PC Dinsdale

These are the Kray twins. For a good few years they ran a heavily armed gang that managed to kill Londoners with impunity.

These days we have the Metropolitan Police.

"Now steady on", I can almost hear you say, "Whilst I have my problems with the Duggan verdict, you're going too far here. Unlike criminal gangs, the police are basically on our side. They are there to protect us. Yes, things sometimes go wrong, and that is sad, and sometimes demands protest as a response. But you can't make people suspicious of the police, that way lies lawlessness, criminality, and violence".

To which I reply that, in the only sense of those words that matter, the Duggan family have already experienced lawlessness, criminality, and violence. So did the family and friends of Jean Charles de Menezes, those of Ian Tomlinson, those of Smiley Culture; so did Alfie Meadows, so did those still awaiting justice after the death of a loved one in custody.

But I did once agree with you, or at least I think I did.

I am white and was born away from any large urban area in a place lacking any significant ethnic or religious diversity. My left-leaning family would not be averse to criticising the actions of the police in places like South Africa or northern Ireland; but the police here, well they were just there, they were a local service you would call in certain circumstances, one of the options available if you called 999. The friendly local beat constable would come into my primary school from time to time, sometimes to tell us not to talk to strangers (except, that is, strangers in police uniforms), and sometimes to tell us about his work. He emitted an air of general joviality and came across as an avuncular local service provider, on a par with the woman in the sweet shop and the people who held lollipop sticks while we crossed the road. The policemen, and they were always men, in my Lego kits were no less smiley. I used to make them catch the pirates from another Lego kit; retrospectively this lacked something in the historical realism department.

Occasionally you'd hear people moan about the police, usually because of someone having been caught out by a cunningly placed speed trap, but this occurred against the backdrop of a much wider culture of confidence. With the benefit of hindsight, the local police were - and still are - engaged in a low grade war of attrition against the young unemployed (an important demographic in the region) executed through arrests for possession and catch-all public order offences. To the extent that people were aware of this, and awareness could only be had by reading the local paper very carefully, there was a widespread impression that it was a good things. 'Yobs' had to be dealt with, 'respectability' and 'decency' preserved. These sentiments came from normal, working class, people. At this stage in my life the phrase 'divide and rule' was something heard only in history lessons.

The thoughts of @Cwtsh (via Twitter)

I was not unaware that there was a grittier side to the police. We watched The Bill twice a week. And here we saw people with skin colours other than our own, often on the receiving end of the constabulary's attention. We saw knives and guns, and the fictional world constructed for us seemed a very dangerous place. Thank goodness the good men and women of Sun Hill nick were there to protect its inhabitants. To be sure, there were a few wrong'uns amongst the televisual cops. But they were usually rooted out in the end, and anyhow the script writers ensured they were shown in a bad light, as a break from the norm. In as much as these PCs had prejudices they were ones shared with a good proportion of the TV-viewing public. On this point, at least, the series could have been on to something.

My naivety was not total. The bubble was punctured by news reports showing the police evictions of travellers from Stonehenge; as a teenager I got involved in a local campaign against the Major government's Criminal Justice Bill and became more aware of suspicion of the police over their behaviour towards travellers. And hadn't the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six been set up by police in Britain? However, it was moving to London that really changed the way I saw the police.

I got more involved in politics, of a fairly run-of-the-mill Labour Students sort, and this led to me ending up on demonstrations: against student tuition fees, in support of striking workers, and against racism. From the word go I saw heavy-handedness and routine surveillance by Forward Intelligence Teams. I felt a real hostility from those policing demos. This feeling, as it turns out, was not unjustified, since from time to time the police's active dislike of protesters spilled out, denting the image of them as neutral keepers of the peace. On one occasion a police officer shouted "get a job"; given that this was directed at a group of workers striking in defence of their jobs, it didn't suggest a high level of awareness. It did serve to disabuse me of any uncritical belief that the police were on my side.

What I saw then, in the mid-1990s, is - with one exception I will mention later - nothing compared to what I have seen in the way of policing of recent anti-austerity demonstrations. I have seen hundreds of people kettled for hours on end, having done no more than protest against government policy. I have seen people, including friends, people I know and trust, snatched by undercover squads from protest marches. I have seen people punched and pushed to the ground by police without provocation. I have seen the routine deployment of riot police against perfectly ordinary, everyday, protests. The behaviour of the Metropolitan Police with respect to political events in the past four years has been often horrific , sometimes also tinged with absurdity. We have witnessed highly politicised policing, with the police actively taking sides against people opposing government attacks on their livelihoods and communities, acting with impunity and subject to no real accountability.




