Stop-and-search

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A police action of this type.

    "Read literally, he simply ruled that a cop made a bad collar, a stop-and-search without "reasonable suspicion.""

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of or pertaining to laws or policing practices, found in some jurisdictions, which permit a law enforcement officer to temporarily detain and search a member of the public based on the officer's suspicions.

    "Adding to the department's problems is a long-running controversy over a stop-and-search policy that includes random searches of young black men."

Synonyms

All synonyms
stop and friskstop and friskstop-and-friskstop-and-frisk

Example

More examples

"Adding to the department's problems is a long-running controversy over a stop-and-search policy that includes random searches of young black men."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.