On January 4, 2024, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) opened its annual public consultation on whether to (yet again) increase Council Tax to fund more police.
GM Mayor Andy Burnham and Deputy Mayor Kate Green have requested an increase in the Police Precept that will cost taxpayers an additional £10.5 million in 2024/25, including a £13 increase to B and D properties.
Recent public consultations show widespread opposition to increases in the Police Precept with clear majorities expressing a preference for a freeze or reduction in 2022 (74%) and 2023 (61.8%).
However, the GM Police, Crime and Fire Panel, the committee empowered to approve any increase in the Precept, have repeatedly disregarded public opposition and pressed forward with the hikes proposed by the Mayor. In January 2022, members of the public were even removed from a supposedly-public meeting of the Panel for challenging Mayor Burnham on this undemocratic process.
Despite these barriers, it is critical that we continue to express our opposition to hikes in the Precept that serve to exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis at the same time as giving greater power to an institution that continues to cause great harm in our communities.
NPMP is an anti-racist, abolitionist organisation. We organise to build community resistance against police violence, harassment and racism and recognise our work in connection to wider, global struggles for liberation from systemic racism and state violence in all its forms. We mourn the lives of Palestinians and Israelis who have been killed and we condemn the cycle of violence that colonial occupation has produced. We stand against the escalating Islamophobia and Antisemitism that we are seeing in the UK and elsewhere. We stand in solidarity with Palestinians who have endured occupation, imprisonment, displacement and violence for 75 years and support those across the world resisting for a Free Palestine.
At this time many people in the UK, like many across the world, will be involved in protest and face increased risk of police violence, harassment and/or arrest as a result. We know that the police, enabled by the state and Home Secretary Suella Braverman, are increasing their racist targetting of protestors and we want to remind you of your protest rights and the support we can offer.
If you are protesting, go prepared. Wear a mask and nondescript clothing. Consider knocking off your phones. The police may use it for surveillance & to extract data. Be aware that the police will use facial recognition tech. Avoid filming and taking photos. Blur faces if you do. The police can use the footage against you and other activists. Those in Greater Manchester, write these numbers on your arm in case you are arrested, and your phone is off or lost. Manchester Green & Black Cross 07761911121, Robert Lizar Solicitors 07900998999.
REMEMBER:
If the police stop you and ask questions, ask “Am I free to leave?” If you are, you do not need to give them any information about yourself.
NO COMMENT. If you are arrested, say “No Comment” to all questions, including ‘chats’, until you have free legal advice.
NO PERSONAL DETAILS. You do not have to give personal details under stop and search powers, so don’t
UNDER WHAT POWER? Ask “under what power?” to challenge the police to act lawfully.
NO DUTY SOLICITOR. Avoid the duty solicitor. See numbers above instead.
NO CAUTION. Do not accept a caution – it’s an admission of guilt & will appear on a DBS check.
If you witness any incidents of police brutality, take down the collar numbers of the officers. Check on the welfare of the victim. You can use our Incident Reporting Form to ask for support and/or to report an incident.IMPORTANT: If you’re a migrant, please remember that police & Home Office databases are linked – and that rights are far less protected. Take extra care.
A central aspect of Northern Police Monitoring Project’s (NPMP) day-to-day work is the monitoring of the police and other agencies of the State that have responsibility for governing police conduct.
In 2023/24, we are seeking to recruit a small team of 3-5 volunteers who have interest in conducting this type of monitoring work through attendance at various State proceedings, hearings and meetings. Should you decide to join us, you will receive an orientation to these areas of NPMP’s work involving a commitment of approximately 4 hours per month for three months from September 25 to December 15, 2023.
Upon successful completion of the training programme, participants will be invited to serve as general police monitors or identify a specific area of monitoring work that they would like to focus on. If you would be interested in joining us this autumn, please email npolicemonitor@gmail.com to sign-up and for more information.
This article is from NPMP’s annual magazine. You can see the full magazine online, and order physical copies here.
How has the Covid-19 pandemic shaped experiences of police racism and racialised police violence, and what might new police powers mean for communities beyond the pandemic?
