This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
by Vik Chechi-Ribeiro (NEU Black Members Organizing Forum)
The criminal justice system is institutionally racist. We know this because black people are more likely to die in custody, be stopped and searched, receive longer prison sentences and are over represented in children and adult prison populations.
The education system is institutionally racist. We know this because black children are more likely to be excluded, attain less than other cohorts, be under predicted at GCSE and A-levels and be victim to behaviour and other school policies.
Society is institutionally racist. We know this as half of black children are living in poverty, have less access to housing, secure employment, pay and are more likely to live in areas of deprivation. These market failures along racial lines have been highlighted during this coronavirus pandemic.
Therefore, it’s extremely worrying that the Greater Manchester Mayor is looking to expand the use of school-based police officers. Schools are places of learning where children should feel free to express themselves, make mistakes, reflect and grow. As our children return into schools, they need support not policing.
School-based police officers raise the possibility of the criminalisation of behaviour, students being stopped and searched, compilation of gang databases and surveillance of an already over policed group. Police officers have no place in schools and it’s not on educators to provide PR or relationship building for them.
It’s important to understand where the demand for police officers has come from. It’s a law and order response to a decade of austerity and an education system moving towards ‘zero-discipline’ approaches driven by exam results and league tables. I would suggest it’s much more effective to have increased funding and support for pastoral support, social workers, teacher training, restorative justice and independent student councils. And in the community campaigning for properly funded and access to housing, health, social care and secure employment.
As trade unionists, what can we do? As workers we should be seeking to transform education and society and assert our right to anti-racist spaces. It is for trade unionists to collectivise an issue and collectively bargain on issues of equality. It’s how we inspire our members and bring in wider layers of workers into the union.
Speak with your fellow union members and then your Headteacher on the role of school-based police officers. They may disagree with you but part of a democratic workplace is highlighting the issue and persuading others. The right to anti-racist workplaces isn’t a debate but it’s important we show leadership on the issue.
Our North West Black members organizing forum (NW BMOF) has produced a motion that you can use in schools to raise the matter with your members. If you need more information read and share Dr Remi John-Salisbury’s report for the Runnymede Trust titled’ Race and racism in secondary schools’. Finally follow and support Kids of Colour and Northern Police Monitoring Project who our union black members group are supporting.
This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
by Gail Hadfield-Grainger (United Families and Friends Campaign, Legal Officer)
Eight years ago, I lost the love of my life when he was shot and killed by the police in what is alleged to be a highly pre-planned operation. I just want to take the opportunity to share the struggles and the painstaking process which I, and other families, have to go through after the police kill someone you love so dearly.
It starts the moment you are told. In the ordinary world in which we think we live, the natural route would be to phone the police and believe that they will do everything in their power to catch the person that did it…. But, in this situation, that isn’t the case. You have just been given the news that doesn’t sink in, it doesn’t feel real – the police killed him. So who do you ring? What do you do? How do you tell the kids?.
At that point, you sit in a daze, a million things in your head that do not make sense, questions like “what was he doing?”, “How could he have possibly been in a situation where the police had a gun and shot him?”. The newspapers start printing about a person the police killed, as though Anthony was one of the Kray twins or some monster – not the Anthony I know, or anyone else who knew him. It must be a mistake. Over the next few years, the struggles get harder. Your emotions take over, you do what you can to keep normality at home to protect your children and your own sanity but at every step of the process, nothing is ever what you would expect in a fair, just, and transparent investigation.
I soon found out, by reading every single document available to me and cross-referencing, that on the night he was killed there were 4 cars, each had 4 Armed Officers in. Each officer had a Heckler and Koch Machine gun and a self-loading pistol called a Glock, each with 30 rounds of ammunition. Some officers had CS Gas canisters, a shotgun, and tasers with extra cartridges. All this for a kind, loving man, a dad who worked with cars? You cannot get the vision from your mind- and even now, when I see an armed officer, I envision what must have happened in that dark carpark that night and the panic attacks set in.
