Stop and Search
Stop and search powers are an important tool our officers use in your community every day, to help prevent and detect crime and make where you live a safer place.
We largely make use of intelligence and information either gathered by our teams or provided to us by the public so we can target stops in areas where we know criminal activity may occur, and on those we believe to be involved in this.
It is not a power used lightly, and police officers must use it lawfully and proportionately, but it also enables us to further progress investigations without the need to unnecessarily arrest a person.
As a force, we strongly believe in the open and transparent use of these powers and making sure we are explaining how we utilise them to our communities. This includes the annual publication of data on the use of these powers at a whole force level, and quarterly updates from district commanders on how their officers are specifically using stop and search to address criminal activity where you live.
You can find out more below on what you can expect from us should you be stopped, your rights if you are stopped and how you get involved in the scrutiny of how officers are using stop and search in your community.
Each quarter, we publish data for our use of Stop and Search for each of our 13 districts, along with an explanation of its use by the Commander for that area.
You can find a link to each of these pages below. You can also take a look at our main overview page which will explain what powers we have available to us, how we use these and what we must do when stopping someone.
Stop and Search (Isle of Wight)
You can also find out more about how you can get involved in our Community Scrutiny Panels, where our use of police powers is reviewed, here.
Another area we are committed to more openness and increasing the ability for further scrutiny is in our use of force. You can view annual, forcewide data for this here.
The force also publishes a range of other information in response to Freedom of Information Requests, and on subjects such as misconduct. You can find links to some of these below
Other stats and data on police powers