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 Smina Akhtar (School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow)

The killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis last month sparked global demonstrations not only about police brutality in the US but police brutality and structural racism at home.  Some people may be surprised to know that there were Black Lives Matter events in different parts of Scotland too.  There remains a widespread belief amongst many Scots that racism doesn’t happen here, we call it the myth of Scottish Exceptionalism, but the killing of George Floyd allowed Sheku Bayoh’s family to remind us that deaths in police custody happen in Scotland too.  

Sheku Bayoh a 31-year-old Black man was arrested and restrained by nine police officers in Kirkcaldy, a small town on the east coast of Scotland, in the early hours of 3 May 2015, he was pronounced dead when he got to hospital. Sheku was originally from Sierra Leone, but left for London at the age of 4 and joined his sister Kadi in Kirkcaldy when he was 17 because his mother thought he’d be safer in Scotland. He had two children; Isaac was only 3 months old when his father died.  In November 2019 the Lord Advocate confirmed that there would be no criminal prosecution of any of the police officers who arrested Sheku; the following day the Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf announced that there would be a full Public Inquiry into Sheku’s death. The terms of reference of the Public Inquiry were announced in May 2020, and stated that it will ‘examine the circumstances leading up to the death of Mr Bayoh… the post incident management process and the subsequent investigation into his death’,  ‘it will also establish if Mr Bayoh’s actual or perceived race played a part in events’. This was five years after Sheku died. 

Was the fact that Sheku was Black and a Muslim significant?  If so, then racism did have a part to play.   

Examples of the police using brutal force to contain public protest are not hard to find; examples include the 1984-5 miners strikes, poll tax demonstrations, the killing of anti-racist activist Blair Peach in 1979. The system which investigates severe misconduct within the police exists on a state canvas which is also institutionally racist.  This ensures that any challenge to their authority by families and activists involved in deaths in police custody campaigns are contained.  The racism of the police has been documented countless times and ranges from the disproportionate stop and search statistics of Black and other racialised groups, to publicly disclosed evidence that the police spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence knowing that they had failed to investigate his death sufficiently.  In Scotland, it took the police and judicial system 18 years of constant pressure from the family lawyer, Aamer Anwar as well as a change in the law to prosecute the killers of Surjit Singh Chokkar.    

According to Inquest, from 1990 to 2019, there have been 1741 deaths in custody, of them 183 are of Black and minority ethnic people in police custody including shootings and they are more likely to have force used on them whilst being arrested and restrained.  They confirm that no police officer has been convicted of a death in police custody since 1969.  A BBC analysis found that Black people are twice as likely to die in police custody. When the police are accused of killing, the whole system closes in to protect them and stop victims’ families from getting justice. This is containment at an institutional level.  

Sheku’s sister Kadi told me that after Sheku’s death, police officers met family members separately and told them different versions of how Sheku died which naturally made them suspicious.  At one point the family were told Sheku had been found by a member of the public. They were told he had a machete, which was downgraded to a knife and then a blade – all in one conversation, though no such item was on him when arrested.  

The press ran several stories which can be described as racist, often originating from police sources; police suspected Sheku was a terrorist because they realised Sheku had been brought up Muslim. The police asked Sheku’s partner if they ate pork and bacon at home, no doubt to establish whether he was a practising Muslim, they even asked her if she got on with the rest of the family, because they are Black and she is white.  Some newspapers reported that he’d been high on drugs and had fought with his best friend.  All in an attempt to present Sheku as violent and justify the amount of force used on him when he was being arrested.  

Aamer Anwar wrote in Scottish Left Review that, ‘CS spray, Pava (pepper) spray and batons were used by uniformed police officers on Sheku as he was restrained and brought to the ground by several officers within 42 seconds of their arrival. Some officers stated they believed they were under ‘terrorist attack’. CCTV footage leaked to the BBC revealed that Sheku was also handcuffed and restraints applied to his knees and ankles. Shortly thereafter, he lost consciousness and died. His body was covered with lacerations, bruising and a broken rib’, over 50 injuries in total.

The police post mortem found no conclusive cause of death, common in deaths in police custody because when so many non-lethal weapons are used it is not possible to identify which caused the fatal blow.  The report however cited excited delirium, a very much contested condition which is caused by excessive struggle whilst being restrained.  The family’s pathologist concluded Sheku died of ‘positional asphyxiation’ which meant he couldn’t breathe, caused by the use of extreme force. Such use of force is more common in Black deaths in police custody, justified by a racist stereotype of the Black man possessing super human strength, which has existed since slavery. This is how Sheku was portrayed by the Scottish Police Federation lawyer Peter Watson when he told the media that ‘a petite female police officer was subjected to a violent and unprovoked attack by a very large man who punched, kicked and stamped on her.’ 

Sheku was of average height, 5-foot 10 weighing 12 stone 10 pounds.  The same ‘petite’ police officer alleged in her submission to the Court of Session for early retirement in 2019, that when she was kicked by Sheku she landed across the road resulting in significant injuries which have prevented her from returning to work since.  Aamer Anwar states that ‘no one could kick a person that distance, especially since CCTV footage shows that Sheku was handcuffed and face down on the ground within seconds of police officers arriving on the scene’. It was also revealed that one of the police officers on the scene when Sheku died was reported by his own family to be a violent racist.  

