Stop-and-search records

Stop-and-search records are the individual-level encounter tables published alongside UK street-level crime data under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Coverage is uneven across forces - PSNI supplies none, and outcomes data is unavailable for BTP and PSNI - so per-force completeness must be checked before analysis.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - data.police.uk (tagging) — "stop-and-search".

A label on a listing is not a deliverable. Teams that license on the strength of a product-name match routinely find the shipped files cover a narrower slice than they assumed, and backfilling history afterwards costs more than the license ever did.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and data.police.uk lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Read data.police.uk's record on tagging — "stop-and-search" — then confirm the delivered artifact matches before you license anything.
2. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
3. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
4. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: security-alarm-services data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - Open Government Licence v3.0 - Street-level crime data