 Okay, 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. We look suspicious No offense to you, but you're a black male, okay? I'm not gonna lie to you You're gonna be detained for a drug search, right? You're here with your friends, a couple of cars I think you're trying to hide something. Look at this. Look at this. I might throw my house What did you do? I'm getting scared. I don't know what's gonna happen to me if I come out of the vehicle Drug searches rather than ones looking for guns or knives make up around 60% of all 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 found El Chapo Hanging out around Stratford Westfield Black people in England and Wales are nine times more likely to be stopped in search for drugs than white people Asian people are three times more likely to be stopped in search for drugs than white people Which doesn't necessarily mean that the police are racist. It just means 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 in anonymously self-reporting having used illicit drugs in the last 12 months White people self-report using class A drugs at around four times the rate of black people and over six 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 drug 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 stopping 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 five times the rate of white people Black and Asian people are also 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 offenses than white people Evidence suggests that white people use illicit drugs more than people of color But they're not stereotyped for it And they're not criminalized 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 neighborhoods and more in Wait gary, where do white people hang out? Like queries 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 decriminalization for those who are deemed to be of the right race or the right class Being criminalized for drugs possession can reduce someone's lifetime earnings by nearly 20% Unless that is your current or former member of the government's cabinet Then I imagine you're doing pretty all right for yourself. Well, yes Yeah, exactly I tried cannabis somebody passed around this pipe around the room and I smoked it It was against the law when you did it in Iran, wasn't it? Yes How many times did you take cocaine? I took it several occasions. Should you have gone to prison? Um, well, I was 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 legalized because for those who have more social and economic privilege They may as well already be