As part of a collaboration between the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), we published a report that explores experiences of policing amongst racially minoritised groups across England at this critical juncture. The report draws on in-depth conversations with 22 individuals who had interactions with the police during the pandemic, focusing on the testimonies of those subjected to policing. The findings from the research demonstrate that, rather than contributing to public safety, policing during the pandemic has reproduced profound harms for those from racially minoritised groups and communities.
Safety is a prominent theme throughout the report, but – in a challenge to dominant police narratives – it is the police themselves who appear as a major threat to the safety and wellbeing of research participants and their wider communities. For instance, a number of those who took part in the study recount how police officers they had interacted with over the course of the pandemic had failed to socially distance or wear adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). In a particularly disturbing case, one woman described being stopped multiple times while heavily pregnant, and repeatedly having to ask police officers to socially distance and wear masks. We now know that unvaccinated pregnant women are amongst the most vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19.
But risk of Covid-19 transmission due to police negligence is just one of the ways in which the harms caused by over-policing have been exacerbated in the context of the pandemic.
Policing was made central to the British government’s response to Covid-19, and police forces were granted extraordinary powers to enforce restrictions on movement and social gatherings, administer fines and detain potentially infectious people. This raft of legislation was rushed through parliament with minimal scrutiny, having severe consequences.
The racialised impact of these increased police powers has been well-documented. For example, Black and Asian people have been issued Covid-related fines at a rate 1.8 times higher than white people, while the initial months of the pandemic saw a marked increase in police use of force, and stop and search practices, which continue to disproportionately affect racially minoritised groups and communities.
Discussions with research participants reflected these patterns, revealing how new police powers have interacted with long-standing forms of racial and class inequalities to further criminalise those communities already subject to forms of violent over-policing. The report documents a number of experiences in which Covid-related powers were used to stop or even arrest individuals in conjunction with other highly racialised police practices, such as drug-related police stops. One individual described policing under Covid as: “Like a golden ticket to […] go out there in Black communities and just ridicule us.” The use of Covid-related regulations in the kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer, which took place during the course of the research, was yet another heart-breaking reminder of how particular groups are rendered more (not less) vulnerable when police are granted exceptional powers.
Despite pleas from leading civil rights organisations to respond to the pandemic in a way that prioritised both public health and the upholding of civil rights, the government’s approach to policing reflected their ongoing commitment to an increasingly authoritarian agenda. Even as certain police measures are now scaled back while the pandemic develops, they have helped to pave the way for a massive expansion of policing in the coming years. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (now Act) is set to increase a multitude of police powers, ensuring even less police accountability and hitting racially minoritised communities hardest, all while clamping down on our legal right to protest.
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the extent to which we do and must depend on each other – for our health, well-being and ultimately our lives. Now is the time to connect various struggles around a common message: policing is not a public service, but another critical threat to our collective safety.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) are on track to report a record high number of fatalities arising from road traffic incidents involving the force’s officers. Since September 2020, eight people – Patrick ‘Paddy’ Connors (36), Thomas ‘Tommy’ Sharp (29), Shae Marlow (16), Kyle Hudson (16), Ronaldo Johnson (17), Diyar Khoshnaw (24), Devonte Scott (18), and Brandon Geasley Pryde (18) – have died following pursuits by GMP officers. [1] Earlier this month, another young man was left in critical condition after coming off his moped during a pursuit initiated by GMP officers engaged in an anti-social behaviour project known as Operation Bluefin. This unprecedented surge in road traffic deaths raises urgent questions about police protocols in the initiation and progression of pursuits. Yet this important dialogue is being sidelined by a coordinated national effort to protect police officers involved in road traffic incidents.
The Conservative Government has touted the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill as part of its first duty ‘to protect its citizens and communities, keep them safe and to ensure that they can get on with their daily lives peacefully and without unnecessary interference.’ Yet, as many have pointed out, the bill’s provisions invasively expand policing powers, pitting the interests of powerful police lobbyists against the safety and well-being of communities.
One provision that has received relatively little attention pertains to Police driving standards (Part 1, Sections 4-6) and includes proposed amendments to the Road Traffic Act 1988 likely to make it even harder to hold police accountable.
