Changelog
Police powers change often — the Public Order Act 2023 and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 both rewrote parts of this area within the last few years. Rights advice that has quietly gone stale is harmful advice, so every change here is dated.
2026-08-25
Site created. First nine England & Wales pages published (noindex).
Covers when you must answer, the caution and adverse inference, stop and search, being stopped while driving, giving your name, rights in custody, custody time limits, Schedule 7 port examinations, and phone passwords. 18 authorities, all quoted verbatim from legislation.gov.uk and machine-verified.
2026-08-30
Scotland stop-and-search powers, a Scotland stop-and-search data layer, and SEO launch plumbing.
Added the three Scotland-specific powers behind most real Scottish searches (Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 s.66, Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 s.60, Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act 1995 s.50), and a Police Scotland figures layer alongside the existing England & Wales one. Also: a single route enumeration feeding both the sitemap and the static build so the two cannot drift, canonicals, and Article/BreadcrumbList structured data.
2026-08-31
Scotland "at the door" and "after arrest", 9 pages, 63 authorities.
Scotland had none of this content while England & Wales had eleven pages between the two sections. Researched from Scots law rather than reworded from the English pages — common-law entry and search under CJ(S)A 2016 s.46/47, sheriff officers and diligence rather than bailiffs, and after arrest, the 1 April 2025 repeal of Police Act 1997 Part 5 for Scotland (replaced by the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020) and the fact Scotland has no "caution" in the England & Wales sense.
2026-08-31
Two Scotland claims corrected after judge review.
The Scotland stop-and-search page understated the bladed-article search power as one condition rather than the two the statute actually requires, and a fiscal-fine recall claim on the warnings-and-fines page dropped the condition that makes a recall request valid. Both traced to an under-quoted source rather than a wrong reading of it. Full detail in /corrections.
2026-08-31
Automated tests, linting, and honest reporting of unused authorities.
24 new tests on the decision-tool graphs (no dangling edges, no unreachable outcomes, every outcome either cited or carrying an explicit unsourced caveat) — which caught a real bug: the printable rights card sent Northern Ireland readers the England & Wales card, asserting PACE 1984 duties under a statute that does not extend there. Fixed to an exhaustive jurisdiction switch with an honest blank card for Northern Ireland. Also added ESLint, and started marking authorities that are fetched and verified but not currently cited by any claim, so /sources can report them honestly instead of implying every entry is in active use.
2026-09-02
Five new pages closing the highest-harm coverage gaps, plus analytics and a privacy page.
Being arrested (the s.24 necessity test), detained under s.136 of the Mental Health Act, strip and intimate searches, conditions imposed on protests, and the Public Order Act 2023 offences — taking the site to 46 pages, 231 duty items and 275 authorities. Consent-gated GA4 analytics (Consent Mode v2, denied by default) and a privacy page were added at the same time, since publishing UK law without a consent mechanism for any future analytics would itself be a PECR problem.
2026-09-05
Soft-delete for retired authorities, and a monthly check for stale stop-and-search figures.
Authorities can now be retired without losing their verification history, closing the one stale entry that had no content left citing it. Added a monthly check comparing the committed England & Wales and Scotland stop-and-search figures against the upstream publications, so a new quarter of data is flagged rather than discovered by chance.
2026-09-05
Refreshed stop-and-search figures: England & Wales to 2026-07, Scotland to Apr-Jun 2026.
data.police.uk now publishes July 2026 (34,867 searches across 29 forces); Police Scotland’s newest quarterly release covers April to June 2026 (9,913 searches). Also fixed a format change in the Scotland source data (result codes changed from "Positive"/"Negative" to "POS"/"NEG" without a header change) that had been silently read as zero positive and zero negative results for every row in the new quarter.
2026-09-10
Launched: the site is now public and indexable.
Before launch the privacy page was brought up to date with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations as amended in February 2026, analytics were switched on in a mode that loads nothing from Google until you accept, and several places where the site described its own coverage wrongly were fixed.
2026-09-11
Every page now links to its Scotland or England & Wales counterpart, and the tools ask where you are.
A reader who lands on the wrong jurisdiction’s page is now one tap from the right one, and each page lists related pages in the same jurisdiction. The "Stopped right now?" button goes to a new page that asks whether you are in England & Wales or Scotland, instead of assuming England; both answers are saved for offline use. The which-power and deletion tools now ask your jurisdiction first and give Scottish readers Scots law only; the custody clock adds the Scottish extension and the section 136 Mental Health Act clock. The legal statements the tools make in their own right are now checked against their sources the same way page claims are. One correction to the Scotland fingerprints and DNA page — see /corrections.
2026-09-14
The "free legal advice" sentence, repeated on thirteen surfaces in five wordings, now renders from one sourced constant, and two unsourced claims were dropped.