There were several instances where we can see how the system closed in to protect the police officers from recrimination.  The police officers who arrested and restrained Sheku, in a restrain that led to his death, were allowed to go back to the station and sit in a room together which gave them an opportunity to confer.  This would never have happened if they had been treated as suspects.  PIRC, the body that investigated Sheku’s death, didn’t have the power to force police officers to give statements; they eventually gave statements 32 days after Sheku died.  That would not have happened if a civilian had been suspected of killing Sheku, or if a civilian had been suspected of being responsible for the death of a police officer.  

Just as the PIRC investigation was about to start, the then head of Police Scotland, Stephen Hause met the police officers involved, he didn’t bother meeting Sheku’s family.   Kenny McAskill, the former Justice Secretary but still an MSP at the time wrote in a police magazine that no criminality would be found in the case, effectively claiming that the police officers were not guilty, this was months before the investigation had concluded. He added that this case was an example of ‘open season of hunting Police Scotland’ thus dismissing the family’s legitimate right to an investigation. 

The PIRC investigation structure is far from perfect and according to the family’s lawyer not fit for purpose.  Over 70% of its investigators are ex police officers, and the two officers investigating Sheku’s death had over 35 years of service at a senior level in the police.  The PIRC investigation which the Lord Advocate has based his decision not to prosecute the police officers was far from an independent investigation.  

Sheku’s family have had no public funds to help them find out what really happened to him, they have had to fundraise and rely on the goodwill of their legal team and professionals they have sought services from, whilst the police and judiciary have access to public funds to safeguard their reputation and authority. 

Finally, Dame Eilish Angiolini’s interim report of the Public Inquiry into deaths in custody has recommended that there should be no delays in investigations, that police should not be allowed to confer and investigating bodies such as PIRC be more independent of the police.   These conditions were not met in PIRC’s investigation which is why Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf have agreed to have an independent Public Inquiry.  Scotland could have its own equivalent of the MacPherson Inquiry report following the killing of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which concluded that the police were institutionally racist.  At that time, Scottish police said that McPherson didn’t happen in Scotland and the police weren’t racist.  The Sheku Bayoh Public Inquiry may conclude otherwise.  

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 Katy Sian (Northern Police Monitoring Project)

Despite white America’s attempts to forget, lynchings of black bodies are not simply part of a grisly and shameful chapter in the history of the US. Lynchings are very much the present, with black body, after black body, after black body, murdered by white supremacists masquerading as police. This is borne out of a system built on racism; a society whose laws, culture, politics, and education, serve white supremacy. The United States, it seems, is only united in its disregard, disrespect, and dismissal of black lives. Police racism and violence knows no bounds in this context, with officers inflicting a regime of daily terror upon African Americans. They do not serve to protect, but serve to kill. They do not serve to keep communities safe, but serve to keep them defenceless. They do not serve for the common good, but serve for the exceptionally bad.

The US has always criminalized black bodies, so much so, that being black is in itself a crime. This is a society that prefers to incarcerate masses and masses of black and brown bodies, rather than afford them the right to an education. Communities of colour are kept in poverty, rather than being provided with the access to healthcare, welfare, and resources that they so desperately need. It is a society that prefers to kill innocent black bodies, rather than see them live, grow, and prosper. The US was built by the hands of African Americans – their blood, their sweat, and their tears – and how are they repaid? It seems that the shackles, chains, servitude and oppression, wasn’t enough, now bullets fired into their backs, chokeholds, and officers kneeling on their necks to the sound of I can’t breathe.

The myth of ‘threatening’ racial ‘others,’ particularly black bodies, has served to legitimize police brutality throughout history right up to the present day. This of course is not unique to the US; it is standard practice across all Western nations. In the UK, as Stuart Hall documents, there was the construction of the mugging crisis in the 1970s, which linked so called mugging to black youth, so much so that, “mugging and black crime are now virtually synonymous”. By falsely equating mugging to black youth, official responses in the form of oppressive street policing in inner city areas i.e., ‘trouble spots,’ were legitimized.

The murder of George Floyd, and the many other black men and women before him, and after him, really has to make us question the role of the police in society. Unfortunately, as so often is the case when these horrific events happen, we see the all too familiar ‘bad apples’ argument being replayed. In this narrative it is the individual officers who are to blame. We must question how many times this claim can be made before we reach a point and finally admit that it is the whole system that is rotten. Recent events have certainly contributed to the opposing of the ‘bad apples’ framework, as more and more recognize that the problems with the police are indeed systemic.

The police for black and brown working class communities have always represented what Sivanandan refers to as, ‘an army of occupation’.[ii] The notion of the ‘bobby on the beat’ who is trusted and supported by the community is therefore a fantasy, and couldn’t be more further away from the realities experienced by communities of colour who remain targeted and pursued in all walks of life, from the war on drugs to the war on terror. Over the decades, the police have become increasingly militarized with tactics being deployed around coercion rather than consent. Equipped with armed vehicles, assault rifles, grenades, and snipers the police continue to spread terror with a state sanctioned capacity to use violence on their targets. They have more and more power, and less and less accountability, often operating with total impunity.

