Black drivers are more likely to be stopped by police

                                   Stopwatch estimates five million unrecorded stops in one year.

Millions of cars are pulled over by the police every year without being officially recorded – and black drivers are significantly more likely to be targeted, figures reveal.

Although there is no official available data on the number of vehicle stops, researchers from Stopwatch, a coalition of academics and legal experts which monitors the use of stop-and-search powers by the police, used figures from the British Crime Survey to estimate that around 10% of adults in England and Wales are stopped in a vehicle by police each year.

"We estimate that there were approximately 5.5 million vehicle stops in 2010-11, approximately five million of which did not involve a search and therefore were not covered by the recording requirement," said a Stopwatch briefing document.

Research commissioned by the group based on British Crime Survey data between 2008 and 2011 also found that black people had reported higher levels of car stops  in the past year than white people and that "the disproportionality could not be explained by any other social or demographic factors". Rachel Taylor of the legal firm Fisher Meredith, who is a member of Stopwatch, said the practice of stopping cars without recording the incident using section 163 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 was alarming. It allowed officers to circumvent the conditions of reasonable suspicion that the driver is carrying an unauthorised weapon or drugs.

"This throws the power wide open to abuse, and research indicates that there are very high levels of racial disproportionality in its use," she said.

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