Bisi Akintoye is a London-based criminologist whose research explores the relationship between drugs, race, belonging, policing and imperialism in contemporary Britain. Bisi is a solicitor and a lecturer at the University of Roehampton. She is also a board member of Release.

Despite police efforts to improve trust and confidence in Black communities, frequent and often hostile drug policing remains an inescapable part of life. Most notably, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and stops and searches conducted under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 provide the basis for frequent and often hostile drug policing. The result is scores of Black Britons being drawn into the criminal justice system, with consequences for freedom, education, employment and other civil liberties. This research analyses the historical and contemporary drug policing experiences of Black communities in a North-London suburb. Using data from 58 semi-structured and unstructured intersectional qualitative interviews with young people, adults/elders and community workers, the research explores the lived experience of generations of Black British communities labelled “suspect communities”. These experiences highlight that little has changed in the policing of Black communities, 25-years on from the finding that British policing is institutionally racist. The study finds that negative experiences of policing over time have created deeply embedded cultural narratives about how the police treat Black people, that are transmitted across generations. These narratives provide conceptual frameworks to interpret information about the police, drawn from the vicarious experience of racialized policing, which may be more powerful than other sources. These accounts emerge within the broader drug policy context of militarised policing and punitive drug legislation in Britain, which disproportionately harms ethnic minority communities and Black British communities in particular. The data illustrates that negative community perceptions of the police are the inevitable result of decades of racialized policing in Britain, with considerably harmful consequences for the legal, social, and political freedoms of generations of Black Britons. This has significant implications for the present and future relationship between the police and Black Britons, representative of the place of Black Britons in the British state.