Under 18 Stop and Search

1. I would like to request figures for (a) the total number of stop and searches carried out by Cheshire Constabulary each year for the past three years and (b) the number of under 18s made the subject of a stop and search each year for the past three years.
2. If possible, I would like figures for the individual ages from one to 16-years-old.  Failing that, I would like the age of the youngest person to be made subject of a stop and search as well as how many children in the following age brackets were made subject of a stop and search: (a) 0-9 inclusive (b) 10-15 inclusive (c) 16-17 inclusive.

In accordance with section 1 (1) (b) of the Act our response is provided below;

Stop & search statistics are widely published both on Cheshire Police Authority Web site, the Constabulary's web site and by the Home Office & Ministry of Justice. The information is therefore exempt in accordance with section 21 of the Act as being reasonably accessible to you by other means.

Please see the following web pages that you may find helpful:

Cheshire Police Stop and Search
Cheshire Police Authority Stop-search

It appears however that the only information that is not included in published information are the ages of the persons stopped. The reason for this is that people are not required to give that information to officers. Therefore the recoding of that information is sketchy.

From a sample of the 26,423 Stop Search records returned for the three years, there were a considerable number where the D.O.B was missing or clearly inaccurate. This would lead us to have to manually examine every record in order to provide information that we could either rely on or discount. This would clearly exceed the time limits for FOI requests.