From my own and friends’ personal experience (I lived in the Thames Valley for much of my raving life) its usually a combination of both, with [1] being most common (its only very recently the cops have been able to have automatic numberplate scanning kit and not every cop car has it as its expensive)

And if its a nice car the cops often pull it just out of envy or curiosity

if you’re young and drive around late at night its always prudent to expect to be stopped by the cops and stash anything particularly incriminating….

Its not worth worrying about, I always work on the assumtion I’m gonna get pulled and ensure anything is very well “stored” if you do that that and the car is fully legal and not hangin to bits its unlikely things are gonna get nasty.
Havin attended lots of illegals over the years and drivin through plenty of road blocks etc I find the OB very lazy, if there aint something immediatly obvious that they can have you for, no tax, tyres, driver smokin spliff etc then they just move onto the next, its when they have something that they start pullin the seats about etc.

good cops an bad cops, after mushrooms became illegal
was on our way into the local woods with a massive bag of mushrooms , get funked build a camp fire an chill , we were just about to get off the road to enter the forest when a bobby car pulls us up an ask us what were doing at this time o night in the middle o no where , an check our crim records for bail etc etc [all clean] xcept dannys who’d been caught with a few gram an an ounce o ganj ages ago . he then said he was gonna search us and asked if we had any thing on us … he was gonna find it anyway cos it was a massive bag [mouth starts dribblin in recolection]
so i just said ” yea we got this bag o mushrooms” …the bobby took em off me looked at them … smiled at me, handed them back, said “have a very good night fellas” and went on his way… we then proceeded to our designated spot , trip our bollocks off , although i went on a bad one as i thought the predator was in the forest with us an he was gonna skin me up and use my skull as a trophy.

TBH a lot of cops are our sort of age now, and many personally feel that non-problematic recreational drug use should not be criminalised…

the level of recreational drug has risen to such an extent in the last 10 years that its no longer realistic to arrest every drug user, particularly when they will usually only give them a caution (lots of paperwork and time). Many cops also do seem to realise that putting a person through Court for a minor drugs offence fucks up their career prospects, and if people can’t get jobs they do crime instead..

OTOH they have to deal with some right scum because of drugs; thuggish dealers who prey on vulnerable people or muppets who can’t handle their intake and are violent towards their partners or family, and they pick up the pieces of the aftermath of overdoses and dealers murdering one another, so they are constantly exposed to the darkside of drug culture.

what happens to people in this situation is often at the whim of the individual officer; but more and more are only concentrating on those who cause problems to society because of their drug use.

if they stop some youths who aren’t involved in stuff like thieving, twoccing or fighting and only have a small amount of substances for personal use there is a good chance they will either be let off or at the worst receive a caution…