the the focus or you have to be in a very high crime area where effectively what they call a section 60 so all grounds reasonable grounds are removed and a police officer could just stop you from being in that area none of those things have ever applied to me and did you say that to them when they stop you do you say you're being a fucking idiot get your get yourself sorted out or do you just go along with it i would never say that to a police officer just as a bit of a well there's a bit of professional courtesy involved but i have uh but also i wouldn't recommend it um but effectively you do ask why are you stopping me and you do get occasionally some very how can i put it mumbled answers not very clear or the usual reasons you match the description of you know and i won't be the only person who has experienced that i mean clearly because i am a professional and i can look after myself and i can have that kind of conversation with a police officer it's less of a problem but can you imagine being a teenager stopped for your sixth or seventh time that month and if you're stopped and searched in public passers-by are watching that happen to you you are immediately being effectively in the eyes of anyone passing by you look like you're a criminal if that keeps happening you start you probably start psychologically thinking that you are one it is much more of a problem for the young black particularly afro-caribbean community and major urban centers it is a problem for the asian community as well but not to the same degree but it it is humiliating and it's it doesn't matter if it's done really well it's still embarrassing and humiliating for the person that happens to and i think you're you i think the numbers show that you're four times more likely per head of population to be stopped if you are black than if you are white and you know i'm sort of in my mid 60s i've never been stopped and searched emily have you ever been stopped and searched no uh I have actually at the airports.

17:14Yeah, I have. OK, airports is a different thing, though, isn't it? No, I've literally been met by people who've taken me away and said, we found gunpowder on your suitcase. Oh, well, there we are. I'm glad I asked that. That's interesting. Well, I'm glad we asked that. The conversation now goes in a different direction. But you also said early on in the interview that you were against the use of live facial recognition technology. and I've been at football games where I've seen a police van and it says we are using live facial recognition technology and I think well what's wrong with that if you think that there are people there that are going to cause trouble inside a football ground or whatever and they're known then they they should be rooted out weeded out why not use that on the streets if that technology is

17:56Neil Basu:available I'm not sure I've ever been against live facial recognition technology what I have said in previous interviews is when we first started deploying it many years ago in a very small experiment if you like with South Wales police we did not do that very effectively and also the technology at that time and this was quite a few years ago now was not very good it was discriminatory so it gave a lot of false positives which again means you're stopping and searching innocent people it does have a police backdrop to it so once it's indicated that there is a reason to stop somebody of course you're you're then put in front of a police officer who's got access to lots of other databases and can ask questions so it's not an immediate judge jury point but i am actually pro-life facial recognition now because the technology has improved massively and it's proving very effective and when i was head of counterterrorism i would have put live facial recognition technology in every major port airport and railway station in the country i would probably also put it in shopping centers um it is very effective at finding wanted people and and getting them arrested and that has got to be a good reason i understand why it feels somewhat like a big brother technology but the technology has moved on it's basically searching databases which are full of wanted criminals and if you get a false positive you can be very quickly sent back on your way because it's a false positive and they are much smaller so i know the person who's in charge of it nationally she's a very very impressive member of law enforcement community and she has studied this in depth and we hear her quite often talking about life facial recognition it's very different today than when we first started using it and we should have put it in the places i've recommended because i don't think the public would have batted an eyelid about that kind of technology being deployed in places like airports.

19:52Yeah, that's so interesting. So on that point, you agree with Chris Philp that there needs to be an upscaling of the use of live facial recognition technology.

20:01Neil Basu:Yes, but I think it's a completely different point. I wouldn't have conflated it with what happened this weekend because if he's, he certainly wasn't, I think there's been a statement saying he wasn't known to the security services. He may well have not been known to policing. So how would live facial recognition have helped? But the stop and search thing is if he was acting very suspiciously and that would have raised the hackles of a police officer who would have given reasonable grounds to stop and search him. Yes, that would have been useful, but you have to have the police officers there.

20:27Neil Basu:So one thing I would agree with is you need an awful lot more police officers, which means we're going to have to pay a lot more for them. Can I ask you something, Neil? I think it was only about two years ago, two and a half years ago, that after Louise Casey's report, she concluded that there were parts of the Met that were institutionally racist, homophobic, misogynist. I guess you are dealing with a force that is both highly aware of being accused of being institutionally racist and also maybe institutionally racist. So when it comes to stop and search, do you think that police officers are, I mean, would more powers be dreadful from that perspective?

21:09Or do you think that people should kind of be able to put that on one side and say we will search exactly who we need to search?

