- Good evening everyone. The Brixton Riots, Policing the Black Community the Last 40 Years. Before I start this lecture, I want to say thanks, I want to say to Steven Watts, Steven is my legal researcher and also to David Neil both of whom helped me put this lecture together and I think I really need to acknowledge them. I want to start with a poem and it's a poem that some of you may have heard me give before, but I just think it's just so apt in relation to what we're discussing and it's by a ninth grader. I just let people take their seats. Good evening. Yeah, this is a poem by Ayodele Ayoola who's a ninth grader in a Baltimore School and she wrote this poem shortly after George Floyd's death."Ain't welcome here no more, I walk down the street and guess who I meet? The men in blue who are supposed to defend, but instead they chose to apprehend, they slap, punch, choke me red, they won't stop until I end up dead. Oh, stop, please, I can't breathe! I beg of you, just go and leave my cries all disappear out of sight, I'll end up dead if I try to fight. His knee is up against my throat, no one can stop him, they're all too remote, oh God, what country do I call this? A nation where the popo can just go bliss at my expense, I kid you not! I'll be beat, stepped on or even shot, this nonsense must stop, but of course it won't, all I can do is scream, please don't! As I bleed here lying dead on the floor, I know I ain't welcomed here no more." I started my March, 2001 lecture on restraining the police with Ayodele's poem, it's such a brilliant poem and I think it was fit in use again for the purposes of this lecture, so I make no apologies for that. So today, we're going to be looking at a closely related topic to the topic I looked at in the last lecture, which was judicial racism, we're going to be looking at related topic, police racism. We're more than 40 years on now from the 1981 Brixton riots, which saw a series of clashes between mainly black youths and the Metropolitan Police. We're going to look at, oh, what's changed in British society and British policing, has it changed? Has the riots changed policing for the good, what has stayed the same? And I dare say it, what has got worse? Are our police forces still racist? How does police racism still impact on the black community and what should we as a society be doing about it? So let me set the scene. Our story begins in early 1980, it was a time of heightened racial tension in the UK as we discussed in the first lecture in this series, in the 1960s and 70s saw a widespread vicious, racist backlash against black and brown immigration. Successive governments adopted various strategies to contain this upsurge in popular racism. On the one hand, we had the Race Relations Act 1968, which had constituted the first legislation against racial discrimination in British history. Interestingly, even this act did not apply to police. On the other hand, as we discussed in the first lecture, we saw series of statutes, which had been enacted to assuage popular racism by restricting black and brown immigration from the Commonwealth. During this time, one of the state's most hostile institutions to the black community was the police. In the last lecture, I described the scandal that shocked Leeds in the late 60s when David Oluwale, a homeless Nigerian man died after being systematically and repeatedly brutalized and beaten and humiliated by two white police officers. By the early 1980s, things had not much improved, there were very high tensions between the police and the black community, especially in London and other large cities, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol. At the time, the police had very wide discretionary powers and that discretion was used to its full potential, there were few constraints on how the police conducted their business a meaningful and effective safeguards were essentially nonexistence. In this regard, I want to talk about two aspects of the law at the time first, the sus law and secondly, the Judges' Rule. Sus, Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824, known as the Sus law made it an offense for a suspected person to loiter with intent to commit unarrestable offense. The law originated from a time of widespread unemployment and poverty in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and from a time when the ruling classes was tracking down on poor people. Despite the radical changes in social conditions over the subsequent century and a half, the sus law was still very much enforced by 1980. In a prosecution under the sus law, it was not necessary to prove a substantive criminal offense or even an attempt to commit a criminal offense, all that was necessary was to prove two things, first, that the accused person had done a suspicious act, which brought them into the category of a suspected person and second, that they had done another act, which constituted loitering with intent, which could be a supposedly another suspicious act of the same kind. The two acts did not need to be separated by any particular length of time as confirmed in the Court of Appeal case of Plyburn against Hudson in 1950. In practical terms, this effectively gave the police complete freedom to arrest whoever they wanted and those accused of offenses under the sus laws were not tried by jury, but by a magistrate who tended to have an institutional bias in favor of the police. Hugh Boatswain a Hackney activist and poet once told the Institute of Race Relations that "The problem with sus for us was that it was your word versus whoever arrested you" and it was enough simply to be black and "In the wrong place at the wrong time." Now, it wasn't just members of the black community who were concerned with the oppressive nature of the sus law as long ago as 1937, in the case of Ledwith versus Roberts Lord Justice Scott said,"It is now time that our relevant statute should be revised and that punishment and arrest should no longer depend on the words, which today have an uncertain sense and which nobody can truly