Stephen Manderson, better known by his stage name Professor Green, has denounced police moves to expand stop and search powers along with racist media portrayals of knife crime as a predominantly black issue.
Police chiefs want to trigger an expansion of stop and search by lowering the level of suspicion an officer needs against a suspect to use the power, according to the Guardian. They want to scrap the requirement that “reasonable grounds” are needed before a person can be subjected to a search.
Green, who declared his support for the UKCSC model as “sensible” and “progressive” after Teeside Cannabis Club featured in his documentary about legalisation, posted to Instagram after being asked about knife crime on Good Morning Britain, saying that the real cause of rising knife crime was government-imposed poverty.
“I’d like to expand as I only had about thirty seconds,” he wrote. “There had been a lot of reference to a statistic that it’s largely black youths stabbing each other – what was left out was that this is only true of certain areas. As anyone with a brain can work out, in more densely white populated areas, the face of knife crime is white. That’s never represented in the media. That the face of knife crime they project nationally is black youths, as I said this morning implies institutional racism and criminalises a whole race, fitting their agenda to bring back racially profiled stop and search.
“I don’t think stop and search works to do anything apart from cause more division, friction and lack of trust of an organisation ever-proven to be growingly corrupt. What we’re looking at isn’t a new problem, it’s been a growing problem for years with many different contributing factors.
“I’d put poverty at the top of the list. There’s a science to social deprivation, to exclusion, expulsion, lack of paternal role models, lack of any role models, unequal education, unequal opportunity, cuts to all the services that might help people from going down the road to carrying a knife.
“I believe what we’re seeing is the result of years of neglect. A government who constantly imposes cuts that directly effect the people who already have fuck all. I understand the frustration around [London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s] comment that it may take a generation to undo this, but I understand his point. Stop and search isn’t going to be a quick fix. Children should never get to the point of carrying a knife – but society needs to move on a hell of a lot before that will happen. When we look at these problems we look at them as though they’re a problem for the people affected, not for society as a whole, which it most definitely is.
“We need to start empowering people in their communities and giving them voices, doing everything we can to help underprivileged children and struggling families. All of this happens while our government quite simply washes the blood from their hands.”