Stop and search by time of day

Across the day

Every stop and search recorded in England and Wales in the year to July 2026, by the hour it happened, in local time. Bars show each hour's share of the 467,563 searches counted.

Searching builds through the afternoon to a peak at 4pm, holds through the evening, and falls away after one in the morning to almost nothing by 6am. The quiet is the striking part: the busiest hour carries 11 times the searches of the quietest, and the four hours from 4am to 8am together account for 4.3% of the year's total.

Across the week

The same searches split by day. Each cell is one hour of one weekday, shaded against the busiest cell in the grid.

The weekday pattern is an afternoon one and the weekend pattern is a night one. The busiest single hour of the week is Friday at 11pm. Five of the ten busiest hours fall between 10pm and 4am, every one of them at a weekend.

Night is counted here as 10pm to 4am. The boundary is arbitrary, as any such boundary is, and it is stated so that the figures above can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Force by force

Forces differ in when they search, and the differences are large. Ordered by the share of searches falling between 10pm and 4am. Forces with fewer than 1,000 searches in the window are left out, as are the returns described in how this was worked out.

A force's position here says more about how it deploys than about the place it polices. A force covering a city centre with a late licensed trade will search at night because that is when its officers are out and where they are sent.

How this was worked out

The timestamps are UTC, and were converted

Every search in the published files is stamped with an offset of +00:00, in every month of every year, including the months the United Kingdom spends on British Summer Time. That leaves two possibilities: the times are true UTC, or they are local times labelled wrongly. The two differ by an hour for about seven months of the year.

They are true UTC. Comparing a fortnight either side of both 2025 clock changes, where behaviour barely moves but the clock does, the mean search hour shifts back 0.76 hours in spring and forward 1.04 hours in autumn. A shift that reverses direction across a boundary a fortnight wide is the clock and cannot be the season. Every figure on this page is therefore converted to local time first, so 10pm means ten at night where the search happened.

Some returns record a date and no time, and were dropped

A force that files without a time produces a record at local midnight. Those rows are not searches carried out at midnight, they are searches with the time missing, and left in they pile up high enough to make midnight look like the busiest hour of the day. It is not.

A force-month is left out where more than 10% of its searches land on exactly midnight, or where more than 10% land on any single second of the clock, which catches the same fault in other guises. Of 442 force-months in the window, 395 are counted and 47 are not.

The threshold was set by testing rather than taste. Moving it anywhere between 25% and 10% leaves the national curve unchanged; only below 5% does the shape start to move, and at that point it is the mix of forces changing rather than bad data being removed.

What the figures cover

Stop and search records published by police forces to data.police.uk, under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The site holds them from July 2014 onwards. The figures above cover the twelve months to July 2026, so that the shape reflects current practice rather than an average across a decade in which search volumes changed sharply.

Roughly a quarter of searches carry no coordinates, which is why this page reports forces rather than towns and districts: a force is known for every record, a district is not. Full method on how the figures work, sources on data sources.

Related: stop and search by ethnicity, which covers who is searched and what the searches find.