apply to modern conditions. To retain such law seems to me inconsistent with our national sense of personal liberty and respect for the rule of law, clear and definite language is essential in penal laws." It was widely known at the time that the sus law was disproportionately used against black people. The figures bore this out, for example, evidence given by the Commission for Racial Equality to the Home Affairs Select Committee, established that black people made up 44% of those arrested by the Metropolitan Police District under the sus laws in 1977, 44% in 1978, 40% in 1979, hugely disproportionate to black people share of the overall overall population. In 1980, the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended the repeal of the sus law, its recommendation was debated in parliament on the 5th of June, 1980, where there was widespread support for its repeal from the Conservative and Labor MPs alike. The Home Secretary of the time Willie Whitelaw accepted the need for change in the law. And ultimately, the sus law was repealed by Section 8 of the Criminal Attempts Act 1981 with effect from the 27th of August, 1981. Now, although repealed as we shall come to discuss, the legacy of the sus law continues today, often dubbed Sus Law 2.0. I'll come onto that in a while. The Judge's Rules. Meanwhile, another major issue was the conduct of police interrogations, at the time, there was no clear legal framework governing the power of the police to question suspects, the only framework that existed was a document called the Judges' Rules. These rules were not rules of law, but guidance issued by the judiciary to police officers. The main purpose of the rules was to provide clarity on when confessions and other statements made to the police would or would not be admissible in court. The Judge's Rules were first issued in 1912, they've been revised in several occasions with the final edition being issued in 1964. The Judges' Rules are still used today in several Commonwealth countries. Breach of the Judges' Rules did not automatically make evidence inadmissible, it was already a rule of law that confessions and other statements could not be admitted unless they were voluntary. But even if a statement had been obtained in breach of the Judge's Rules, the trial judge still had a discretion to admit it. The court of appeal said in Crown against Prager 1972, that ultimately all turns on the judge's decision, whether breach or no breach, it has been shown have made voluntarily. In terms of evidence, other than confessions, the trial judge had a discretion to exclude evidence if its prejudicial effect outweighed its probative value as confirmed in the House of Lord's case of Crown against Son. But, trial judges did not have a discretion to exclude evidence purely on the ground on how it was obtained, so, the American fruit of a poisonous tree doctrine had no place in English legal system, even if evidence was illegally obtained that did not preclude its admission. Now, the Judge's Rules did not provide adequate protection to suspects, especially children and vulnerable suspects who could easily be pushed into making or giving false confessions. This was illustrated amongst other things by the Maxwell Confait case of 1972. In Confait, also known as Michelle, who was a mixed race sex worker who was found murdered. On the 24th of April, 1972, three boys confessed to the murder, Colin Lattimore, Ronald Layton and Ahmet Salih. Two of them were children, age 14 and 15 respectively and the third Colin Latimore was 18, but had significant learning difficulties and was said to have a mental age of eight. There were significant breaches of the Judge's Rules in the way that they were questioned, including failing to have a parent or guardian present during the questioning of two of the children and failure to inform them of their rights. They were not given the opportunity to consult with a solicitor and to cut a long story short, it turned out there had been a miscarriage of justice and the three boys were eventually acquitted by the Court of Appeal in 1975. As noted by historian Aaron Andrews, the Confait case became a landmark case in shaping police interrogation practices, standards for admissible evidence and the treatment of people we've learned in disabilities. Andrew's also underlined the notable parallels between the Confait case and the investigation of the New Cross massacre, which I will be shortly addressing. A subsequent 1977 public inquiry by Sir Henry Fisher, highlighted the inadequacies of the judge's rules, although controversially, Sir Henry also reincriminated two of the three boys. We can see therefore, that at the outset of the 1980s, there was a great deal of justified concern about the unfettered powers of the police and about the scope for miscarriages of justice, these issues were not exclusive to the black community, but they affected black people disproportionately. New Cross and the Brixton riots. Having set the scene, we can now turn to the events of 1981, a year, which marked the turning point in UK race relations. In the early hours of Sunday, the 18th of January, 1981, there was a fire at a house in New Cross, in Southeast London, which killed 13 black young people aged between 14 and 22. The causes of the fire have never been conclusively established. Some people believed at the time that it was a racist attack given by the National Front was active in the area and had claimed responsibility for burning down the Deptford Albany Empire Community Theater three years before. However, the police investigation quickly dismissed this theory. Now, a friend of mine Dr. David Michael MBA, the first black police officer to serve in Lewisham in 1970, New Cross's part of borough described the forces behaving like an occupying army. Unfortunately, this is the approach many felt they took to the investigation of the New Cross fire. The line of inquiry into a potentially racist fire bombing was quickly dropped in favor of a theory that a fight had broken out and there were unruly black youth who had caused their own deaths. A number of survivors were detained for questioning and activists exposed how children were encouraged to sign false statements. The story of Denise Goodin is recounted by Carol Pierre

