Shaunie Investigates: Is Stop and Search Really The Best Route?

Knife crime amongst young people has been a huge topic this year. Many discussions have been had by many people trying to solve this issue.

In November 2018, Piers Morgan and the Good Morning Britain programme finally invited a real panel of people on to the programme to discuss the rise in knife crime.

The panel consisted of people that were either directly or indirectly connected to knife crime.

(l-r) Alison Cope, Rico Finlayson, Justin Finlayson, Pastor Lorraine Jones, Piers Morgan, Susanna Reid, Omar Shariff, Leroy Logan MBE & Duncan Bew. 
Picture courtesy of Justin Finlayson (United Borders)

Pastor Lorraine Jones, who lost her son, Dwayne Simpson, 20, in 2014, when he was stabbed during an altercation.

Dwayne Simpson, 20,
died after being stabbed three times in 2013

Pastor Lorraine Jones
lost her son in 2014 to knife crime

Alison Cope whose son, Joshua Ribera, 18, was murdered in 2013, four years after his father was charged and convicted for the gun-related murder of Post Office worker, Craig Hodson-Walker.

Joshua Ribera, 18, died after attending a
memorial service in 2013

Justin Finlayson, whose son Rico, 21, was stabbed ten times in an unprovoked attack by a group of seven people in January 2018.

Rico and Justin Finlayson

Rico thankfully survived and also joined his father on the panel.

Justin Finlayson gave up his job as a bus driver five months before Rico was stabbed and started the charity, United Borders. He purchase an old London bus from TFL and used it as a music studio. This was his way to encourage young people to channel their attention in another direction and to steer them away from crime and joining gangs.

Message for Justin Finlayson

United Borders was created in North London to unite young people from other less fortunate areas and provide them with a way to get along and have a common purpose - music. The police and the government felt that this would only make matters worse and were not very supportive of this idea, which meant that Justin was unable to receive any funding or additional help from the government or the Met Police.

United Border's Bus

Before & After the arson attack

Unfortunately less than a year after being launched the bus was destroyed after being set fire to. Justin has now set up a Go Fund Me Page to help gather funds to go towards another bus and studio equipment. Over £4000 has been raised towards the £80,000 that is necessary to purchase a new bus and studio equipment.









Leroy Logan, a former Met Police Superintendent, was also on the panel, along with former gang member, Omar Shariff, who went on to win a Pride Of Britain Award and Duncan Bew, a trauma Surgeon at a south London hospital.

Leroy Logan MBE, 
Former Met Police Superintendent.

The panel were invited on to discuss knife crime, but with the constant mention of Stop and Search, as well as comments made by the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, during a pre-recorded interview with Susanna Reid supporting this law, it all seemed like a ploy to push the stop and search law.


Black people have always been impacted by the stop and search law, originally known as the 'Sus Law', as the police would stop and search people due to racial profiling. This led to frustration from the community and several riots taking place throughout the 80's because of this law.


The Sus Law permitted police to stop and search and eventually detain a person who they believed was in breach of the Vagrancy Act 1824, without warrant, reason or evidence.


The Sus Law was repealed in 1981, but stop and search remained - the only difference between the Sus Law and the process of today's Stop and Search is that the police need to have 'reasonable grounds' to suspect someone of carrying something illegal. They cannot be suspicious based on your skin colour alone.  

Seeing Piers continuously refer to a Daily Mail article written by the former chair of the equality and human rights commission, Trevor Phillips, really frustrated me, as in the article, Mr Phillips says that the "police should be exempt from race discrimination laws in order to target black youths in high crime areas." Saying this whilst knowing that an organisation have shown acts of institutional racism is very reckless and can lead to more problems between the two groups.

People like Piers need to know that just because a black person is saying what they want to hear a black man say, Trevor Phillips does not speak for all black people. He was given a job, not by us the black people, but by the ones that control the system and how black people are seen.

I'm not against the police carrying out stop and searches, I am against the way that it is being done. I've seen a couple stop and searches on social media and it never seems to end good, and that's primarily due to the way it has begun. The police acting like bullies and forgetting every bit of their police training.

Now the police are talking about equipping all of their officers on patrol with guns.

Why? So they can end up shooting innocent people?