Located in Part 1 of the Bill titled, ‘Protection of the Police etc’, the provision responds to a concerted campaign by the Police Federation of England and Wales, a professional association representing over 130,000 police officers. Currently, officers involved in road traffic incidents are subject to internal investigation with the exception of cases that result in death or serious injury, which are referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). During investigations, the IOPC is responsible for ascertaining whether any criminal offence has been committed and, where appropriate, making recommendations to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). If charges are filed, police officers are subject to the same offences of ‘careless’ and ‘dangerous driving’ under the Road Traffic Act 1988as all other drivers. In Section 2A and 3ZA of the Road Traffic Act 1988, a person is regarded as driving without due care or dangerously if the way they drive either falls ‘below’ or ‘far below’ what would be expected of a competent and careful driver.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill proposes amendments to the Road Traffic Act 1988 in which police drivers charged with the offences of careless and dangerous driving would be compared to what is expected of a competent and careful trained police driver as opposed to a civilian driver. According to the explanatory notes accompanying the Bill, this reform acknowledges that officers receive additional training in pursuit and response driving techniques from the College of Policing and are exempt from some aspects of road traffic legislation including speed limits and a range of road signs and markings. The Police Federation contend that without reform police officers are vulnerable to lengthy investigations, suspensions and criminal prosecution for violations of the Road Traffic Act 1988.
As members of Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) we are deeply concerned about the proposed amendments to the Road Traffic Act 1988 and their potential impacts on police conduct and accountability. As indicated, in the late nine months alone, eight people have died following pursuits by GMP. Reflecting national trends, most of those who lost their lives were young men and disproportionately from racially minoritised communities. The IOPC reports that between 2004/5 and 2019/20 there were 471 fatalities arising from road traffic incidents involving the police in England and Wales. Eighty per cent were male and more than one-quarter (28%) were under the age of 20. Despite efforts by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), (now known as the IOPC) and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to reform protocols related to police pursuits, the numbers of fatalities have steadily increased [2]. In 2018/19, forty-two people died following road traffic incidents involving police in England and Wales marking a new ten year high.
The IOPC is now investigating the deaths of the eight young men from Greater Manchester, a process that is likely to take up to a year or more. Kelly Darlington, an associate partner and head of inquests at Farleys solicitors in Manchester, informed the Manchester Evening News that the firm is currently acting for families in seven road death cases. As Darlington explained, ‘One of the things that families always ask is, whether the pursuit needed to take place at all when the seriousness of the [suspected] crime is quite often relatively low, compared to the risk to the public.’ Academics and professional bodies reinforce such concerns. In Police Road Traffic Incidents: A Study of Cases Involving Serious and Fatal Injuries (2007), the IPCC pointed to a growing body of evidence related to the ‘high level of discretion exercised by police drivers in terms of initiating and progressing with a pursuit’ as well as the ‘lack of justifiable cause for initiating a dangerous pursuit’.
Despite these concerns, precedent suggests that prosecutions are highly unlikely. During a governmental consultation related to the proposed reforms to police driving standards in 2018, the IOPC reported that their statistics ‘[did] not show that a high or disproportionate number of officers were prosecuted following an IOPC/IPCC investigation.’ In fact, of the ninety-seven investigations into road traffic incidents completed between 1 April 2012 and 30 September 2018 only two officers were prosecuted for pursuit-related incidents and five for emergency response driving incidents. None were convicted. Such small numbers of prosecutions raise inevitable questions about the rationale for the proposed reforms in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, suggesting that The Police Federation’s concerns about the vulnerability of officers to criminal conviction are misplaced. At the same time, the small number of prosecutions raises broader societal concerns about the ability of families to secure justice for loved ones unnecessarily killed in road traffic incidents involving the police. While the full implications of the new reforms are still unclear, it appears that one of the few remaining tools by which officers might be held to account, limited as it may be, is being eroded.
[1] For annual statistics on the number of road traffic fatalities by force see, Independent Office for Police Conduct, ‘Deaths during or following police contact: Statistics for England and Wales – Time series tables 2004/05 to 2019/20’ (IOPC, 2020). Accessed online: https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/research-and-learning/statistics/annual-deaths-during-or-following-police-contact-statistics. The eight fatalities in Greater Manchester took place between September 2020 and May 2021 while IOPC annual statistics are maintained by financial year. Annual statistics for 2020/21 will be released by the IOPC later this year.