New Perspectives.' At just 11 years of age, Goodin was subjected to hours of questioning into the early hours of the morning and pressurized to admit there was fighting at the party. Cecil Gutzmore, an academic, an activist who was active in the mobilization after the fire, explained to me that almost immediately victims became suspects. Many black people felt that the British establishment did not care about who had died in the fire as an article in the 'Guardian' by Kehinde Andrews recorded,"It was not only the police response that fed into community anger, such a tragedy should have provoked national mourning, but there was silence. A month later when 45 people were killed at Dublin disco, the Queen, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher immediately sent their condolences. It took Thatcher five weeks to reply to Sybil Phoenix who had written on behalf of the New Cross families and community condemning the failure of the government to reflect the outrage of the black community. Thatcher's disrespect was summed up in her request to Phoenix pass on her sympathies rather than to make any effort to contact the families herself. The lack of an official response to the New Cross demonstrate the value placed on black lives in Britain. The media were largely silent or supported the view that black youngsters had caused the fire themselves." Those campaigning for justice were victims, summed their feelings in a simple slogan,"13 dead, nothing said." Now the real causes of the fire is still not known with certainty, the original coroners inquest in 1981 recorded an open verdict. The second inquest in 2004, which I represented 12 of the families, likewise recorded another open verdict, although the coroner thought that the fire was probably started deliberately by one of the guests. A massive popular demonstration, the National Black People's Day of Action took place on the 2nd of March, 1981 more than 20,000 people, the vast majority of them black marched through London. The right wing press reacted with horror as Kehinde Andrews records,"The press, the following day focused on pictures from Blackfriars Bridge with headlines such as when the black tide met the thin blue line, Daily Mail.""The day that blacks ran riot in London, The Sun and the rampage of the mob, Daily Express." At the beginning of April, the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Swamp 81, a name, which refer to the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's remark that the country might be rather swamped by people from a different culture. Using the sus law, the police stopped and searched 943 people in Brixton in just five days. Brian Paddick then as Police Sergeant and later Senior Police Officer and Liberal Democrat Politician and Peer said,"We were an occupying army, this brought matters to a head." On Friday the 10th of April a riot started in Brixton with violent clashes between the community members and the police. The largest clashes took place on Saturday the 11th of April, 1981 with 279 police officers and 65 members of the public injured. In the aftermath, the government commissioned an inquiry headed by Lord Scarman the report published in November 1981, highlighted the role of racial disadvantage and in a city decline. It also was mildly critical of the Metropolitan Police, but unfortunately, found that the police was not institutionally racist, PACE or the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The aftermath of the Brixton riots and the Scarman report did see some changes to policing, the most important of those changes was PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. This replaced the old hodgepodge of statutory and common law powers and the Judge's Rules with a coherent statutory code for the conduct of police investigation. Police powers were clearly defined and limited by law for the first time, the powers of the courts to exclude evidence was also clearly defined by Section 76 and 78 of PACE. And alongside PACE itself came the Police and Evidence Codes of Practice, which set out how investigations should be conducted. There were codes governing the powers to stop and seize, detention, treatment and question of people in police custody, identification procedures, the recording of interviews and the powers of arrest, PACE had a huge impact on policing. As the 2020 article by David Cowan and the Law Society Gazette states,"Experienced criminal lawyers and those who helped shape policy in this area are clear, the impact of PACE was dramatic and immediate, it protected rights at the same time as radically changing the culture of policing." Before PACE, officers tried all sorts of tricks of the trade, such as losing your client, recalls Veteran Criminal Law Solicitor Anthony Edwards. The first achievement of PACE was how to help to find them. However, the PACE did not go as far as the American doctrine of the fruit of the poisonous tree, it remains the case that evidence which is obtained in breach of PACE or the PACE codes or otherwise illegally obtained is not automatically excluded from a criminal trial in England and Wales. Section 76 of PACE provides for the exclusion of confessions where the confession was obtained oppression or in the consequence of anything said or done which was lightly in the circumstances existing at the time to render unreliable any confession which may be made by the individual in consequence thereof. In relation to evidence other than confessions, the court has a general discretion under Section 78 of PACE to exclude prosecution evidence if have in regard to all the circumstances, including the circumstances in which the evidence was obtained. The admission of the evidence would have an adverse effect on the fairness of the proceedings that the court ought not to admit it. But the focus