Professor Alex Stevens:

I will try to be brief but I want to start again by focusing on some research we are currently doing in England with police forces which are providing diversion. We have interviewed more than 60 police officers about their use of diversion. The research reflects the international evidence that there is a mixed bag of opinions, attitudes and behaviours among police officers. Some police officers see a reduction in the criminalisation of people who use drugs as a very good thing because they see the problems those people face and they do not see the point of adding punishment to the problems the people face. Some of them also see it as a very good way of reducing the waste of their time. They just do not see it as productive. They come across people using drugs quite often in their work. They do not see any particular successes from repeated criminalisation of people who use drugs, so there is a large body of opinion within the police that would rather not have to be dealing with low-level drug possession.

There are also police officers who see a reduction in their powers to search and arrest people as something that is limiting their effectiveness. There is not much evidence of that and, as I said, we used the evidence from Portugal to show that. However, the fact that it is the police who have to implement these policies means that it is important to include them in the conversation about what these policies should look like and how best to manage these interactions between police and people on the streets. My advocacy would be to include the police in the conversation and, if you want to have a successful diversion or decriminalisation policy, you are going to have to train the police quite carefully in what is expected of them, what the limits of their powers are, and what the communities they work with want, which includes mechanisms for community accountability so that police hear from the community about what is actually happening and how they are dealing with these issues.