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.