21:15Neil Basu:they already get to do that they don't need more powers they've already got very strong powers of stop and search which they can exercise when they've got properly the grounds to do that yes i think they're very very sensitive about being accused institutional racism is a much longer conversation i mean people don't really understand the definition it's more about leadership because it's more about the processes and policies you start using it's not really about frontline officers, institutional racism. I mean, mostly what people are describing is actually individual racists who are abusing their power.

21:48Neil Basu:Now, there's far less of those than the public are led to believe, far more sometimes than chief constables realise. But that's not really the issue here. The issue is they already have strong powers, they just need to use them correctly and effectively. But recognise what I've said, you know, it has tremendous consequences for the person you're stopping and searching now if you get a hit which is in about 20 percent of cases then that's a good thing there is a slight deterrent effect but if you overuse it and you start stopping more innocent people than guilty people you are going to get a backlash from communities and particularly in london but also major urban centers where that has happened in the past it's a strong lesson to policing about using these powers properly neil let me just ask you this about sort of the way that politics plays out at times like this, because the government is getting a bit of a kicking for saying, well, we're not going to do anything sudden and rush to judgment and implement measures which won't work.

22:48And of course, then you have opposition politicians saying, we need to step up this dramatically, instantly, even though they probably know that doesn't work, but it chimes well with the public. And there you have the police in the middle of all

23:00Neil Basu:of this yes you do as usual it's very difficult because i mean i do i do i mean you from my phone this hard to believe john but i do feel sorry for politicians sometimes because we've created a society in which they cannot think long term at all the answer to this is in prevention long-term prevention which is an awful lot of things that we have got wrong in this country for many many years so you know we have got to do something about addiction youth mental health you've got to do something about all of those things wrapping up some short-term soundbites which sound like you know strong law and order and lock people up and throw away the key is not going to work neil grateful to you and i should say there's a special edition of the crime agents out today neil batu thank you very much indeed thanks neil thank you in a moment elon musk the shires The Hobbit and why he thinks English villagers are full of rapists.

24:21LBC leading Britain's conversation.

24:30The News Agents. These like lovely sort of small towns in England, Scotland, Ireland, they've been like sort of living their lives quietly. They're like hobbits, frankly. So, in fact, J.R.R. Tolkien based the hobbits on people he knew in small-town England. Because they were just like lovely people who like to, you know, smoke their pipe and have nice meals and everything's pleasant. The hobbits in the Shire. So, he was talking about, you know, places like Hertfordshire. Like the Shire is around in the greater London area. Oxfordshire type of thing. But the reason they've been able to enjoy the Shire is because hard men have protected them from the dangers of the world.

25:18But since they have almost no exposure to the dangers of the world, they don't realize that they're there. Until one day, you know, a thousand people show up in your village of 500 out of nowhere and start raping the kids. This has not happened, God knows how many times, in Britain. Okay. What? Sorry? Oh, Elon Musk, step away from the ketamine. Step away from the Joe Rogan three-hour podcast. The beauty of Joe Rogan, we now know, as we have understood, is that he goes on for so long, people just talk utter shite without any kind of filter whatsoever. So Elon Musk is telling us about the hobbit-like villages of, checks notes oxfordshire harfordshire where suddenly rapists descend yeah lots of them lots of thousands of them and just not quite entirely sure the empirical basis for any of these claims but it is absurd and of course elon musk has a very big voice and joe rogan's podcast amplifies this massively we now have americans convinced that if you go to the cotswolds now you're inevitably going to get raped because that's what happens when you go to places like this out of london i mean it is frankly fucking absurd i mean just absurd but he's also coupled this with some posts this weekend on his social media platform x that without doubt without a shadow of a doubt civil war is coming to england well this is how it works isn't it you go on a podcast and you spout shite about something you know nothing about i mean what he's demonstrating there i think is like how seldom he probably comes to england to the uk how little he knows anywhere that he's even naming.

27:23I tell you the trouble with what he's saying is that it's almost like it's not just that he's repeating it. He's advocating. He's advocating for it. There's a degree in which he wants it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that there will be civil war because this is what he said immediately after Southport, that he said civil war is coming to England and the terrible murder of the three girls. And again, he has said it again when there was civil disturbances, civil war is coming and he's i think he's slightly frustrated that people in the hobbit-like villages of england are carrying on their daily lives pretty much as normal the smell of woods village of england you've been to many hobbit-like villages recently i mean you know there are some gorgeous english villages but just being torn apart by civil war is not what i normally think when i go and have a pint of foaming ale and light my pipe and the smell of wood smoke rising from the house.

28:20You think, am I going to hit a deer? Yeah. You think, is there any parking? And you think, is the pub still serving lunch? Yeah, and there are no pavements and my shoes are going to get really muddy because I'm having to walk in a muddy road. And oops, let me not knock over that hobbit. Yeah. Yeah. Ridiculous. We'll be back in just a second.