here is on the perceived fairness of the trial, the fact that the evidence was illegally obtained does not automatically lead to its exclusion, although it is of course a relevant factor. Another key thing that PACE did was to provide that police officers could only stop and search members of the public if they had reasonable grounds for suspicion that they would find stolen or prohibited articles, they could not carry out random stop and searches. However, an important exception to this rule was subsequently introduced, which we shall return to later. So, has PACE and the code really helped check police power particularly in regard to discriminatory policing? Well, the code says that stop and search powers must be used fairly, responsibly with respect for people being searched and without unlawful discrimination. They also hold that personal factors such as a person's physical appearance can never support a reasonable suspicion and that generalizations and stereotypes that certain groups are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior cannot have any sway over police officer's decision to stop and search. Not withstanding this, we know full well that stop and search often is carried out in a discriminatory way with little or no hope of proper accountability. You see, if a police officer fails to comply with the code, PACE states that the failure in its in of itself does not give rise to criminal or civil proceedings. Although a judge can take the officer's breach into account, if it arises in relation to other proceedings. PACE was not the only reform in the 80s, the Scarman Report also led to the establishment of the Police Complaints Authority later replaced by the Independent Police Complaints Commission and now in its latest guise, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which too has been criticized for its lack of independence and its inability or unwillingness to meaningfully hold the police to account for overpolicing and racial discrimination. Let me come to Steven Lawrence and I should say, we do have Steven's brother here tonight, welcome. As most people know, racism in the police didn't go away after the 1980s, this was highlighted most profoundly by the investigation of the racist murder of Steven Lawrence, a young black boy who on the 22nd of April, 1993 in one of the most defining moments of British racial history. A 1998 public inquiry chaired by Sir William McPherson concluded, that the Metropolitan Police's investigation had been incompetent and that the force was institutionally racist contradicting Lord Scarman's finding that it was not. Now, the case highlights an important point, the impact of police racism on the black community just doesn't consist of what the police do to us, it doesn't just consist of unjustified stop and searches, unjustified arrests, police brutality or miscarriages of justice. No, no, no, no, no, it also of what they don't do when crimes against black victims are not taken seriously, when investigations are botched and when perpetrators are let off scot-free and I've addressed some of these points in some of my previous talks. Let me look at the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Meanwhile, Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, introduced the power for police officers of or above the rank superintendent who reasonably believe that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in their area, may give an authorization to police officers to stop and search any person or vehicle for offensive weapons or dangerous instruments, the authorization could be given for a period not exceed in 24 hours. This section has been significantly amended over the years, so that now that the authorization can be given by an inspector and can be extended for further 24 hours. This provision originally introduced by Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard, to tackle ravers and football hooligans has been used disproportionately against who? Black people. In the 2003, 'The Guardian' newspaper reported that black people were 27 times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched under Section 60. In the previous lecture, I refer to the case of Roberts against the Commission of the Metropolitan Police 2015, in which the Supreme Court held that Section 60 was compatible with the Human Rights Act. Baroness Hale asserted that there were great benefits to the public in the power of suspicionless stop and searches and rather condescendingly and potentially harmfully said,"The purpose of Section 60 is to reduce the risk of serious violence where knives and other offensive weapons are used, especially that associated with gangs and large crowds. It must be born in mind that many of these gangs are largely composed of young people from black and minority ethnic groups. While there is concern that members of these groups should not be disproportionately targeted, it is members of these groups who will benefit most from reduction in violence, serious injury and death that may re result from the use of such powers. Put bluntly, it is mostly young black lives that will be saved if there is less gang violence in London and some other cities." Despite Baroness Hale claims, Section 60 is not in fact, a very effective power. In the 2014, the Best Use of Stop and Search Scheme, BUUS was introduced as a voluntary scheme, which police forces could opt into to tighten the requirements around the use of Section 60 and tackle racial disparity. However, in March, 2019, the government launched a pilot scheme for five police forces that reversed the changes in the scheme, making it easier for police forces to use Section 60 powers ostensibly, in order to combat knife crime, this was rolled out nationally in September, 2019. Now a study conducted by Agnew-Pauley for the Criminal Justice Alliance found that during the pilot scheme, only 4.5% of searches led to arrests. Let that sink in only 4.5% of these suspicionless stop and searches led to arrests. And even fewer searches led to the recovery of a