Discrimination sociale dans le contrôle des usagers de drogue au Royaume-Uni et en Australie

A la fois au Royaume-Uni et en Australie, les fouilles policières suscitent des inquiétudes, étant principalement effectuées contre les communautés ethniques noires et minoritaires. Pour en savoir plus, en anglais, veuillez lire les informations ci-dessous.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that procedural legitimacy is important in winning the confidence of citizens in their police services. Such legitimacy is threatened when members of some social groups perceive that they are being treated unfairly by the police. One group whose experience of policing deserves attention is people who have used illicit drugs. They are estimated to make up 35.9 per cent of the adult population in the UK, and 39.8 per cent in Australia. This paper focuses on their experiences of policing, in the form of stop and search for drugs.

In the UK in recent years, a more specific focus of concern has been on the use of police stop and search powers, under drug legislation, against members of black and minority ethnic communities. Searches for drugs represent the most frequent type of police search in 39 of the 42 police services in England and Wales, and people whose ethnicity is recorded as black are 6.3 times more likely to experience this than people whose ethnicity is recorded as white. In Australia, this issue seems to have attracted less empirical attention. It is interesting, for example, that a 2010 article relied on British research to make the case that expanded stop and search powers - which would have removed the requirement that police had ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person was committing an offence - would have discriminatory effects in Western Australia. A 2012 report on stop and search for the Victoria Government did not break down the socio-demographic characteristics of those searched.

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