In his 2018 book, The End of Policing, Alex Vitale makes a compelling case for the abolition of the police. He demonstrates that the key purpose of the police is to supress poor, working class, and non-white communities. He argues that more police than ever before are engaged in more enforcement of more laws, resulting in astronomical levels of incarceration and abuse, particularly aimed at black and brown communities. For communities of colour then, the police have an increasingly pervasive, and aggressive, presence. In light of George Floyd we can no longer ignore or deny the toxicity inherent within policing. Reform is not enough, and the mobilizations and campaigns around Black Lives Matter and wider calls for police and prison abolition need to be taken seriously, if we want a better society and future for all.

For too long now we have seen a liberal complacency, and an attempt to weaken anti-racism, prompted by a false belief in the post-racial ideology, i.e. the idea that the West is somehow free from racism. Over several decades, this liberal denial of racism has paved the way for a dangerous unchecking of white supremacy, which has facilitated the landscape that we find ourselves within today. The Black Lives Matter movement is therefore significant to call out and call to account the racism that has been left to fester for far too long. It is an exciting and transformative movement that is rebuilding and strengthening anti-racist and abolitionist movements, allowing voices of the dispossessed to be heard across the globe. From the protests in the US, to the removal of statues across Europe, and solidarity from the Palestinians, these are critical uprisings that are forcing the West to own up to its brutal colonial history, and recognize the way in which those imperial legacies continue to inflict pain and suffering among black and brown bodies throughout the world.

In her book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis alerts us to the necessity of forging transnational and intersectional solidarities arguing that, “we will have to be willing to stand up with our combined spirits, our collective intellects and our many bodies”. This seems symbolic of the Black Lives Matter movement today. It represents a force for real change through its ability to connect so many of us around the world fighting for social justice, allowing our collective demands on the state to be heard. This has to be the start of a new global and hegemonic anti-racist politics, and now more than ever is the time for all of us to be courageous, after all, as W.E.B Du Bois reminds us, the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

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 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.

Matteo Tiratelli of the Univesrity of Manchester considers the role of stop and search in deterring crime

Stop and search has been a controversial topic over the last few years. In 2014 the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, told MPs that as many as 250,000 street searches were probably carried out illegally last year and called for significant reductions in their use. In London these changes were already being championed by the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Bernard Hogan Howe, who boasted that they had been reduced by almost a third. But, recently, as violent crime has risen, there’s been a backlash. Last year the new Met chief, Cressida Dick, called for more stops and searches. And earlier this year London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, went back on his election pledge and revealed that police would be ‘significantly’ increasing stop and search in London.

There are many different angles to approach stop and search form. Reports have shown a startling disparity in the likelihood of black and Asian men being stopped and searched. There have also been investigations into its impact on communities, on trust in the police and its possible role in the 2011 Riots. But, its rare to see people explicitly assess whether changes in the level of stop and search deter people from committing crimes. This is the implicit, ‘common-sense’ idea that lies behind recent attempts to use the overall level of stop and search as a policy tool to reduce crime. But, despite a feeling amongst many officers and policy-makers that ‘it must have an effect’, there’s not much evidence to base these policies on.

Our study aimed to test this ‘common-sense’ assumption. Using ten years of Metropolitan Police data (2004-2014), grouped in months and weeks within each London Borough, we tested a large number of possible associations between stop and search under different powers and different crime types. The central finding is that the effect of stop and search on crime is marginal, at best. Although you can never prove a null hypothesis, there’s precious little evidence of a meaningful effect. We find some associations, particularly suggesting that stop and search might be reducing the number of recorded drug offences, but the overall picture is of tiny and inconsistent effects. Given recent trends in London, we were particularly interested in the connection between stop and search and violent crime. Looking initially at non-domestic violent crime we found no real evidence of an effect. The tiny association between section 1 and section 47 (weapon) searches showed that a 10% increase in stop and search would lead to a 0.01% decline in crime, but this effect disappeared when we looked across months and other search powers. When we tested the same models using ambulance incident data for calls related to ‘stab/shot/weapon wounds’, we found no significant effects whatsoever. This all suggests that, if there is any association between the overall level of stop and search and crime, it is likely to be at the outer margins of social and statistical significance.

This finding echos earlier studies. A Home Office report into the impact of Operation BLUNT 2 (a knife crime initiative involving a large increase in section 60 searches in some Metropolitan Police borough) found no effects. There were similar findings from a variety of other studies looking at New York, London and Chicago, all of which we describe in our paper. If this is the evidence base for Sadiq Khan’s policy proposals, then it’s not a strong one.

What should we conclude from this? If we are interested in policy tools which will reduce the overall level of crime, particularly violent crime, then there’s not much evidence to suggest that forcing/empowering officers to do extra searches on each patrol is going to be effective. But, this was never the legal justification for stop and search in the first place. The question should not be about if token stops and searches will deter potential offenders, but whether each and every stop is legally and operationally justified.