weapon, only 1.1% of searches in London led to recovery of a weapon. And in two of the participating police forces, no weapons were recovered at all. Meanwhile, during the pilot scheme in London, black people were 10 times more likely to be searched than white people during the Section 60 authorizations. The data collected in the same study from after the national rollout in September, 2019 told a similarly disappointing, but expected story. Liberty and StopWatch, the organizations also warned in a letter to the Home Secretary threatening legal action late last year, that black people already up to 18 times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched under Section 60 and further stress that only around 1% of stops resulted in weapons being found. The threat of legal action was in response to Priti Patel's decision to scrap discrimination safeguards although the government eventually halted its plan. In short, there is little evidence that Section 60 keeps the public safe from illegal weapons, but a lot of evidence that it leads to innocent black people being stopped and searched at staggering rates with clear disparities and as the Home Office own Equality Impact Assessment acknowledges,"It is possible that this disparity is at least in part, a result of discrimination/stereotyping on the part of officers and forces." The Human Rights Act 1998. Another statute that's had an important impact on policing is the Human Rights Act 1998. In previous lectures, I've talked about how the incorporation of Article II of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to life into our domestic law has had a huge impact on the ability of bereaved families to hold the state accountable. Although police shootings are rare thankfully in the UK compared to the US, deaths in police custody are common, many of these have of the use of dangerous restraint techniques, which cause positional asphyxia often applied to vulnerable people who are in a mental health crisis. The victims of these police killings have disproportionately been ethnic minorities, particularly black men often exacerbated where the victim is in mid mental health crisis. Over the years, I've represented many bereaved families in inquest or public inquiries where their loved ones have been killed by the police. And thanks to Article II and the improvements in the inquest and inquiry process, it has brought a about... It is now easier than previously to hold the state and the police to account. For now, I limit myself to saying that the Human Rights Act has been a very powerful tool for protecting civil liberties, limiting police powers and holding police to account for their abuses. I, for one, I'm not surprised, that our current Conservative government is once again, proposing to limit its protection to the beat of a populous drum with increasing discussions of completely getting rid of it and replacing it with a modern bill of rights. The 2000s and the 2010s. Time does not permit me to cover all the developments in policing during the 2000s, 2010s, including the draconian anti-terrorism legislation enacted in the new labor years or the police shooting of Mark Duggan, and the result in 2011 riots and the hard line response to them by the criminal justice institutions. Many of these topics could be a whole lecture of and in themselves, but without further ado, we need to move on to the present day, so I shall do so. So where are we today? How much of a race problem do our police today have? Well, the Home Affairs Select Committee said in its 2021 report, 22 years on from the McPherson report call urgent action to tackle persistent and deep rooted unjustified racial disparities within policing. It stated quote,"The central aim of the 70 recommendations published by the McPherson report was to eliminate racist prejudice and disadvantage and demonstrate fairness in aspects of policing. More than two decades later, the same still has not been met. And we only have to cast our minds back to the summer of 2020 in the brutal killing of George Floyd. Although this took place in the US, one would be gravely mistaken to suggest that the gut-wrenching video many of us watched of George's death, has no relevance here in the UK. As the Institute of Race Relation said, the death of George Floyd,"Recalled and coalesced with the police brutality that has taken place across UK, both historically and contemporary with some particularly high profile cases of black experiences of policing gaining an attention in 2020. In the light of this and refusing suggestions that racism and police violence are only US problems, the UK is not innocent emerges a popular slogan during and beyond the protests." Many had hoped to in the aftermath of George's death, that a new dawn was on the horizon, but such hopes were swiftly tempered after witnessing the drastic policing approach in the first six months to the pandemic, which sought an exacerbation and proliferation of discriminatory policing, especially against black people. Now, I have addressed in previous lectures for Goldsmith College, University of London, the intensification of racialized policing during the pandemic and many others too have addressed this, so I do not intend tend to focus much on this now, but let's take one example, Fixed Penalty Notices, FPNs, issued for breach of COVID regulations. One might think slightly popular topic given the current government and our Prime Minister's problems that he's suffering currently. The Joint Committee on Human Rights published a report in April, 2021 on the government's use of FPNS noting figures by the National Police Chief Council. It found that despite Asian people making up 7.5% of the population, they represented 13% of those issued with fines, 13%. And although black people constitute 3.3% of the population, they represented 8% of those fined. In fact, the first conviction under the Coronavirus Act 2020 was against a black woman, which was quickly exposed as unlawful that's the Marie Dinou case. The Institute of Race Relations quite neatly