Ms Niamh Eastwood:

It is interesting. In the UK, where our research is from, it was found at the time we last published that black people were nine times more likely to be stopped and searched for drugs, despite using drugs at roughly the same rate as white people. We work with young people in the centre of London. Working out how to get from home to school not knowing if they are going to be stopped and searched is a trauma for folks. It is debilitating. I cannot express enough how damaging stop and search can be to individuals. Some work has been done to try to adapt police behaviour to take the energy out of drug stop and searches. A big driver in the UK is the smell of cannabis. I do not know what the stop and search laws are in Ireland or whether there needs to be reasonable suspicion, but if that is the case, I suspect the smell of cannabis is probably an experience that is pretty common. One piece of work we did with the College of Policing was to bring in professional guidance standards for police officers that would state explicitly that the smell of cannabis should not be the sole ground for stop and search. That came into effect and many police forces were not welcoming of that guidance. We saw a move towards using a second ground. Officers would say they could smell cannabis but that someone also had red eyes, ignoring possible hay fever or whatever. The police found a way around it. We saw, in the end, that the police forces were not happy with this guidance so it was eventually watered down.

There have been public outcomes in the UK. Officers have had to prove their effectiveness through the number of interactions they take, including stop and search. That was abolished but it did not affect stop and search numbers; rather, they went back up in recent years. It is about police officers working out how to demonstrate they are effective in their jobs. My concern is that we can tinker at the sidelines but without legislative reform, we will not get to the crux of the issue. The evidence in the US is that decriminalisation and regulation have reduced police contact with communities.