Background: Drug legislation is a major driver of racial disproportionalities in policing. While much discourse surrounding policing focusing on using stop and search to tackle serious violence, the majority of these stops result in no outcomes. In practice, stop and search is frequently used for the policing of drug offences and remains disproportionately used against Black Britons.
Methods: Semi-structured qualitative interviews from 58 Black young people, parents and community workers, unstructured qualitative interviews, focus group with school aged 13–14-year-olds. Interviews focused on perceptions and experiences of policing, both direct and vicarious.
Results: Experiences of racialised drug policing has resulted in intergenerational cultural narratives, creating frameworks for understanding drug policing experiences that are often more powerful than actual experiences. Cultural narrative frameworks through direct discussion and the indirect transmission of information through cultural understandings are explored. Taking an intersectional approach to policing, the ways in which race, gender, age, class, and immigration histories enable analysis how structural and cultural positionality mediate experiences of drug policing.
Implications: While there is no homogenous Black experience of policing but that ongoing experiences of racialised drug policing have produced negative perspectives of the police throughout communities. Cultural narratives, drawn from decades of racialised drug policing, have deeply embedded negative perceptions of the police throughout Black communities. This has significant implications for the future relationship between the police and Black Britons. The eradication of racialised drug policing is central to improving this contentious dynamic and improving trust and confidence in the police.
Dr Bisi Akintoye explores the intergenerational lived experience of racialised policing for Black communities in Britain. Bisi is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Roehampton. Bisi’s research takes a qualitative and ethnographic approach to criminology, exploring how racism, gender, and immigration interact with the disproportionate policing of Black communities. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Kent in the School of Social Policy. Previous research also includes gendered cultures in occupational policing for the University of Kent and she recently contributed to an evaluation of multi-agency public protection arrangements in the UK with Anglia Ruskin University. Her experience also includes criminal justice and drug policy evaluations at RAND Europe.