I was 12 years old when I was first frisked, groped and harassed by the police. I was walking down Lawrence Road in Tottenham, rocking big hair and NHS prescription glasses, when I was abruptly ambushed by three police officers. Ferociously patting me down, they said I matched the description of a mugger. The reality was that they could not tell one black boy from another. Many years later, the fear and embarrassment of the first time I was stopped and searched for a crime I did not commit remains with me. Speaking to young black men in my constituency and looking at the statistics, it’s clear that nothing has changed.

Racial bias in police stop and search getting worse, report reveals Read more

The fact that you are now over eight times more likely to be stopped and searched if you are black than if you are white, even though it is less likely for drugs to be found, represents a profound racial injustice. Grounded in the fictitious narrative that drug use is especially prevalent among black and minority ethnic groups, the current practice of stop and search entertains a racist fantasy. As we speak, there will be young, white middle-class men smoking a joint at a campus university or having cocaine delivered to their dinner parties, but the police will be nowhere in sight. We cannot have different policing for different communities. It is inherently unfair. Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

The disproportionate use of stop and search is not only born out of, but also perpetuates, a paranoid and generalised suspicion toward an entire community. The ingrained image of black men being searched by the police feeds into the collective illusion that black men everywhere need to be policed more than others. Crucially, the way in which the police’s huge discretionary power is exercised does not only fuel deep distrust toward the groups they target. The systematic profiling of black and minority ethnic groups inevitably leads them to lose faith in the very authorities that are meant to protect them. An institution that people depend on for their safety is transformed into one that is feared just as much as the threats it intends to defuse.

As for the use of weapons searches, the evidence is clear: increases in the use of stop and search do not lead to any discernible drop in violent crime. Used as an antibiotic to a resistant infection, stop and search is overly prescribed to the detriment of its own effectiveness, squandering police time and energy that could otherwise be expended on protecting the wider community. In fact, it relieves us of the responsibility of engaging with the deeper problems that create the criminals it intends, but systematically fails, to apprehend. It wants to magically make the underlying roots of criminal activity disappear.

To put it simply: “Nobody wins when stop and search is misapplied. It is a waste of police time. It is unfair, especially to young black men. It is bad for public confidence in the police.”

These are not my words. These are the words of Theresa May, in 2014 when she was home secretary. As somebody who is committed to both reducing the overall use of stop and search and ensuring its “effective and fair use”, the prime minister clearly shares my concerns on this issue. Why, then, is the man who now has her old job committed to expanding its use? Why is [home secretary] Sajid Javid willingly ignoring the evidence and moving away from cross-party agreement? By pandering to the right of his party, he risks deepening society’s divides.

Instead of relying on this ineffectual and racially unjust practice, we must stop stigmatising black men and search for more intelligent, long-term solutions to the problems that foster criminal activity in the first place. Ultimately, we must either abandon our reliance on stop and search or abandon any hope for a criminal justice system grounded in equality, impartiality and fairness.

David Lammy is MP for Tottenham, and author of a government review into the over-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) individuals in the criminal justice system.