FIGURES have shown Cumbria Constabulary conducted almost 1,500 more stop and searches last year.

StopWatch UK said declining arrest rates across England and Wales suggest that relations between the police and the public are deteriorating.

Home Office data shows officers in Cumbria used stop and search powers 3,594 times in the year to March – up from 2,118 the year before.

The proportion of searches which led to an arrest rose from 16% to 17% over this period.

Across England and Wales, the number of stop and searches rose from 577,000 in 2019-20 to 704,000 in 2020-21.

This means almost 2,000 people were stopped per day on average last year, with figures peaking in mid-May 2020, when there were almost 3,000 searches each day.

StopWatch UK said the vast majority of searches cause more problems than they solve.

Habib Kadiri, research and policy manager at the police monitoring organisation, said a fall in arrest rates reflects fears that police-community relations are backsliding.

The figures also show that across England and Wales, black people were significantly more likely to be searched than white people, though slightly less so than the year before.

In Cumbria, they were 2.8 times more likely to be stopped, compared to 2.7 in 2019-20.