captured the racialized policing climate during the pandemic echoing the positions of many other policing and human rights charities and NGOs such as Liberty and StopWatch quote,"The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a period of extraordinary police powers, which arrived in a broader context of racist over policing and police violence. British society was already on a trajectory towards an increase in punitive social order with policing at its heart, the pandemic became a vehicle through which this trajectory was articulated and accelerated. For a punitive state, policing the pandemic was but logical solution to a serious problem but this is not to say that it was an appropriate solution." Also Liberty quite rightly stress that,"Coronavirus did not create new problems as much as exposed preexisting inequalities, the discrimination exhibited in the use of police powers on the lockdown follows the patterns, be not just ignored, but reinforced with everyday UK policing." Stop and search. Picking up on the words I read before from the Home Affairs Select Committee that 20 years after the McPherson report, racial prejudices in policing still have not been eliminated. Let's look briefly at the current state of stop and search. An area of policing that often receives pointed criticism and I say, rightly so. As noted earlier, ethnic minorities, particularly black people have historically and consistently experienced most harshly and disproportionately the use of stop and search. During the pandemic stop and search practices surged generally with rates more than doubling in May, 2020 compared to the previous year. Liberty found that in London levels rose to their highest in over seven years. The Home Office's most recent data for the year ending March, 2021 revealed that black people were seven times more likely to be stopped than white people compared with 8.8 times more likely in the previous year. These figures are the first time that age and gender of those stopped were recorded alongside ethnicity, which revealed that young minority ethnic males experienced the highest rates of stops with the overall number of searches being the highest for the seven years. For instance, the Home Office admitted that males between the age of 15 and 34 from a BAME background account for 32% of the stop and searches in the year ending March, 2021. despite only comprising of 2.6% of the population, let me repeat that, 32% of the stop and searches, but they only comprise of 2.6% of the population. Further, it was noted that 77% of all stop and searches, there was no further action taken. Although there was an overall fall in the disproportionality compared to the previous years, Sergeant Andy George, President of the National Black Police Association stressed,"The statistics that one in five young people from an ethnic minority backgrounds were being stopped is a shocking fact and policing must look at why four out of five searches result in no further action and how the style and tone of some stops may be pushing an entire community away. Also expectedly, the biggest reasons officers gave for stopping someone was for drugs accounting for 69% of all stops with the overall number of drug stops rising by 36% in the year. Disappointingly however, there was no further comment on how many searches for drugs resulted in a positive finding. The 2019/20 statistic shows that 566,440 stop and searches 343,000 were for drugs. Black people made up 16% of those stopped and search for drugs and 16% of those arrested for drug offenses again, as compared to the 3% of the general population. Data by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services found that in 2016/17, although black people were stopped and searched for drugs almost nine times at the rate as white people, the fine rate, the fine rate for drugs was lower in black people than white people suggesting that the such searches are carried out on the basis of weaker grounds for black people. This disproportionate policing filters through into the justice system. As Lammy Review found, the odds of receiving a prison sentence for a drug offense was 240% higher for black offenders than white offenders. Some people might claim that the reason for the disparity is that black people are simply more likely to use drugs than white people, but the data suggests different. Government survey data last updated in November, 2021 show that 11.7% of black adults used illicit drugs in the last month compared to 8.9% of white adults and 3.4% of Asian adults. So, the disparity in the actual drug use is far smaller than the disparity in drug enforcement. Racism plays a very real and visible role. Unfortunately, our government is unwilling to consider the obvious solution for being the legalization or decriminalization of some drugs. Legalization of cannabis has worked well in many US states, in Canada and elsewhere around the world, including some European countries, but our politicians are stuck in an reactionary dated war on drugs mentality. Even the Labor opposition is unwilling to consider drug legalization or decriminalization as an option for the table. I accept, of course, that ending our hard line stance on drugs wouldn't end police racism, but it would significantly reduce the disproportionate criminalization of black people and reduce the opportunity to use suspected drug possession as a reason to racially profile. As I'm sure you all will appreciate, the issues before us regarding police span much either than just stop and search, the list of concerns is truly endless, from the use of facial recognition, overpolicing of protests, excessive use of force, deaths in custody, the gang's matrix, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill the proposed serious violence reduction orders, the criminalization of drill music, the failures to investigate racially motivated attacks,(exhales) but a discussion of all of these issues will take us well into the early hours of the morning. I've referenced these in the footnotes to this talk and several