[2] For example, see Independent Police Complaints Commission, Police road traffic incidents: a study of cases involving serious and fatal injuries (London: IPCC, 2007) and Association of Chief Police Officer of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, The Management of Police Pursuits Guidance (London: ACPO, 2008).
A new Stories of Injustice report authored by Becky Clarke and Kathryn Chadwick for JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty By Association) finds that at least 109 women have been sentenced to long prison terms on joint enterprise convictions.
“The experiences of the 109 women examined in our report paint a harrowing picture of injustice which is currently sanctioned by our legal system. We would argue that these women are wrongfully convicted, and that charging them for violent crimes they did not commit is neither in the public interest, or delivering justice to victims and communities.”
Becky Clarke
Prosecutors rely on racist, classist and gendered narratives to secure convictions, the report finds. Additionally, in almost one half of cases there had been repeated failures, by the police and other agencies, to protect the women from violence as children and adults, or to respond to their health or care needs.
The report calls for a moratorium on the use of joint enterprise and secondary liability with women, and increased transparency and accountability in the decisions to use secondary liability by the Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in cases involving female defendants in multi-offender cases.
The authors call for the evidence on the use of joint enterprise with women defendants to be scrutinised by a Parliamentary Committee with appropriate jurisdiction, alongside a ‘People’s Panel’ of relevant experts and interested parties. Existing barriers to legal appeals for those women currently in prison, where there is a very real possibility of a miscarriage of justice, also need to be removed.
Read the report here, and find out more about JENGbA here.
We, the Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP), express our solidarity and deep concern for the safety of student occupiers associated with the UoM Rent Strike movement as well as the wider student population and surrounding communities of the University of Manchester.
These developments take place against the backdrop of the University of Manchester’s recent attempt to erect physical barriers around the Fallowfield residence halls, a move that prompted student protest and has since been replaced by heightened security patrols.
To many, the ‘ACAB’ slogan may seem like little more than radical posturing. The prospect of a police-less future is so impossible that it exudes pharaoh-nic levels of naivety. So naturalized has the existence of the police become, that many think reform, rather than abolition, is the only way to advance beyond racist policing. It is akin to when Fredrich Jameson, the famous cultural theorist, once said ‘it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.
Part of the difficulty many have in accepting calls to abolish the police, seem to lie in the absence of practical, short-term solutions towards abolition. However, there has been serious engagement on police and, relatedly prison, abolition in both activist, academic circles and even popular press. This post, largely aimed at communities and campaigning groups, argues for a more modest but related position against engagement with the police. By no means exhaustive, these are not purely positions of principle but rather concrete arguments that demonstrate how engagement can and has undermined the ability to hold the police to account.
Before detailing these positions, largely restating things written and heard elsewhere, it is worth recognising the strategic position that other groups and individuals may have in specifically-targeted engagement with the police. However, this article briefly argues for a general default position for non-engagement with the police and locates itself within the larger anti-racist tradition of prison and police abolition.
Vulnerability to police intrusion and intelligence gathering
Underlying much of the argument against police engagement is the false presumption that it is a safe and effective way in addressing and resolving concerns around police racism, brutality, harassment and impunity. The argument here is that engagement invites infiltration. The police, as an institution, are largely not interested in dialogue but information gathering. Perhaps most importantly, once a person, community or organization is exposed to dialogue with the police, it leaves them vulnerable to data gathering. The nature of data gathering is such that it becomes part of a permanent archive that can be exploited and used for other security imperatives when necessary and convenient. This is painfully apparent in how disparate and entirely innocent pieces of information are pulled together to create profiles of risk about individuals in determining their potentiality to commit crime.
The police have a history of using ‘dialogue policing’ to gather intelligence. Police Liaison Officers (PLO), created in light of the appalling policing of the G20 protests and police killing of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, emerged following a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The parliamentary group argued for greater dialogue with the police and criticized police units, such as the protest-intelligence gathering team FIT, for being more interested in surveillance than engagement with those exercising their right to assemble. The formal role of PLOs therefore, is to engage in a more dialogic approach with protestors.
