Ok big idea, hear me out. Maybe policing in this country
isn’t actually institutionally racist. Maybe people of colour are just… worse.
What have we done that’s wrong? -You look suspicious.
-We look suspicious?
No offence to you but you’re a black male, okay?
I’m not going to lie to you.
You’re going to be detained for a drug search, alright?
You’re here with your friends, a couple of cars.
You’re scaring the life out of me. -I think you’re trying to hide something.
Look at this, look at this. I’m outside my house.
What did I do? Bruv, I’m at home bro!
I’m getting scared.
I don’t know what’s going to happen to me if I come out of the vehicle.
Get out of the car!
Drug searches, rather than ones looking for guns or knives,
make up around 60% of all of stop and searches.
And most of these are for simple possession, looking for and finding
only small quantities of drugs, rather than cops who genuinely think
they’ve found El Chapo hanging out around Stratford Westfield.
Black people in England and Wales are 9 times more likely
to be stopped and searched for drugs than white people.
And Asian people are 3 times more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs
than white people.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the police are racist,
it just means that people of colour are more into drugs, right?
Right?
Well… not really.
According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales,
White British people outperform almost every other ethnic group
White people self-report using Class A drugs at around 4 times the rate of black people,
and over 6 times the rate of Asian people. And yet, black and Asian people
are consistently stopped and searched at disproportionate levels.
And That’s despite the ‘find’ rate of drugs searches
being lower for black people than they are for white people -
which suggests that the grounds for searching black people
tend to be much weaker.
Turns out, racial profiling is actually a really rubbish way to fight crime.
It’s not just about stop and searches. Racial inequalities play out
at every level of the criminal justice system when it comes to drugs.
Black people are charged for cannabis possession at 5 times the rate of white people.
Black and Asian people are more likely to be charged instead of cautioned
when caught in possession of cocaine, while the opposite is true for white people.
And Black and Asian people are 1.5 times more likely
to receive custodial sentences for drug offences than white people.
Evidence suggests that white people use illicit drugs more than people of colour.
But they’re not stereotyped for it. And they’re not criminalised as a community
on the basis of their race either.
So, there are two ways of addressing this. One is to try and tinker with the system -
introduce reforms to police tactics and CPS guidelines,
so you have race-blind sentencing recommendations,
or fewer stop and searches in diverse neighbourhoods and more in -
wait, Gary, where do white people hang out?
like... aquariums?
But that doesn’t change the fundamental injustice of drugs prohibition:
which is that it punishes poor people for being poor,
addicts for being addicts, and communities for lacking
the economic resilience needed to mitigate against the corrosive impact of gang exploitation.
We already have an informal policy of drugs decriminalisation for those
who are deemed to be of the right race and the right class.
Being criminalised for drugs possession can reduce someone’s
lifetime earnings by nearly 20% - unless, that is, you’re a current
or former member of the government’s Cabinet.
Then I imagine you’re doing alright for yourself.
Well yes, I mean, I tired- -And you were lucky enough not to get caught?
-Yeah exactly, I tried cannabis. Somebody passed round this pipe
around the room and I smoked it. -And it was against the law
when you did it in Iran wasn’t it? -Yes. yes.
How many times did you take cocaine? -I took it on several occasions.
-Should you have gone to prison? -Well I was fortunate in that I didn’t.
Problematic drug use needs to be treated as a health issue and not a criminal one.
Communities which have been abandoned to addiction and despair need to be invested in.
And drugs need to be legalised -
because for those who have more social and economic privilege,
they may as well already be.