The Police Service’s Stop and Search policy has come under scrutiny recently.Some might say this was overdue, but the fact it has gained little public attention until now is due to the fact that it has only been in widespread use comparatively recently.More importantly, the public wanted the terrifying burst of murders in late 2009 and 2010 brought to an end, and such an end demanded unprecedented means.More often than not, modern democracy is about balancing different interests and rights. In crime fighting, individual rights of privacy and the right not to be stopped without reasonable cause have to be balanced against the right of people to be secure and to be able to walk the streets without fear.Another comparison has come in the war against terror. The use of different forms of torture, such as waterboarding, has been justified on the basis that it gives intelligence-gatherers information that could be used to prevent a terrorist attack. But information gained from torture is unreliable, and the power to torture is open to abuse. The fact that many innocent people were arrested and held without charge at Guantánamo Bay has stained the reputation of the United States for a generation. History will decide if it was worth it.Blackstone’s formulation, “better that ten guilty men escape than that one innocent suffer” is a long-standing principle of law that underpins the presumption of innocence.But in the context of stop and search, you have to ask if the reverse formulation is also justified. If one person is stopped with a gun when they are on their way to murder someone, how many stops and searches of innocents were too many? One? One hundred? One thousand? What is a spared life worth?The police already have the power to stop and search when they have reasonable cause. And reasonable cause can be quite broad. That might account for some of the 19,000 stops and searches that will have taken place by the end of this year.But there seems to be little argument with this provision. The big argument is over the section of the Criminal Code that allows police to stop people and search them simply because they are in an area where the police judge serious violence is likely to occur or where people are believed to be carrying weapons.The Centre for Justice believes this provision is unconstitutional, and says similar laws have been struck down in the UK and Europe.This may be so. Great care must be taken not to run roughshod over long established civil and constitutional rights. Once lost, they are very hard to get back. But there is a balance of interests here too. To what extent has this provision made people safer? The police statistics are not that detailed, but in general terms, they say that the stop and search policy has helped to reduce offences and to keep wrongdoers off the streets, and the recent drop in reported crimes seems to supports that.So a case can be made that it has been worth it, especially given the crisis the Island faced over the last 24 months or so. It would be foolhardy to assume that it is the sole answer to stopping crime, but it has played a role.However, it is much harder to make that case if it can be shown that the law is used primarily to stop and search one segment of the population in this case, black males with the “area” law being applied very generously.The use of racial profiling, and the sweeping up of innocent people on the basis of their race is a clear violation of their human rights as well as their civil rights. As an experiment, it would be revealing to see what kind of uproar would occur if stop and searches were conducted in the early evening on Front Street, and only white women were stopped and searched and then taken to Hamilton Police Station to be processed.The long term damage stemming from a policy in which innocent people are constantly stopped and searched for no reason except that they are in the wrong place must be taken into account. Leaving aside matters of principle, the resentment caused will do long term damage if care is not taken.Indeed, there is a risk that in solving one problem (gun crime) by this means, stop and search may cause another a rise in civil unrest caused by resentment towards the police. There seems to be a good of evidence that stop and search tactics in the UK contributed to the wave of riots there this past summer.For now, the police have seen a rise in popularity as the crime rate has finally begun to fall. But popularity is a fickle thing, and it would not take much for it to be reversed if a large segment of the population feels it is being victimised.Lord Acton said: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Whenever anyone is handed broad powers over the lives of others, great care must be taken to ensure that they is not abused. The police need to make certain they do not abuse the wide stop and search powers they have been given.