What is a search?
A search is an examination of a person, their belongings or a vehicle at a site. Security officers have no power to search: it is carried out with consent, on conditions the site has set.
The absence of any power is the essential point. A search happens because someone agrees to it, usually as a condition of entry or of employment, and refusal is answered by refusing entry rather than by searching anyway.
How a search is conducted matters legally and practically — who conducts it, whether a witness is present, and how a person of a different sex is handled are all matters for the site's procedure rather than the officer's judgement.
Records of searches, including refusals, protect officers as much as sites, because an allegation about a search is answered by a contemporaneous record and by very little else.
In practice
A distribution centre with a bag search condition in the staff contracts.
An employee declines. The officer insists, the employee walks out, and by the afternoon it is a grievance about how the search was conducted rather than about the bag.
A search is carried out with consent, under a condition the client has the right to impose, and refusing it has consequences that belong to the employer rather than to the officer. The officer's job is to ask properly and to record a refusal, not to obtain compliance.
The instruction that prevents this is the one that says what happens when somebody says no, and it has to be written before it is needed.
What goes wrong in practice
- Officers behaving as though they have a power they do not have.
- No written procedure, leaving each officer to decide how to conduct one.
- Searches and refusals not recorded, so allegations cannot be answered.