This International Day Against Police Brutality, we stand in solidarity with those resisting police violence across the world. Police brutality is not an exception —it is the norm, an extension of their everyday exercise of power and violence. From violent arrests to unnecessary, high-risk, often fatal, pursuits, stop and search, surveillance, ‘gangs’ policing, use of taser, and harassment, policing harms our communities daily, here in Greater Manchester, and around the world.
Whilst commemoration of the day began in Canada and Switzerland, its message resonates globally. Policing is a tool of control and oppression. Our fight is international, because the harms of policing are felt everywhere.
To resist this system, we must organise, disrupt, and build alternatives. You can do this by supporting local police monitoring groups, supporting UFFC (United Families & Friends Campaign), building community and showing up for those who are subject to the harms of policing: being an active bystander when you witness police violence.
We oppose police violence today and everyday as we – alongside others in Manchester, the UK and globally – fight for a world where communities keep each other safe and no more lives are lost to, or harmed by, the police, prisons and other agents/agencies of state violence and injustice.
NPMP’s Zara Manoehoetoe addresses the crowd in St. Peter’s Square
In Manchester these demands are far from new. Following a series of complaints raised by young people in 2019, NPMP and Kids of Colour submitted a Freedom of Information request that revealed that Greater Manchester Police (GMP) planned to put twenty additional police in schools for the 2020/21 academic year. As the nation went into lockdown following the outbreak of Covid-19, grassroots organisers held forums, crafted an open letter to Mayor Andy Burnham, and launched an online survey to consult young people, parents, teachers, and wider communities about their views on the decision. The results of the survey provided the foundation for a subsequent report, Decriminalise the Classroom: A Community Response to Police in Greater Manchester’s Schools (2020), which, as NPMP member Siobhan O’Neill explained, revealed widespread opposition to police in schools and concerns that their presence exacerbates existing inequalities, foster a culture of low expectations and create a climate of hostility that leads to the criminalisation of young people, particularly working-class and racially minoritised students. Instead, respondents overwhelmingly called for funding to be spent on non-punitive alternatives such as youth workers, counsellors, and more teachers.
NPMP’s Siobhan O’Neill describes the findings of the 2020 Decriminalise the Classroom report
Lisa Eigbadon describes attending a school with a school-based police officer in Manchester
Angela Henry of the Manchester branch of No More Exclusions and Eline Davies of Kill the Bill Manchester connected Child Q’s experience to wider systemic patterns of racialised surveillance, discrimination and violence in schools. As Angela Henry explained, ‘Child Q is not the first Black young person that finds themselves being dealt with disproportionately, aggressively, illegally and traumatically at the hand of police who are supposed to serve and protect, and she won’t be the last under current policing structures.’ All of the speakers insisted that ‘police have no place in schools’ and joined Henry in calling for non-punitive transformative justice interventions of the type outlined in the recent No More Exclusions report, ‘“What about the Other 29?”: Demystifying Abolition in the UK Education System’. ‘Abolition’, as NPMP member Zara Manoehoetoe explained, ‘is about putting love and care at the centre of our approach.’
Kids of Colour founder, Roxy Legane, addresses the crowd in Manchester.
Kids of Colour founder, Roxy Legane, recounted some of the more recent developments in the local No Police in Schools campaign which through collaboration with young people, parents, and members of the National Education Union’s North West Black Members Organising Forum secured a landmark victory in July 2021 when Councillor Garry Bridges announced that plans to introduce twenty additional officers were being scrapped. Despite these gains, Legane cautioned that police are still a presence in many local schools and that parents at a school in Trafford are currently embroiled in a battle to halt the introduction of additional officers. As Legane explained, such developments contradict the stated policy of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority that if a school does not want an officer, they will not be forced to have one, a reality that necessitates concerned parents, young people, and community members continue to push back. Pushing back, Manoehoetoe asserted, means identifying those schools that have, or are seeking to introduce, a police presence and contacting the board of governors and local councillors to express your discontent. Whether they are operating as ‘schools-based police officers’, ‘school resource officers’, ‘school liaison officers’ or by another name, if you are a teacher you should organise with your local union to pass motions opposing police in schools. And, you should join the more than 25,000 people that have already signed the No police in UK schools petition.
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.
The Northern Police Monitoring Project (NPMP) wishes to offer its full support to the Stop the Scandal campaign launched by the Racial Justice Network and Yorkshire Resists. The stop and scan initiative allows police to check people’s fingerprints in the street against immigration and crime databases.
As the Stop the Scandal campaign has argued, the introduction of this scheme acts to ‘turn the UK police into a border force’. This scheme has been introduced without due consultation with the public, and there is no indication of: any checks against officer discrimination, checks against (racist) issues with the biometric technology, and checks of the accuracy of Home Office immigration databases. Given robust evidence of racism at all levels of policing, including evidence of racial discrimination in biometrics and data, stop and scan will undoubtedly impact most harshly on Black and Brown communities.
The interlocking of policing and immigration control agencies is likely to perpetuate racism and contribute to what is already a ‘hostile environment’ for People of Colour who live with the ubiquitous threats of detention, deportation, criminalisation and incarceration.