I would find myself sitting in the wardrobe, wearing his clothes because the smell of him was lingering around, I’d close my eyes and pray that he would walk through the door. But he never did. The realisation starts to sink in. This is real, the police really do kill people, I can’t believe I have been so ignorant to it in the past.
You are led to believe that the IOPC is independent of the police, but once you speak to the team investigating the death, it soon becomes clear that a high number of these are actually ex-police officers. They do not have the power to compel an officer to make an independent statement, which is the least that you would expect because this is not a petty theft – it is potentially murder or manslaughter.
You find out that all 16 armed officers sat in a room together, 9 days later, and made their ‘independent account from memory’ with another officer guiding them on what to say via a flip-chart. But this only came to light because of the exact same mistakes they all made, the car registration was written down wrong and street names all spelled wrong. This is not how I imagined a serious investigation into the death of a person by the police would be carried out. This wholly undermines the independence and integrity of any account they subsequently provide and would not be allowed if they were anything but police officers.
The 4 cars of armed officers swooped on Anthony’s Car that Night, it took less than 2 seconds before ‘Q9’ fired his weapon from the back seat of a car, which delivered the fatal shot into Anthony’s left lung, through the pulmonary trunk of the heart and into the right lung but no ambulance was called. I believe that there should have been an ambulance on standby given the ‘highly pre-planned’ element of the operation. It later transpired that it wasn’t as ‘highly pre-planned’ as the police made out. In fact, the planning of the operation did not even consider any LESS LETHAL tactic than an armed strike. The disclosure that the police ALLOW you to have is redacted, page after page, we have to make a case with a percentage of the information missing, but available to the police, the IOPC and every other interested party except you! Working with pages of information that the police say you are not entitled to see, but they can – how is that a fair trial?
Whilst it is still early stages, families are means-tested to see if they are entitled to breadcrumbs of funding to find out why their loved one isn’t here anymore, then your learn that ALL other parties, such as the one who fired and killed Anthony, the Chief Constable and Greater Manchester Police as a whole, the IOPC, and the National Crime agency are all entitled to the best legal teams that money can buy, regardless of their income or situation. How can this be fair? I’ve met other families along that way that have sold their home, emptied children’s savings accounts and even got into serious debt through lending money to pay for their legal representation, but I do not believe any family can raise the money needed to cover years and years of this whole process. But all the officers are represented from day one!
I am on 8 years now and still, not one single officer has been held to account in any sense of the word. I realised quite quickly that some struggles were going to hinder me, I started to study law, this way I could take days off when needed to so I could attend the hearings but later down the line, I realised I may have to represent myself in the fight to find out why Anthony was killed.
The worst part of this whole process is not only going up against trained officials, experienced lawyers, and 100+ police officers all working together – it is doing everything you can against ALL of these people, as a single-family member whilst you’re trying to hold your own life together. Eight years of random dates to attend court, delay after delay. It is almost impossible to hold down a job, or even start the grieving process – how can you grieve over something you can’t understand?
Our public inquiry found that officers lied, fabricated documents to exaggerate the threat level. The police also used a criminal past from a different person and told the court that they believed that Anthony had previous criminal convictions, that were proved in the inquiry to be completely false – Anthony died because of serious systemic failures in the operation from the very start and these failures continued after he died. This includes the deleting of vital emails that were related to the case, which showed some of the armed officers that night did not hold a valid Firearms Licence due to failing the course.
Yet, here I am fighting for the government recommendations to be implemented – but who am I except a grieving woman and mother who just wants answers and justice for the death of the man I love. This should not be left to the families – families who have been through enough! This system needs to change. Officers need to be held to account by the law when they break the law!
The Chair of the Public Inquiry, HHJ Teague, described in the report “that Anthony Grainger’s untimely death was not the consequence of one wrong decision but of many. As often happens, it took a combination of errors and blunders to produce so calamitous an outcome – an outcome for which I have concluded that Greater Manchester Police is to blame”.