The Network for Police Monitoring produced a report providing compelling evidence that many former FIT officers had gone on to become PLOs. The report contains several admissions by senior officers that PLOs were less concerned about dialogue and more about intelligence gathering. Among a litany of failures, Chief Inspector Sonia Davis, head of the Police Liaison Teams (PLT), gave evidence as a prosecution witness in the trial of an environmental cyclist group who were arrested on the evening of the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. She admitted that PLTs gathered information on protesters and had been deployed at previous mass bikes rides to try to identify ‘leaders’. PLOs illustrate why dialogue and engagement with the police, more generally, is problematic and can potentially incriminate communities and individuals while posing serious challenges to the integrity and functioning of campaigns and organisations.
It’s also worth saying something about the 2015 Undercover Policing Inquiry because it also shows how engagement and working with the police can leave individuals and groups vulnerable to infiltration. There have been many shortcomings with the inquiry which, though extremely important, are not the focus of this post. Generally however, there are fundamental problems with undercover policing. One famous example, which only came to light many years later, was the infiltration of the Stephen Lawrence Justice Campaign in which police spies tried to gather information about the Lawrence family. While the family were grieving about their son who had been murdered in a racist attack, they were also trying to persuade the police to properly investigate their son’s racist murder. Police spies tried to gather information about the parents of Stephen Lawrence, including the breakdown of their marriage. They used this information to try to deflect criticism that they messed up the investigation- an investigation which, coupled with mass mobilistion from the community anti-racist campaigns, prompted an inquiry that showed the police to be institutionally racist.
Political groups have also been infiltrated. Many women have provided testimony to the undercover police inquiry that they had been tricked into having sexual relationships with people they believed to be activists but later turned out to be police officers. Police officer Mark Kennedy had lied about being an environmental activist and infiltrated many left wing groups, providing intelligence which led to the arrest of several activists at demonstrations and direct actions. During his time undercover, he had formed close friendships and sexual relationships with activists. In a legal case which eventually collapsed, involving a group of environmental activists trying to shut down a coal station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, one of the protestors, Danny Chivers, described Kennedy not just as an observer but as an agent provocateur.
Ultimately too, dialogue provides an invaluable ‘PR win’ for the police as they are being seen to engage with communities which illustrates the police’s desire for resolution and assuages their often violent and long-lasting interventions into those very communities. It provides the illusion that they are doing something, whilst in fact they are often entirely unwilling to make any meaningful change.
Non-effectiveness of Dialogue
It must be said from the outset that when you enter into dialogue with a state institution like the police, the difference in expertise, in resources, in well-curated legitimacy, will always create an imbalance of power than can inform discussions and dialogue. Thus engagement is typically rendered meaningless. Consider the role of independent advisory groups (IAGs) whose role, among other things, is to ‘improve communications with groups not usually in dialogue with the police.’ In the conversations that we have had with members of the Independent Advisory Group in Greater Manchester, they have seen it as a powerless forum. To help illustrate the ineffectiveness of engagement, we can refer to Sherry Arnstein’s level of citizen participation which looks at the different levels of involvement that public and community forums can have in decisions that impact them.
Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of citizen participation (1969)
This can range from manipulation at the bottom, where the forum is used as a means to dictate the responses and framing of communities concerns, through to consultation, or, right at the top, delegated powerand citizen controlwhere communities actually dictate, implement the agenda and action policy. The sense that many people get is that IAGs are more about therapy and informing at the very least, thoughare often about manipulation, with the police often steering the conversation. While members from the community get understandably angry and upset and are able to vent at the police, which is important, little gets done. Again, however, it provides the police with an absolutely vital opportunity to demonstrate that they are sincerely committed to listening, engagement and reform.