We encourage people to support the Stop the Scandal campaign, and particularly it’s demands that the Home Office:
end the racist stop and scan initiative immediately, before it irreparably further damages relations between police and communities;
sever all connections between police activity and immigration databases, to prevent the police becoming an extension of border forces;
keep fingerprint scanning a step that only happens in police stations following arrest, in order to protect citizen privacy rights;
and publicly release the data captured in the West Yorkshire pilot, including its impact on axes of race, age and gender.
We, the undersigned, are concerned about the implementation of ‘Project Servator’ in the city of Manchester.We are more concerned about the unwillingness of Greater Manchester Police to justify this practice, or to respond to the legitimate concerns of the community.
In a statement on Project Servator, the Northern Police Monitoring Project drew attention to a video tweeted by Greater Manchester Police (@GMpolice) which showed uniformed officers handing out leaflets in the Manchester Arndale shopping centre. In the video, Superintendent Chris Hill stated that those who do not want to engage with leafleting officers would be ‘watched’ by plain-clothes officers. He has also urged the public not to worry about more ‘checks’ taking place.
We echo the contention of the Northern Police Monitoring Project that the public have the right to go about their daily lives without fear of state monitoring and surveillance. When individuals are not obligated to engage with the police, they have a choice, and choosing not to should not be grounds for suspicion. Whether in a rush or averse to leaflets, there are countless reasons individuals may choose not to engage with leafleting officers. Given the harm that over-policing has caused to many communities, we would even suggest that a direct desire not to engage with the police could be entirely justifiable and should not be grounds for suspicion.
Tactics like ‘stop and search’ have been shown to criminalise people and communities, without leading to effective crime prevention. ‘Project Servator’ is another example of police forces monitoring and imposing themselves upon individuals without any legitimate justification. ‘Project Servator’ presents itself as the police and community working together, but there can be no true partnership when individuals who do not participate are deemed potentially criminal. Given that GMP seek to present itself in this way, we are particularly disappointed that there has been no response to concerns raised and no attempt to justify this practice.
We hope that the public will continue to question this practice and believe that policing cannot continue without accountability. We call upon Greater Manchester Police to respond to our concerns and to end Project Servator.
Signed:
Northern Police Monitoring Project
Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury, (Northern Police Monitoring Project; Racial Justice Network; University of Manchester)
Dr Laura Connelly (Northern Police Monitoring Project)
Dr Tanzil Chowdhury (Northern Police Monitoring Project, Queen Mary University of London)
Ilyas Nagdee, NUS Black Students Officer
Dr Asim Qureshi, Research Director, CAGE
Ewa Jasiewicz, Writer and Union Organiser
Jas Nijjar (Brunel University London)
Roxy Legane (Kids of Colour)
Zita Holbourne, National Chair BARAC UK & National Vice President, PCS union
Dr Meghan Tinsley (University of Manchester)
Dr Kate Hardy, Associate Professor, Leeds University Business School
Dr Patrick Williams (Sites of Resistance, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Scarlet Harris (University of Glasgow)
Lee Jasper, Former London Deputy Mayor, Blacksox Sponsor
Hamish Reid, University of Nottingham
Dr Lisa Long (Leeds Beckett University)
Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper (King’s College London)
Peninah Wangari-Jones (Racial Justice Network)
Lowkey (HipHop Artist)
Chantelle Lewis (PhD researcher, Goldsmiths)
Dr Waqas Tufail (Leeds Beckett University)
Dr Azeezat Johnson (QMUL)
Jessica Perera (Institute of Race Relations)
Yusef Bakkali (Birmingham City University)
Katrina Ffrench, Chief Executive – StopWatch
Dr Jamie Woodcock (University of Oxford)
Dr Musab Younis, (Queen Mary University of London)
Dr John Narayan (Birmingham City University)
Hafsah Aneela Bashir ( Poet, Playwright, Co-Director of Outside The Frame Arts )
Dr Leon Sealey-Huggins (University of Warwick)
Dr Gary Anderson, Senior Lecturer Drama, Liverpool Hope University
Dr Niamh Malone, Senior Lecturer Drama, Liverpool Hope University
Dr Necla Açik (University of Manchester)
Manchester Momentum
Afshan D’souza-Lodhi (Northern Police Monitoring Project, poet and playwright)
Dr Katy Sian (Northern Police Monitoring Project, University of York)
Ian Allinson (former candidate for Unite General Secretary, Manchester)
Kojo Kyerewaa, (Black Lives Matter UK)
Guy Parker
James Chambers
Mea Aitken (Kids of Colour)
Fowsia Cansuur (Kids of Colour)
Clara Paillard (PCS union, President of Culture Group, personal capacity)
Farzana Khan (Director, Healing Justice London, Fellow International Curators Forum)
Right to Remain
Dr Kim Foale (Geeks for Social Change)
Liz Fekete, Director Institute of Race Relations
Dr Kerry Pimblott (University of Manchester)
Becky Clarke (Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dr Karis Campion (University of Manchester)
Dr Samantha Fletcher (Lecturer in Criminology, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dr Helen Monk (Lecturer in Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University)
Isobel Cecil (PCS Union, youth engagement worker)
Niamh Eastwood, Executive Director, Release
Y-Stop
Sharon Adetoro
Opemiposi Adegbulu (Lecturer, University of Huddersfield)
Dr Charlie Ingham (Clinical Psychologist).