interesting reads throughout this speech, I recommend for you to read. Finally, let's have a discussion about police racism in 2022, it wouldn't be complete without mentioning the toxic political environment in which we now live. Following the George Floyd protest in 2020 and the growing movement against anti-black racism and police violence, there has been a significant reactionary backlash from the so-called and anti-woke movement. And sadly, our government has given suckle to this disturbing trend. I mentioned, for example, the worrying restrictions on the right to protest in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and the racist anti-refugee provisions of Nationality and Borders Bill. I also mentioned the government's in temperament rhetoric direct towards anti-racist activists, for instance, to take an example, in the aftermath of the removal of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick described activists as a BAME mob and announced changes to plan in permission to allowing the government to veto the removal of statues. The Department of Education also announced in February, 2021, that it would appoint a so-called free speech champion to combat unacceptable, silencing and censoring on campuses. Apparently the government thinks that giving itself more powers to restrict protests isn't a threat to free speech, but anti-racist activism on campus is. What should we do about it? Solutions. So that brings me to the final part of this lecture, what should we do about police racism? If you and I or if you and I were in government tomorrow, what would, could, should we do to tackle the ongoing and deeply pervasive problem? I'm going to look at three options which have been floated, reform, defunding and abolition and the key arguments for and against each. I'm not going to come to a concluded view in this lecture, I'm simply going to present some of the options. Reform, one possible perspective is that we simply need to reform the police, that we need more accountability, more oversight, stronger procedural protections, better funded legally aid for defendants and a more diverse police force. Proponents of this view might point to some of the procedural reforms we've addressed in this lecture, PACE, Criminal Procedure, Human Rights Act and point that all these reforms have made things better and fairer and reduce the occurrence of miscarriages of justice. They might say that while the police still have a race problem, it's not as bad as it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, they might point out that it's much harder today for the police to get away with fabricating evidence, lying in court and other corrupt practices. Critics of dispute by contrast might argue that none of these reforms have tackled the elephant in the room, they might point out that as we've seen the racial disparities in the criminal justice system remain stubbornly high and the overall prison population has dramatically increased since the 1980s, they might point out that having abolished the sus law, parliament brought back broad stop and search powers in the form of Section 60. They might also say that for every step forward, we've taken a step perhaps two back. Going deeper, these critics might argue with fair historical justification that British police forces were established by and for the ruling classes as an instrument of oppression, they might point out that our British system of policing from its inception in the early 19th century has always been designed to protect the power, property and privileges of the rich not to deliver for ordinary people, most certainly not for black people. They might argue that this system cannot be reformed, so it protects and serves people rather than the elite. Defund. A second perspective is one which has been widely advocated in the United States, defunding the police, that is to say channeling money and resources away from police budgets and into things that tackle root causes of crime, such as housing, healthcare, jobs, education, and community and youth services. Anyone with experience in the criminal justice system can tell you that a great deal of crime is caused by cycle of poverty, homelessness and addiction, which criminalization does nothing to solve and which could be solved more effectively through giving people social housing, substance abuse treatment and a decent income and livelihood. Another related idea is that of establishing non-police first responders to deal with issues such as mental health crisis and drug overdoses, therefore removing the risk of police violence and criminalization from those situations. Some institutions of this kind are being trialed in US cities, such as Albuquerque, the Community Safety Department in the city of Albuquerque for example. Some advocates of this idea point to an unintended experiment in York City in the late 2014 and early 2015, when the New York City Police Department officers took part in a work slowdown, carrying out most of their essential duties and refraining from responding to low level offenses. A study by Christopher Sullivan and Zacharia Keith found that this reduction in policing did not increase crime. And in fact, complaints of major crime fell by approximately three to 6%. The idea of defunding the police perhaps is a different resonance in the UK where police budgets were cut significantly after the 2010 Cameron coalition government austerity policies and there are now fewer police officers on the streets than previously. Self-evidently this hasn't ameliorated the problems with British policing, but that doesn't undermine the argument because advocates of defunding the police don't just want to cut out police funding in general, they also want to see an increase in funding for services that provide positive and constructive alternatives to criminalization ranging for social housing to youth projects, to substance abuse projects. Those services of course, were brutally cut during the Cameron years as part of the austerity program. Abolition. A third perspective