Added a standing-statements file quoting PACE Code C paragraph 6.1 for "free independent legal advice is available", plus a separate Scotland statement, and switched the footer, the error page, the shared emergency bullets, Easy Read and the duty pages to render it instead of each hand-writing their own wording. Dropped the unsourced means-test limb ("whatever you earn", "regardless of your income") and the naked negative "never held against you", replacing the latter with the duty PACE Code C paragraph 6.4 actually places on officers not to dissuade anyone from getting advice. See /corrections.
2026-09-14
Three quotes widened after a second adversarial verifier pass, and the section 2 plain-clothes identification duty added.
The PACE 1984 section 2 quote had silently dropped the duty to show documentary evidence of being a constable before a plain-clothes officer may search someone — arguably the most important protection in the section — and is now added to /stop-and-search with its own, prominent item. The section 42 custody-clock quote had only the 24-hour timing bar; the second, independent bar (the extension cannot be authorised before the second section 40 review has been carried out) is now carried by the claim on /how-long-they-can-hold-you. The CJPOA 1994 section 172 extent quote now opens with its own qualification ("except as regards any provisions applied under section 39"), so the England & Wales pages that used to assert Scotland has no equivalent adverse-inference rule now signpost the Scotland pages instead of asserting an unqualified comparative. Four further errata added. See /corrections.
2026-09-16
A correctness release: five errata, a face-covering power that was described as having one trigger when it has two, and a rendering bug that showed raw markup inside legal claims.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 section 60AA quote had been stored without the second of its two limbs, so /stopped/facial-recognition described a section 60 authorisation as the only route to the face-covering power. There is a second, independent route: an inspector can give an authorisation in its own right. Both routes are now quoted and described. The custody representations quotes (PACE sections 40 and 42) were missing the subsection each is expressly made subject to, under which an officer may decline to hear the detained person's own oral representations. The appropriate-adult sentence on /arrested/your-rights-in-custody, unsourced since the page was written, is now carried by PACE Code C paragraphs 3.15 and 1.5. A Scottish under-16 claim was cited to the wrong subsection of the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016 and is now cited to the one that carries it. Separately, fourteen claims and details across eight pages contained HTML entities in text that is not rendered as HTML, so readers saw sequences such as "“relevant matter”" inside a legal claim; all are fixed and a new build check now fails if one is reintroduced.
2026-09-30
A new check for what a quote leaves OUT, and the first defect it found: the five conditions for a search warrant, two of which the site was naming.
Every legal claim here carries a verbatim quote, and a build check confirms those words are still present at the source. That check cannot see an omission: where a quote skips from one limb of a provision to a later one, the words in between are invisible to it, and twice before now that gap has hidden a condition or an exception. There is now a second check that recovers what each quote left out and fails the build when those words carry meaning rather than just provision numbering, along with a way for an author to record a deliberate omission and why it is safe. Where a quote does leave something out, the omitted text is also shown to the model that reviews whether the quote supports the claim, which until now saw only the quote and so was blind to exactly the same thing. That is what caught the search-warrant defect recorded in the errata below: shown the missing condition, the review changed from "supports" to "partial" on both claims citing it. The existing 147 quotes that the new check flags are recorded as a reviewed baseline rather than fixed in one pass — each needs a legal read of its own — so the check guards every quote added or edited from here on, and the backlog is worked through deliberately.
2026-10-16
Two correctness fixes: the England and Wales duty to stop a vehicle now includes traffic officers, and the face-covering requirement moves under "You must".
Section 163(1) of the Road Traffic Act 1988 requires a driver to stop on being required to do so by "a constable in uniform or a traffic officer". The words "or a traffic officer" were inserted for England and Wales only by the Traffic Management Act 2004, and the quote stored for the duty stopped before them, so the England and Wales pages named constables alone. They now quote the full wording. The Scotland duty is unchanged and cites a separate Scotland entry, because the Scottish text ends at "constable in uniform"; the Scotland driving page, the Scotland hub and the which-power tool no longer describe the two as identical. Separately, the facial-recognition page listed the section 60AA face-covering requirement and its penalty under "Lawful to refuse — but it costs you" (a column described as "Not an offence"), when refusing a valid requirement is an offence under section 60AA(7). Both items now sit under "You must". Two errata added. See /corrections.
2026-10-17
A fourth Duty Map block, "How the power works", and a third column no longer described as "Not an offence".
Statements of what a power is, who can use it and when are not duties on you and not things you can refuse, but the Duty Map had nowhere else to put them, so some sat under headings that made a false claim about them. They now sit in a separate block below the three columns, on the facial-recognition, serious violence reduction order, stop and search, Schedule 7, section 136, Scotland stop and search, immigration enforcement (both) and PACE-in-Scotland pages. The third column, formerly "Lawful to refuse — but it costs you" ("Not an offence…"), is now "Refusing costs you", because some of its items are offences in themselves. Some items in that column on other pages are still not about refusing (custody time limits, criminal record disclosure); they move in a later pass. Separately, the Schedule 7 penalty quote now covers the whole of paragraph 18(2), including the fine, and the Schedule 7 offence on the two pages on when you must answer is stated in its own words. Twelve errata added. See /corrections.
