More on the police

A blog from Patrick Sikorski

The massive international movement of revulsion against the police murder of George Floyd in the USA has rightly generated major debates about policing and whether or not it's possible to reform it without first overthrowing the economic and social system that policing exists to defend.

Immediate demands raised by the Black Lives Matter led movement are to "Defund the Police" and "Disband the Police". On the web many references were made to the example of a town called Camden in the state of New Jersey, which had apparently disbanded it's police force of around 120 officers due to many years of racist policing and widespread corruption, which, not surprisingly, had led the town to aquire one of the highest levels of homicides proportional to population, in the whole country. At the time of writing it's not clear whether the disbandment was directly caused by community pressure for urgent change or whether the town budget simply ran dry due to continual cuts to "public services". Nevertheless the initial reports indicate that a county or state wide force took over policing and proceeded to eventually re-recruit one hundred of the original Camden constabulary.

Details apart, this shows up both the issues and problems raised by policing in general and in addition who polices the police.

A very brief overview of the "policing" of the sectarian six county statelet of Northern Ireland also allows us to see how the British ruling class deals with such matters.

Prior to the Partition of Ireland policing in Ireland dates back to 1814 when Robert Peel, dubbed "Orange Peel" by the nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell because of his pronounced political sympathies, founded the "Peelers" or the Irish Constabulary controlled directly from Dublin Castle.

They were dubbed the Royal Irish Constabulary in the 1870s due to their role in suppressing a Fenian uprising.

After civil war and partition the Royal Ulster Constabulary was established on 1st June 1922 to police Carson's Protestant State for a Protestant People.

Following the Civil Rights marches and the events in Derry in 1969 the Ulster Special Constabulary (the "B Specials - a section of the RUC) were stood down in April 1970 - leaving the RUC and a new regiment of the British Army - the Ulster Defence Regiment.

The Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 obviously had to see the development another police force potentially capable of winning the "trust" of the Nationalist population after 30 years of conflict and over 3,000 deaths.

The successor to the RUC was named the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) based initially on the body of constables of the former RUC. At its formation the PSNI was almost 92% made up by members of the Unionist community, but legislation in line with the Patten Commission's findings made it a legal obligation to achieve 50:50 parity of members from both communities - through "affirmative action" and also de facto "positive discrimination".

By February 2011, 29.7% of the 7,200 officers of the PSNI were from Nationalist community but amongst police staff (who were not subject to the 50:50 rule) the proportion was only 18%.

Despite this, in 2011 the British Government abolished the 50:50 rule and the "lateral entry" of Catholic officers from other police forces.

Stubborn institutional and structural defects in police and legal systems - racism, sectarianism etc. - are based on and reflect the structural inequalities and deformations in the society concerned and furthermore, amplify those deformations in periods when those conditions become intolerable to those suffering under them.

So it's necessary to address both the underlying economic inequalities and the social relations - including policing and the judicial system - that it throws up at one and the same time. Policing under capitalism was never founded on protecting the citizenry - it was always - and it remains - about safeguarding private property, the process of accumulation of private wealth and the safeguarding of the power of the class that owns  that wealth.

The outstanding TV documentaries anchored by historian David Olusoga, on the story of Britain's slave trade and the mind boggling compensation paid out in 1834, not to the 800,000 slaves, but to the 46,000 British slave owners, totalling £17 billions in today's money - underlines the gut wrenching inhumanity on which capitalism and racism on both sides of the Atlantic is based to this very day. The compensation paid out was for the loss to the slave owner of his or her "private property". The re- investment of these blood stained millions helped create the Railway boom that lasted into the twentieth century and went into numerous investment banks and insurance companies in the City of London.

The Coronavirus pandemic, both in Britain and America, has laid bare the way that the system in both countries treats BAME people - just as it has fallen to those very same people throughout the Health and Care services to bear, not only day to day discrimination as a way life, but also the dangerous burden at work, of treating their fellow citizens who have been struck down by the virus.

As we see our "leaders" desperately trying to "turn the page" and get people back to work when the virus has only concluded chapter one of it's story; we are faced with an enormous economic recession with millions in the workplace already having taken a 20% wage cut through the furlough scheme. Many millions more will be pushed into unemployment trying to live on Universal Benefit. And then there is the matter of the "cost of the crisis" which means another howling gale of austerity - which we will be expected to pay for at the same time as Johnson and his gang desperately scramble with imposing Brexit; tying up shoddy trade deals with Japan, Trump etc; and trying to launch the "Brave New World" of Singapore - on - Thames. As the polarisation in society deepens the clashes between those fighting back and the defenders of the status quo will grow inexorably and therefore the issue of policing will continuously arise and will have to be dealt with.

Patrick Sikorski

Police Inequality

Patrick Sikorski

Policing Inequality

One of the many veteran Civil Rights leaders, speaking at the funeral service for George Floyd in Houston Texas said, to ever growing applause, that back in the 1960s those fighting for Civil Rights and against police brutality and killings were overwhelmingly black but that now they were being joined in the struggle by Hispanic people, by Asian people and indeed white people as well.

This is not only incontrovertibly true but also very importantly expresses the continuity and linkages of current events with the movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Our rulers are well aware of what's now at stake. But we can safely say that those of them who tried the same old standard responses to the mass mobilisations - a "violent minority" undermining the aim of the protests with "thuggery" and "criminal acts" found that their witterings sank without trace even quicker than did the statue of "Salver" Colston into the Bristol docks.