is the nuclear option, abolition. Some scholars and activists such as Alex Vitale and Angela Davis and Mariame Kaba argue that the police as an institution simply can't be reformed. For example, Alex Vitale in his book,'The End of Policing' states,"The origins and functions of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequality of race and class. The suppression of workers in the tight surveillance and micromanagement of black and brown lies has always been at the center of policing. Any police reform strategy that does not address this reality is doomed to fail. We must stop looking at procedural reforms and critically evaluate the substantive outcomes of policing and we must constantly reevaluate what the police are being asked to do and what impact policing has on the lives of those being policed. A kinder, gentler, a more divisive war on the poor is still a war on the poor." Again, this idea comes from a US perspective, but some people would apply the same arguments to the UK, they might even argue that our system of policing was established in the early 19th century but our aristocratic government with the aim to protecting the property and privileges of the rich and suppressing descent. Throughout its history, it's primarily served the purposes of the ruling classes, abolitionists might argue that a system that came about in this way cannot be reformed so as to serve and protect working class people. Critics of this idea might argue, however, that if we simply abolish the police now on this current social conditions, the police would be just replaced by private security forces or self-appointed vigilantes who would be worse and less accountable. For instance, the infamous racist killing of Trayvon Martin, wasn't committed by a police officer, but a self-appointed neighborhood watch member. If we took away the state's monopoly on force, the power vacuum could well be filled by non-state actors who would be even worse as it's sometimes seen in societies where state authority has collapsed. And critics might also argue that a post-police society would still need to protect itself from violence and it might well end up recreating the police on the some other name. As I highlighted earlier, the deficiencies of our current police forces, don't just consist of what they do, but also of what they don't do. There would be very difficult conversations to be had about how we might protect people from violence and abuse and to hold perpetrators to account in the world with no criminal legal system at all. These are all genuinely difficult questions to which there are no easy answers. We don't need to resolve this debate in this lecture and I certainly don't propose to do so. In the foreseeable future, no British government whether label Conservative is plausibly going to abolish the police, indeed we're seeing the opposite. A right wing backlash against a supposedly woke ideas, which has been actively leveraged by politicians to justify expanding the power of the police and suppressing dissent. In this context, both abolitionists and reformers can agree that we need to combat this reactionary movement and keep working to hold the state to account. So what can feasibly be achieved and what is likely to have real impact? Well, firstly, we must address the lack of confidence that black and other ethnic minority communities have in policing. As the home affairs committee said,"There is no get in away from the significant confidence and the fairness gap for black communities. The fact that this persists 22 years after the McPherson report is deeply troubling, it undermines the principle that all victims of crime should feel confident and turn into the police for help and puts in jeopardy the principle of policing by consent, that lies at the heart British policing. It should be a cause for serious concern and urgent action amongst police forces and policing leaders. The police have to recognize this and that is predominantly that sorry... And that it is a predominantly a white institution, white members of the police forces need to understand that questioning the way things currently is, is not necessarily about them being individually attacked, shamed, accused or judged, these are normal reactions to be expected, but it is a more a recognition that the system in the way police is black people is unfair and the police as a profession and improve. Accordingly, questions of being good or bad are largely irrelevant, it's a recognition that advantage may well be tied to race and that it's systemic and it may well be unconscious. Police officers need to forget the guilt and take action, history matters, bias is implicit and often unconscious, more importantly, it takes great courage to change the system. To fully appreciate these realities and the realities and lives that black people live and face real meaningful community engagement is a must not for the sake of a tickbox, but because the police is an institution and as individual officers really want to understand the communities they police. This is essential for two reason. First, many white officers, especially in more rural areas, the only time they really come into contact with racialized minorities is maybe through their jobs. With this comes the inevitable misperception that all black people are criminals. Also until the police are willing to actually engage with communities, there will be an ever persistent lack of trust and confidence and thus legitimacy in policing as the National Police Chief's Council Chair, Martin Hewitt said in his first interview, following the Black Lives Matter protest in 2020,"It is only that trust and confidence and legitimacy that people come forward, people report crimes, people become witnesses, people work with us and that trust and confidence leads to young black men and women saying, I'm prepared to go and become a police officer." I want to finish with these words,"I'm for truth no matter who tells it, I'm for justice no matter who is for or against it." Malcolm X, thank you.(audience clapping)