Why Were The Pace Codes Introduced?

The year, 1984 saw the introduction of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, also known as the PACE codes. The PACE codes were an act of parliment, the introduction of these codes was to standardise and proffessionalise police work. It basically provides a core framework of police powers and safeguards around stop and search, arrest, detention, investigation, identification and interviewing suspects. Official dissatisfaction with the rules of the criminal process goes back to the mid 1960's when the Home Office asked the Crimial Law Revision Committee to look into the rules of evidence in criminal cases. After their ill fated 11th Report the Home Office shelved the issue until 1977 when the labour government announced that it was to set up a Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, whose terms of reference were to consider the investigation of offences in the light of police powers and duties, aswell as the rights and duties of suspects. The Philips Commission was asked to examine the issues, " Regarding both the interests of the community in bringing offenders to justice and to the rights and liberties of the person accussed or suspected of crime." The Report was well recieved by the police and legal proffesion but not so well by the political left as it was said to be to prosecution minded. In November 1982 the Home secutary introduced the first ever version of the PACE Bill, the bill was highly contrivesal and didnt pass throught the house of commons until October 1984, when it had been subject to many government amendments. The question that remains is why was there a need for such an Act to be passed? As a group it is the stop and search aspect of the codes that we shall be analising, why there was a need for these measures to be in place, what its impact has been and what the code actually involves, aswell as a statistical analysis of the Act.

Prior to 1984 it has been revealed that the police would base the stop and searches they conducted soley on sterotypes such as class, gender and race, this was because of the weak constraints imposed on discretion by law that allowed huge bias in policing. It was this discretion that disguised the disproportionate use of police power against the unpopular and powerless minorities also known as "Police Property". This discretion came from the law that was inplace during this era known as the "SUS" law, this was the informal name given to a stop-and-search law that permitted a police officer to act on suspicion, or 'sus', alone. This law was based upon the Vargency Act of 1824 which made it "illegal for a suspected person or reputed thief to frequent or loiter in a public place with intent to commit an arrestable offence" thus effectively allowed the police to stop and search and arrest anyone they choose, purely on the basis of using suspicion as a crime-prevention tactic. It was this disproportionate use of these stop and search powers