Ashli Mullen (University of Glasgow)
CAGE
Abigail Stark, University of Central Lancashire
Dr Lauren Wroe, Social Workers Without Borders
Rob Dawson
Dr Philippa Tomczak, University of Nottingham
Ryan Bradshaw (Solicitor, Leigh Day)
Simon Pook (Human and Civil Rights Solicitor, Robert Lizar Solicitor)
Sue Lees (retired resident of Greater Manchester)
Paul Duggan (retired resident of Greater Manchester)
Phil Edwards (Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dr Sadia Habib
Mx Dennis Queen, Disabled Activist, GMCDP (Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People) and MDPAC (Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts)
Michael Etienne, Barrister
Black Lives Matter UK
Lara Datta
Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts (MDPAC)
Rose Arnold, Rising Up! Manchester Families
Dr James Trafford (University of the Creative Arts)
Max Farrar (Emeritus Professor Leeds Beckett University)
Melz Owusu (Kinfolk Network)
Tom Kemp (University of Kent)
George Grace (Next to Nowhere, Liverpool)
Sisters Uncut Manchester
Dr Fahid Qurashi, Lecturer in Sociology
Marion Dawson, activist, Smash IPP
Anandi Ramamurthy
Lani Parker on behalf of sisters of Frida
Jan Cunliffe Co Founder JENGbA (Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association)
SuAndi Black Arts Alliance
Dr Rajesh Patel, Senior Lecturer Manchester Metropolitan University
Sisters Uncut Leeds
Dr Rizwaan Sabir (Liverpool John Moores University)
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’.
First, on the 13th March we are co-hosting an event with our friends at Sites of Resistance. Professor Alex Vitale joins us to spark a public discussion about the expansion of modern policing and the extent to which it is inconsistent with the values of community empowerment and social justice. Alex is a Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice project, and author of ‘The End of Policing’ (Verso).
Alex will be joined by Dr Waqas Tufail, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University. Waqas’ research examines the policing of marginalised communities and the criminalisation of Muslim minorities.
Also joining the panel will be Dr William Jackson, Lecturer in Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University. Willams’s work focuses on policing, security and protest. He has recently written on the policing of anti-fracking protesters and state violence.
The event will be held at the Cornerhouse, arrive from 17:00 for a 17:30 start, please get your free tickets via Eventbrite here
Then, on Friday 23rd March, we have a public screening of THE HARD STOP, a revealing documentary charting the story of Mark Duggan’s friends and family following his death. We’ll be joined for the evening’s discussion by the amazing local youth worker Akemia Minott and the local youth group 8 4 Youth. The event will be held at Powerhouse (140 Raby Street (M14 4SL) from 18:00 – 20:30.
Christopher Alder died 20 years ago in the early hours of 1st April 1998. He was a fit and active 37-year-old black man who was born and grew up in Hull. He had served as a paratrooper in the 1980s and he was making a life for himself back in Hull when he died.
He died slowly, hands cuffed behind his back, face down on the custody suite floor at Queens Gardens Police Station, Hull. Christopher was unconscious and struggling for breath. His breathing was getting slower and louder, and more laboured. Paramedics were called too late to save him and the whole 11 minutes sequence was recorded on custody suite video. During this time police officers laughed and joked; later on, monkey noises can be heard on the tape.
Despite Humberside Police attempts to present a different story, Janet Alder, Christopher’s sister, defied their attempts to intimidate her and their attempts to deflect her questions about her brother’s death. In search of truth and justice, she launched the Justice for Christopher Alder campaign.
In 2000 the inquest jury in Hull gave a verdict that Christopher Alder was killed unlawfully. Still no-one has been convicted in connection with this case.
This injustice remains unresolved in 2018, as are the injustices visited on Janet Alder in her campaign for justice, including:
The cover-up of evidence.
The flawed and inadequate police investigations.
The failed prosecution by the CPS.
The institutional racism of the CPS in their dealings with Janet.
The failure to identify racism in individuals and institutional racism in all the official organisations connected with the case.
The surveillance of Janet and her supporters during the inquest.
The swapping of Christopher’s body so that the wrong body was sent to the funeral (this probably happened at the morgue).
All these are unresolved issues.
This is why the 20th anniversary of Christopher’s death will be commemorated by a protest gathering at 1pm on Saturday 31st March 2018 (Easter Saturday) at Queen Victoria Square, Hull.
NPMP’s Zara Manoehoetoe addresses the crowd in St. Peter’s Square
NPMP’s Siobhan O’Neill describes the findings of the 2020 Decriminalise the Classroom report
Lisa Eigbadon describes attending a school with a school-based police officer in Manchester
Kids of Colour founder, Roxy Legane, addresses the crowd in Manchester.