Compromises Community trust
Central to any community-led organization or campaign, is securing trust of individuals and impacted communities. It is important, not only that independence from the police is done but also that is it seen to be done. Anxieties are often stirred by working with the police, particularly in communities that have been criminalized and over-policed. Many people within impacted communities reasonably see the police as an antagonistic force and perceive any organization working with them as merely being interlocutors of the police rather than impartial brokers. It is not merely that communities hate the police (often with good reason), but that dialogue can often trigger traumatic episodes. An organization that works with the police therefore may be perceived as trying to appease the damaging work the police do and often soften the trauma they have imposed, rather than genuinely being committed to supporting individuals and families. Much anecdotal evidence gathered through protracted conversations with impacted families have spoken to this effect, often creating a deep sense of mistrust in police investigations into their own wrongdoings and a general hesitancy of the state in conducting public inquiries and inquests.
Limits Radical imaginations
Finally, engagement with the police limits our imagination. The arguments for abolition of the police are not pie-in-the-sky fantastical thinking, but well researched, forensically thought out positions. It forces us to reflecting on the role and need for the police and thinking about alternative forms of public safety. To do otherwise can blind us to the contingency of the police force. In other words we think of them as a ‘natural’ institution rather than a relatively new institution in the UK that emerged around the time of 19thcentury capitalism and that imported and exported expertise from the colonies in how it has policed communities of colour.
However, arguments of police abolition are not isolated and they necessarily require engagement with wider social structures that control racialized, gendered and classed populations. Abolition of slavery for example, required more than just disappearing enslaved people from plantations. It required society to eliminate its reliance on forced and brutal racialized labour. A similar logic is needed here. In his recent book, the End of Policing, Alex Vitale makes a broader argument against social and economic injustice, and against criminalisation and racism. He locates these injustices in the neoliberal exploitation and its spiraling inequalities of wealth and power- of which the police have a role in socially reproducing. The solution isn’t just about abolishing the police but restructuring society in such way that doesn’t require them as an institution.
The kinds of ‘short-term’ measures or ‘non-reformist reforms’ we can make, away from police engagement and toward abolition require both a discursive battle as well as a material one. The former, which has already been touched on, is questioning the presumption that the police are invested in preventing crime (what is crime? does it prevent crime in particular communities and spaces?) and that societies need ‘law and order’. The latter alternatives to policing may include initiatives such as community monitoring, divestiture (particularly toward social infrastructure like youth clubs, social and mental health care, education, sports etc), decriminalization and restorative justice. Many abolitionists have argued that we need to see policing as a public health issue not a criminal justice one. Thus, perhaps an often ignored focus on some anti-police brutality organisations is articulating and working toward these alternatives. The position of non-engagement therefore is not esoteric, ivory-tower thinking, but one which is necessary to maintain the integrity of our campaigns which works toward a more just and realizable future.
In this article, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly of the Northern Police Monitoring Project discuss institutional racism and the limits of calls to diversify the police force (estimated read time: 6 minutes).
It’s twenty years since the publication of the Macpherson report into the police handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson’s key finding was that the Metropolitan Police were ‘institutionally racist’, a charge that has been levelled at other forces, including Greater Manchester Police. Last month, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, lauded the ‘transformative effect’ the report had on policing but lamented that ‘we still have much more to do.’ But the truth is, little has changed.
One of the most common and seemingly well-meaning responses to police racism is to call for greater representation of Black and Brown communities in the police force. Given that none of the 43 police forces in England and Wales currently reflects the racial demographics of their communities, this seems like a logical and relatively uncontroversial response to a long-standing problem. Last week, the Police and Crime Commissioner for West Yorkshire, Mark Burns-Williamson, called for legislative changes to enable the police to attract, recruit and retain officers from ‘BAME’ backgrounds. And just a week or so prior, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, Sara Thornton, suggested that new laws are needed to enable positive discrimination in police recruitment. However, to view the racial diversification of the police force as any kind of meaningful solution is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of racism. Such calls fail to take seriously the lessons of recent history, including those highlighted by Macpherson.
In this respect, the concept of institutional racism allows us to challenge the dominant narrative which constructs police brutality and racism as something that is exceptional. It helps us to see that the problem is not simply a ‘few rotten apples’ but a rotten apple cart. If we only replace the apples and not the cart, the new apples will simply rot too. Such an intervention would be fundamentally misdiagnosing the problem: treating the symptom, not the disease. This is not only a hypothetical or theoretical point but one that is supported by empirical evidence.
