As a young policeman, I once worked with a natural “thief-taker” who I’ll call Stuart. In the Job, to use police officers’ term for our line of work, a thief-taker is a street copper who, upon leaving the station, sniffs out wrong ’uns like a caffeinated spaniel. Stuart would intuit guilt with a glance. Parking near a pub on a local estate, he studied people milling around outside. “You smell puff?” he asked. I’ve always hated the smell, so yes, I could smell weed. I nodded. “Right, that’s the key to the door. The secret’s choosing the right one.”
We watched people come and go. Black and white, but mainly black. The estate was largely Afro-Caribbean, which is a problem when you’re perpetually accused of only stopping black people. A few of the pub-goers were known cannabis dealers. They saw our marked car and either sucked their teeth or pointed their fingers at us like pretend guns. “There you go,” said Stuart, nodding at a tall black man wearing a tracksuit. The man was leaving the beer garden, wreathed in sickly white smoke. “That’s my man.”
The thief-taker got out of the car and began reciting the catechism known to all police officers: “I can smell weed on you, mate. I’m gonna search you. Now, have you got anything in your pockets you shouldn’t have, anything sharp?” Then he continued with a heavily-abbreviated version of the information required under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The search led to the discovery of several wraps of crack and a quantity of cash. The man in the tracksuit was a dealer who the thief-taker had been keeping a beady eye on. And, yes, the scent of weed was the key to the door.
I later tried the same trick myself. Stopping a suspect who smelt of weed, I searched him and found a car key. The suspect, who didn’t have a driving licence, had “borrowed it”. Inside the car? A dozen freshly stolen leather jackets from a local motorcycle shop. I was no thief-taker, but then again the guy with the stolen jackets wasn’t exactly Moriarty, either.
The tactic is hardly a secret. London’s police are sanguine about cannabis use unless you’re — to put it bluntly — taking the piss. During my stint as a uniformed officer I was fairly liberal in my application of the law, but found it was a useful tool for catching bad guys. And, for some reason, petty criminals love weed. Sadly, such earthy truths offend the sensibilities of those in power. Which is presumably why Sadiq Khan’s recent review of drugs use in the capital recommends decriminalising small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The review, which pompously treats London as an independent state rather than the UK’s capital city, was (of course) headed by an impeccably liberal lawyer and close friend of Tony Blair, Charlie Falconer. Falconer said officers use such tactics “disproportionately against black men”, and that the enforcing of drugs laws is an “incredible friction point between the police and black communities”.
The politics behind this review are typical of London’s mayor: performative, headline-grabbing, problematic for policing and designed to garner support from Labour’s base, especially younger voters. Unlike his predecessors, Khan’s support for the Met has been equivocal, despite policing being one of his only significant Mayoral powers (the other is transport).
Khan is the third London mayor since the role was created. I have been an officer under all three London mayors, of whom Khan has been the most unhelpful to policing. Ken Livingstone, despite his reputation as a Left-winger, understood the importance of robustly policing a capital city. Boris Johnson had the good sense to subcontract policing to his more capable deputies and, eventually, to get rid of the lacklustre police chief Sir Ian Blair. What of Sir Sadiq? His opportunism is shameless yet instructive. How so? Delve into the small print and you’ll see how, practically, his proposals are unworkable. The Mayor said: “The report makes a compelling, evidence-based case for the decriminalisation of possession of small quantities of natural cannabis, which the Government should consider.”
This is where the proposal falls apart, or perhaps the mask slips. Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists. All arrests for drug possession are usually “on suspicion of”, because, at the moment they seize the drug, officers can’t evidentially prove precisely what it is. Another difficulty is that, compared to other drugs, cannabis covers a wide spectrum, from brain-rotting psychoactive skunk to the sort of mellow, artisan weed smoked by surfer dudes on Cornish beaches. How, in the rain, at 2am, is a police officer meant to know the difference? This betrays the report’s likelier purpose: the police officer isn’t meant to stop and search in the first place. Just leave the kids alone! Perhaps I’m a natural cynic. Or perhaps I’m simply a keen student of Sadiq Khan’s approach to Ulez “evidence-gathering”, whereby his strident claims about air pollution and congestion were found wanting. Either way, this looks more like an attack on stop and search as a tactic.
“Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists.”
What we should pay attention to is the direction of travel. Stop and search is a totemic issue for progressives, and always has been. Is it always fairly applied? No. Is it necessary? Yes. Is Sadiq Khan prepared to tackle the reasons why stop and search is so contested, or simply pander to his political base? I would, were I able, lock Sir Sadiq in a room and make him watch the third season of David Simon’s TV epic The Wire. Written by progressive creatives for a largely progressive audience, The Wire is nonetheless the best drama ever produced on urban policing. The episode titled “Amsterdam” concerns the consequences of an experiment in decriminalising drugs in order to ease community tension and treat addiction as a health issue. The experiment goes badly wrong when gangs realise parts of Baltimore have essentially turned into a free-fire zone, a place where they can ply their trade unhindered by local officers.
As ever, though, British politicians trail their American counterparts by five to 10 years. American cities have experimented with varying degrees of drugs liberalisation in cities such as Portland and Los Angeles, with predictably dystopian results. The criminal ecosystem, the real one as opposed to the one described by academics, thrives on weakness of any kind. A city weakening its stop-and-search policies for small amounts of drugs, as the Americans discovered, has a cumulative (if not intended) effect as users and dealers drag with them their associated social problems. Portland was transformed from an artsy, bohemian city into an open-air drug market and refugee camp for the addicted homeless. Los Angeles and San Francisco, with their lax prosecutors and defanged police, became lawless paradises for shoplifters and robbers.
Even San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, has had enough. Its Democrats have rediscovered the benefits of robust policing, prosecution and sentencing. The lax policing was an inheritance from the academic revulsion at the “Zero Tolerance” policies of the early Nineties, whereby law enforcement targeted minor offences. The approach was viewed by criminologists as oppressive and ineffective, a verdict that ignored the “lived experience”, usually so respected by academics, of people living in communities blighted by criminality and antisocial behaviour.
This light-touch style of policing is finally going back out of fashion. Naturally, the academics concerned have yet to admit they were wrong — just that their pet policies “haven’t been implemented properly”. Predictably, the milquetoast British College of Policing also reviles Zero Tolerance law enforcement.
Alternatively, closer to home, Sadiq could simply Google Brian Paddick, the real-life police commander who posited legalising cannabis in the interests of “community relations”. This isn’t to unnecessarily disparage Brian, who in my experience was a fundamentally decent man. Serving in Brixton in the early Eighties, he became evangelical about reforming stop and search. The results of his experiment in what I’ll call “Total Tolerance” are disputed, but like the Mayor’s review, it was about much more than implementing drugs laws. It was, again, about a direction of travel, part of the ouroboros of a debate between “robust” versus “soft” policing. The answers are, of course, situational, complex and uncomfortable. This reality is too often lost on policymakers.
My experience suggest that drugs laws are like speed limits. If you set the motorway limit at 70mph, invariably the police (although not money-grubbing cameras) will usually turn a blind eye until you hit 90-ish. Why? Resources. Discretion. Common sense. It’s the same with minor drugs offences. Politicians like Sadiq Khan don’t really like stop and search. They don’t trust the police, either. Why doesn’t Khan simply say so? Or would that involve opening fresh cans of worms about police funding, training, recruitment and leadership? Including, of course, the Mayor’s. He is, after all, the de facto Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater London.
The wheel goes round and round… and where will it stop? We all know, actually, but that never deters progressives like Khan from trying another spin. In the meantime, the Mayor has his headline for the day. The quangocrats of his drugs review board will have been paid their stipends. The slow, inexorable creep of progressive policymaking continues, only ever heading toward one destination: failure.
Meanwhile, for operational police officers, the mood music is clear. It’s also clear to the activists seeking to undermine or even defund the police. All parties know that stop and search is something frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Should something go wrong, an officer is unlikely to be defended by those at the top. All this means that thief-takers like Stuart are no longer welcome in London’s police. Parts of London already resemble cannabis-stinking favelas. Perhaps, until Sadiq Khan notes the lessons from Portland and elsewhere, that’s where the city’s future lies.