2026-10-19
The immigration enforcement pages now cover the powers to enter and search without a warrant under sections 28C, 28E and 28F of the Immigration Act 1971.
Both pages (England and Wales, and Scotland) described two ways in, a warrant or an internal authorisation for business premises, and said or implied that an officer with neither had no power to enter. Three further powers need no warrant, and two of them need no authorisation of any kind: entry to any premises to arrest someone for an offence under section 25 or 25A, entry to the premises where someone was arrested away from a police station, and entry to premises occupied or controlled by someone arrested for a section 25 or 25A offence. Each is now quoted, with its conditions, under "How the power works". Two errata added. See /corrections.
2026-10-19
A page on section 60 searches (England and Wales): the power under which, once an authorisation is in force, a constable in uniform can search for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments without grounds for suspecting that you carry them.
Until now this site named section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and said it did not cover it; the "which power are they using?" tool showed a "not fully sourced yet" warning on that outcome. /stopped/section-60-searches now sets out, under "How the power works", who can give an authorisation and on which of three alternative grounds, how long it lasts and how it can be continued, what a constable in uniform can do under it, the limit in section 2(9)(a) of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 on requiring a person to remove clothing in public, and when a constable can seize what they find. Under "You must" it states the offence of failing to stop, the separate offence of resisting or wilfully obstructing a constable, and the section 60AA duty to remove an item worn to conceal identity, with its penalty; the powers in section 60AA become exercisable wherever a section 60 authorisation is in force. It also sets out the written statement a person searched (or a driver stopped) can apply for within twelve months. Twelve new authorities from legislation.gov.uk: ten quote a whole subsection rather than a selected limb, one quotes a single definition, and one quotes section 2(9)(a) of the 1984 Act. The tool now shows the same sourced duty map and the warning is gone. The page covers England and Wales only: section 60 also extends to Scotland, but parts of it do not and Scots law defines one of its terms differently, so a Scottish page has to be written separately and does not exist yet.
2026-10-21
A fifth Duty Map block, "You are entitled to", and the block called "How the power works" is now "What the law says".
The 2026-10-17 entry said that some items under "Refusing costs you" on other pages were still not about refusing and would move "in a later pass". This is that pass. Safeguards the law gives you, such as being told the grounds for a search, a copy of the search record and consulting a solicitor, sat under "You can refuse"; most of them now sit in a new full-width block, "You are entitled to". A few, on the voluntary interview, victim phone extraction, police entry, immigration enforcement (England and Wales, and Scotland) and Scotland animal welfare pages, cannot move unchanged and stay where they are until the second pass described below. The block below the columns is renamed "What the law says", because it now also holds what follows from a power: time limits, how long records are kept, disclosure, and what accepting a disposal means. Statements of the law that sat under "You can refuse" have moved there too. Items left "Refusing costs you" on sixteen pages, eight for England and Wales and eight for Scotland. England and Wales: how long police keep fingerprints and DNA, deleting your record, accepting a caution, pre-charge bail and release under investigation, filming the police, how long they can hold you, the 2023 protest offences, and TV Licensing. Scotland: fingerprints and DNA, recorded police warnings and fiscal fines, liberation and undertakings, sheriff officers, TV Licensing, arrest and custody (the 12-hour clock), your rights in custody, and police questioning. Ten of these form five England and Wales and Scotland pairs (fingerprints and DNA, cautions and warnings, bail and liberation, TV Licensing, and the custody clock). Of the 112 items moved unchanged, 82 went to "What the law says" and 26 to "You are entitled to"; on the filming-the-police page two items, which state offences, went to "You must". The "You can refuse" description, formerly "No penalty for saying no.", now reads "Saying no is lawful and is not an offence, but it is not always free of consequences: read each item in full." Saying no to a police question is lawful, but in England and Wales silence can still allow an inference to be drawn against you. The page on how long they can hold you said you need not answer questions and listed no cost of silence; it now states that inference under "Refusing costs you", in the words of section 34(2)(d) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. On the two driving pages the item saying you need not answer, though there can be consequences, moved there from "You can refuse". The home page now says every page answers "the same questions", not "three", because some pages have none of the three columns. The first item on the stop-and-account page was also reworded to start "You do not have to explain", and its third item was reworded and re-sourced (see the erratum). Each quoted source now links under its own site name; every link used to read "Read it at legislation.gov.uk", which was wrong for guidance and court sources. The heading above each Duty Map now names only the blocks that page shows. A second pass will reword further items that cannot move unchanged. Six errata added. See /corrections.