For example, a 2017 paper examined the correlation between police shootings and the racial demographics of police forces in the United States. The report concluded that ‘simply increasing the percentage of Black officers is not an effective policy solution’. In fact, the report found that fatal encounters between Black citizens and the police were more likely to occur in cities with higher proportions of Black officers. Based on the concept of ‘critical mass’, the authors tentatively suggest that a change in organisational culture might be possible when Black officers constitute at least 30% of a police force. But the authors are, quite rightly, reluctant to say whether or not this would reduce the number of Black deaths at the hands of the police.
Calls for more Black officers are flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, they assume that racial solidarity exists between Black officers and the Black communities that they police. Yet as Forman argues in Locking Up Our Own, many Black officers don’t see their employment as racially significant. They do not take up their jobs in an attempt to rid the police force of racism. On the contrary, US research published in 2008 found that Black police officers were actually more likely than white officers to racially profile Black drivers. Findings like these expose the ‘more Black officers’ argument to be dependent upon an essentialist assumption that all Black people are inherently anti-racist. This fails to recognise the insidious nature of racism. An individual is not incapable of having racially-prejudiced attitudes simply because they themselves are racialised as black. Perhaps more importantly – given that racism can be perpetuated without individual intent – it certainly does not reflect an inability to reproduce institutional racisms.
Relatedly, the racial diversification of the police is not only likely to be ineffective in tackling institutional racism but it also operates to give legitimacy to racist policing. Without systemic change, replacing white faces with ‘BAME’ faces is mere tokenism: a superficial intervention that threatens to obfuscate the systemic nature of racism in the police. Like Trevor Phillips’ ‘work’ condemning Black and Brown communities, Sajid Javid’s role as Home Secretary shows all too clearly that Brown faces in high places can be used to disguise racist agendas. His appointment as part of Theresa May’s ministerial reshuffle in early 2018 enabled her to make the (false) claim that the government now “looks more like the country it serves.” But Javid’s staunch advocacy of the hostile environment agenda serves as a clear reminder that he should in no way be misconstrued as having the interests of Black and Brown people at heart. More Black officers would merely create the illusion of change, lending weight to the myth that we are on the path towards inevitable equality. We are not. More Black police officers might increase trust in the police for Black and Brown communities but, unless there is radical change, perhaps Black and Brown communities are right not to trust the police.
Thirdly, even if there was a way of ensuring that the critical mass of new Black recruits were all anti-racist individuals, the ‘more Black officers’ argument only becomes thinkable when we significantly underestimate the endemic nature of institutional racism in the police. Policing fosters an insular occupational culture which can operate to deter Black (potentially anti-racist) officers from straying outside of established norms. Given the role that policing has played in protecting capitalism and maintaining colonial regimes, it should come as no surprise then that, as Alex Vitale puts it, the ‘police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality’. In this sense, even if anti-racist officers were recruited into the police, their individual agenda is likely to be supplanted by that of the institution.
Finally, calls to diversity the police force place the onus upon Black and Brown people for challenging racism and educating other officers. The responsibility for creating change becomes misplaced and, as Audre Lorde argues, ‘the oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions.’ To redress racism in the police – and elsewhere – it is important that those racialised as white, properly reckon with the inequities of white supremacy. The burden should not fall to those marginalised by the power structure, though it so often does, but to those who benefit from it.
To recognise racism as institutional therefore takes us to a difficult and deeply uncomfortable position. We begin to see that there are no easy solutions: liberal reforms simply will not do. To tackle the deep roots of racism in the police, we need nothing short of a radical re-imagining of policing and criminal justice as we know it, or what Vitale speaks of as ‘the end of policing’.
If rage had no capacity for producing change, then it would not be regarded as being as threatening as it is. With so much overt and covert racialized hatred and violence against black bodies, it is a powerful distortion of rage that the group on whom the oppression is imposed is seen as the one full of uncontrollable rage (Cohan, 2017: 38).