This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
Molly Smith (organiser with sex worker group SWARM, co-author (with Juno Mac) of ‘Revolting Prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights)
Sex worker rights organising is an education in abolition. People sell sex because they need money, for many marginalised people it is a strategy of survival. Any attempt to ‘reduce’ prostitution through policing will inevitably fail in its stated goal because it does not address the actual reasons that sex work exists. The policing and criminalisation of prostitution misdirects attention away from the structural problems of our society – such as capitalism and poverty – onto pathologised, stigmatised and criminalised ‘others’ such as ‘the prostitute’, ‘the john’, and ‘the dealer’.
Not only does policing prostitution ‘miss the point’ of why people sell sex: policing actively creates harm. In England, Scotland and Wales, street sex workers and their clients can both be arrested and prosecuted, and sex workers who work indoors from shared flats face criminalisation for brothel-keeping. This pushes sex workers into foregoing safety strategies such as working on the street in groups and in well-lit areas, or working indoors with a friend. Criminalisation thus creates a vicious circle of harm: it sends a message to society that sex workers are bad and dirty, at the same time as materially obstructing the ways that sex workers might try to stay safe – rendering sex workers intensely vulnerable to violent people. State violence and interpersonal violence go hand in hand: the sex workers most vulnerable to arrest, prosecution or deportation are also those most vulnerable to physical violence and exploitation from individuals. That is because criminalisation and policing, far from making people safer, creates the conditions in which interpersonal violence and harm can flourish.
The policing of prostitution in the UK uses immigration law to particularly target migrant sex workers. For example, in 2017 police raided a flat in Swindon where three Romanian women were working. The police arrested the women, took their money, and deported them. They framed this as for the women’s safety, telling the local paper: “the women are now safe and away from their clients and are no longer vulnerable to the risks of off-street sex work”. A few months later, police in Smethwick raided a flat where three Romanian women were working, and had the women evicted and then deported. In Leeds in 2013, the police prosecuted three Polish women who had escaped an exploitative manager and were working in what the judge acknowledged was an ‘informal co-operative’. They were convicted. In 2018, hundreds of police officers raided London’s Chinatown parlours in what was portrayed in the press as an anti-trafficking operation. As a result of the raid, multiple women were charged with immigration offences, and many were taken to Yarl’s Wood and then deported. The police also stole £37,000 out of individual women’s lockers.
Despite this, it is common for women’s organisations to work with the police, and for the anti-prostitution feminist movement to uncritically laud them. Anti-prostitution campaigners routinely celebrate raids like those described above, and campaigns sometimes share resources on ‘how to spot a brothel’ – with obvious implications for the sex workers who will be caught up in a raid. The manager of a women’s service, based in Glasgow, even told a reporter: “We don’t wait until [prostitutes] say they want to exit and we share all our info with police … We try everything to engage with them. That could be a [criminal] charge, which puts them in a system where they have support.”
It is deeply ironic that this strand of the feminist movement has attempted to co-opt the term ‘abolition’. They want to connect their attempts to ‘abolish’ the sex trade through criminalisation to the abolition of slavery. Analogising modern prostitution to chattel slavery underplays the horror of centuries of slavery in the Americas to the extent that it seems to border on genocide denial. And in both the US and the UK, policing and prisons are directly descended from slavery and colonialism (in 2012, then-prime minister David Cameron responded to calls for reparations by offering to give money to Jamaica to build a new prison, on the understanding that it would be used to incarcerate ‘foreign criminals’ deported from the UK), while the criminalisation of prostitution disproportionately targets black sex workers and other sex workers of colour. In Norway – which is one of the countries held up by anti-prostitution feminists as their ideal – Amnesty International found that police routinely stop black women they suspect to be sex workers, and criminalise, evict and deport them. It should be impossible to claim any proximity to the word abolition while advocating for more criminalisation.
The decriminalisation of prostitution is an abolitionist demand. It would take power and resources away from the police. Those resources could be invested in things that actually help people – like housing, healthcare, and childcare. Criminalisation is deeply implicated in creating the conditions where violence against sex workers thrives. We can change those conditions by dismantling the power of the police.
This article was initially published in the NPMP Magazine Issue 2. You can read all the articles and the full magazine here. To order your physical copy please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com.