At this point there is a certain sort of person who will say that if only these people had kept their heads down, not made a fuss, and just got on with life, they'd never have ended up on the wrong end of plod's truncheon. This isn't very adequate, not least because the people in question were fighting for precisely the right to get on with life in the face of governmental attack. For other people, the mere act of getting on with life is enough to attract police attention. The homeless provide one example. Black and Asian people provide another.

If the policing of demonstrations I saw during the 1990s was heavy-handed, the policing of an anti-racism demonstration in Southall was something else altogether. The presence and actions of the police spoke of an assumption of criminality against the, overwhelmingly Asian, participants in the demonstration. Helicopters hovered overhead, riot vans sat on side streets, the main streets being lined with police.


Smiley Culture, killed during a Met raid, 2011.

Subsequent years confirmed in me this awareness of an assumption of lawbreaking from which I, because of my skin colour, am free. There are the 'random' stop and searches in London railway stations I have seen target young black men, and more recently anyone of obviously Muslim appearance. There are the, similarly 'random', vehicle checks which happen regularly on a road near my house, which almost always seem to involve black drivers. Less abstractly, there was the elderly black couple who attended a church I used to attend, as everyday and 'respectable' in their lifestyle as anyone I'd met in childhood, who said they would never phone the police because they simply didn't trust them. There are the young black men for whom being stopped and searched is a normal part of life. There is the young mother to whom I was supposed to be delivering a food parcel on behalf of a local charity. She wasn't in. I phoned her mobile. She said she was hiding in the bathroom with her children, because she was scared I was from the police. What kind of experience does that to someone?

None of this should surprise us. Racism and other prejudices exist in our society. They inevitably exist therefore in the police force. It is not as though donning a blue uniform magically does away with bigotry. Yet the police don't simply reflect the prejudices of the society in which they exist, they reinforce them, every stop-or-search or violent arrest of a black person reinforcing, via the lies that 'there is no smoke without a fire' and 'those with nothing to fear have nothing to hide' the racist narrative that sees black people as a threat. It is this narrative, for instance, that has convinced so many people that Mark Duggan had a gun with him in the taxi, in spite of no evidence having been presented to this effect. As the police find themselves under attack for racism, the spirit of collegiality, of looking after one's own, kicks in, toughening their resolve, embedding stubbornness, and reinforcing racism. A similar process takes place when the police are deployed against protestors - and the police are structurally positioned within capitalist society such that they will inevitably be deployed against protests from time to time, especially in times of economic crisis when wider ideological narratives seek to deflect blame from governments and the ruling class (onto 'scroungers', 'extremists' etc.), and that buoyed up by these narratives and by group spirit, officers will see themselves as 'us', fighting against 'them'.

The problems with the police are not the result of a few bad apples, of residual 'institutional racism' that is in the process of being sorted out, nor even of tragic but inevitable human error, resulting from false 'honestly held beliefs'. No the problems are systematic, and structural, issuing from the way the police function in a fundamentally unjust society. That is to say, the problems of the police, the polis, are political. And they demand a political response.

So in conclusion let's talk about the Labour Party in London. A good proportion of its electoral base does not view the Met, unambiguously at least, as protectors. Yet, in the face of government cuts to local authority spending, the party has consistently headlined opposition to police cuts as a priority, including during Ken Livingstone's last unsuccessful mayoral campaign. Let's be clear - the Met is well resourced, in spite of its present attack on its civilian staff. Its well-resourced nature reinforces its sense of immunity from accountability or consequence and makes it practically easier for it to act in an oppressive fashion - cash-strapped public services rarely turn up to small protests with dozens of vans, use several helicopters to police peaceful marches, or deploy paramilitary-style TSG units to make arrests for minor crimes, as happened in the aftermath of the 2011 riots.

Boris Johnson is an ally of this bloated force, and wants to buy them water cannon even while closing fire stations. As NWA so very nearly put it, cut the police.


ETA: See also Mark Fisher here.