Edir Frederico Da Costa, a young black man and father died on Wednesday 21st June, six days after his arrest by the Metropolitan Police. It is reported that the arrest involved use of force and the deployment of CS gas. Da Costa’s family claim that they had been told by a doctor at the hospital that he had severe injuries which had caused him to convulse. The official narrative, as may be expected, is different. The IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission) sought to halt the spread of information regarding Da Costa’s injuries by releasing the conclusions of the preliminary coroner’s report on Friday 23rd June. The IPCC states that the coroner found no evidence to support the claim that his neck was broken on arrival at hospital and the coroner found no evidence of severe injuries (IPCC, 2017). Investigations are continuing into the cause of death. Meanwhile, the IPCC has begun an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Da Costa’s death.
It is unsurprising that the family of da Costa and the local community want answers- as we all should. On Sunday 25th June there was a planned ‘peaceful protest’ outside of Forest Gate police station in London. Later in the day, stories emerged on social media of protesters clashing with police and riot police being deployed to the area. Some commentators on social media have already condemned the protesters as ‘barbaric’, as ‘black gangsters’ and Da Costa as a criminal who is to blame for his own death. The media focus is on the six police officers who, it is claimed, sustained injuries during the clashes.
This is business as usual. The rage of families and communities following a death in custody is frequently depoliticised through the relocation of blame on the victim and the community. The perception of black and brown bodies as threat is reflected in the discourses surrounding deaths in custody- ‘State Talk’ (Pemberton, 2008). These discursive strategies legitimise the use of force and perpetuate the criminogenic image of the black male and increasingly other bodies of colour-most recently Asian men. This is not just a police problem, the media construct and reproduce images, the state and law enforcement agencies respond to them and the racialization of crime becomes a fact that the police respond to legitimizing harsher policing strategies (Hall et al., 1978).
In the midst of terrorism fears, the National Police Chief’s Council is to debate offering guns to all frontline officers (Dodd, 2017). A terrifying prospect taking into account disproportionality in restraint related deaths in custody. In 2016, Janet Hills, the President of the National Black Police Association expressed concerns over the proposal to roll out tasers to all police officers (Asthana and Grierson, 2016). She was right to do so, people of colour are disproportionately on the receiving end of a taser discharge – 40% of cases where tasers have been used since 2014 involved black or black mixed-race ‘suspects’ (CRAE, 2017). This includes children; according to the CRAE, 70% of all children tasered by the police were from ethnic minority communities. Taser is not a soft alternative to guns, it is a potentially lethal firearm linked to a number of deaths including that of retired black footballer Dalian Atkinson in August, 2016.
There were a total 510 ‘BME’ deaths in custody (police, prison and mental health detention) between 1991 and 2014. This includes 10 unlawful killing verdicts at inquest. However, there have not been any successful prosecutions in this time (Athwal and Bourne, 2015). If police accountability is ‘constructed’ in order to maintain state narratives of accountability (Baker, 2016), rather than to hold the police to account for their actions, it is inevitable that both the police and the mechanisms for investigating their mis/conduct, including the IPCC, will not be viewed as legitimate. In the absence of a trusted system for securing accountability, protest is a legitimate response. Protest is not ‘barbaric’. It is the reaction of communities in pain; communities that are subjected to systemic racist violence on a daily basis. As Cohan argues above, rage can produce change; in the face of systemic inequalities sometimes rage is the only power we have.
Dr Lisa Long is a Senior Lecturer of Criminology at Leeds Beckett University, her research addresses race, racism and policing.
This piece is her first blog post and a response to the widespread social media condemnation of Forest Gate protesters in the wake of the death of Edir Frederico Da Costa following his arrest by the Metropolitan Police.
References
Asthana and Grierson (2016). Leader of black police officers warns against taser rollout proposals. The Guardian. 16th August [online] www.theguardian.com
Baker, D (2016) Death after police contact: constructing accountability in the 21st century. Basingstoke:Macmillan-Palgrave.
Cohan, D (2017) Rage and Activism; The Promise of Black Lives Matter chapter in Weissinger, S.E, Mack, D.A and Watson, E. Violence Against Black Bodies: An Intersectional Analysis of How Black Lives Continue to Matter. London:Routledge.