Sir Keir Starmer said it shouldn't have been torn down - but that it shouldn't have remained in place for so long! How long Sir Keir? How long? It is an an iniquity that it had to wait for yet another black person to be murdered the police for the matter to be dealt with properly.

The comments of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick and the leaders of Police Federation warrant much more attention.

Dame Cressida condemned "violent criminality" by a "minority of protestors" as "disgraceful" and said that it was "never acceptable" to "attack police" or "damage property".

John Apter, National Chair of the Police Federation - the police trade union - expressed some sympathy for the demonstrations but said they had been hijacked by "some who are intent on violence" against the police.

The head of the Metropolitan Police Federation however called on his "bosses" to apologise for failing to protect officers injured in the protests. Mr Ken Marsh called for urgent action from Dame Cressida and demanded his members were properly equipped with public order gear, including helmets and shields. He went on to say that the police should be dealing with the disorder "far more robustly" adding "we need to have the correct equipment on to deal with what is in front of us".

So far, so normal you might say? We've been warned! But these people have form.

On the day in July 2005 when Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes was the victim of a shoot to kill operation by the Met police down the Tube at Stockwell, the then Commander Cressida Dick, was the Gold Commander. Jean Charles was completely innocent. The then plain ordinary Keir Starmer QC was working at the DPP at the time. They decided not to prosecute any officers and it was subsequently treated as a matter of Health and Safety. It should be noted that since 1969 not one police officer has been convicted for their role in the death of someone in their "care".

Twelve years earlier in April 1993 Stephen Lawrence was brutally stabbed to death in Plumstead southeast London by a gang of at least five white racist murderers. It is now universally acknowledged that the resulting police inquiry was a charade and a cover up resulting from systemic institutional racism in the Met police together with police corruption at the local level. High Court judge Sir William Macpherson's public inquiry report published in 1999, described institutional racism as a form of collective behaviour, a workplace culture supported by a structural status quo, and a consensus - often excused and ignored by the authorities. Amongst its many recommendations, the report suggested that the police force boost its black representation, and that all officers be trained in racism awareness and cultural diversity. It took until January 2012, nineteen years after Stephen's death, for two of his killers to be successfully found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The continuities of racist policing are rooted deep in the building of trading empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then in the directly ruled colonies from the late eighteenth century onwards until well after the Second World War. During the colonial period the British Colonial Police forces and very often the regular armed forces played complementary and sometimes interchangeable roles in order to repress national liberation movements and political protest.

For example in 1967 the Hong Kong police used wooden baton rounds to disperse demonstrations that had started as a labour dispute but quickly developed into mass demonstrations against British Colonial rule. It's use led directly to one death and many injuries, but it was regarded as a successful public order weapon by the authorities.

When the peaceful Civil Rights movement in the North of Ireland, taking its inspiration and name directly from its counterpart in the USA at the time, was battered off the streets by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B Specials, the lid could no longer be held down on the gerrymandered sectarian six county statelet. The British Army used rubber and then plastic bullets from July 1970 killing at least 16 people and maiming many more up to 1986. Using live ammunition they also killed many unarmed civilians - notably in the Ballymurphy Massacre in Belfast during August 1971 in which 11 people died over a period of 48 hours; and the Bloody Sunday Massacre in Derry in January 1972 in which 14 people died.

Plastic bullets were deployed for the first time in Britain at Broadwater Farm in October 1985. Commenting afterwards Sir Kenneth Newman admitted to being surprised that the operational commander had considered that the riot could have been contained without their use. Sir Kenneth had been Chief Constable of the RUC from 1976 to 1980 and was appointed Commissioner of the Met Police in 1982 remaining in office until 1987.

Perhaps the development of police mass surveillance and intelligence gathering may be more recognisable to today's younger activists, but such practices are deeply based in the counter insurgency theories developed by Major General Frank Kitson, who wrote what was to become the definitive text book on the subject, entitled "Low Intensity Operations". It was based on active service against national liberation movements in Malaya, Cyprus and Kenya. Shortly after the publication of the book in 1971, he was posted to the North of Ireland, tasked with overhauling the military intelligence system.

Intel, down to the minutest detail about every adult in the "suspect" community was collected and computerised. The "suspect" community were the Nationalists. It was deliberately aimed at criminalising the whole of that community.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 officially brought that particular period to an end. However, it would be remiss to forget the history and to fall for the idea that racism in Britain or its policing is, or ever was, "nicer" or "more restrained" or indeed "policing by consent".

After all it was Britain that powered the Atlantic trade to provide our American cousins with their enslaved labour in what were originally our colonies. It's clear that the British Empire was the greatest engine of colonialism in the world during the nineteenth century and that the principle idealogical system that helped continue it's rule at home and enforce it abroad, was that of the claimed racial superiority of white British people.

But if Britain has lost its Empire why does racism and inequality persist and why does policing continue to uphold this rotten state of affairs? Many of us believe that it is because racism and inequality are the inevitable product of the class system and help to sustain that system. There is no hierarchy of oppressions involved here. The threads of racism and class division are woven into the basic fabric of our society and are mutually self - perpetuating.

'Policing - Reform or Abolition' - to follow.

Further on Black Lives Matter

Patrick Sikorski


The Murder of George Floyd and the Anti Racist Struggle

Points

1. As Spike Lee said there is is nothing “new” about the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota USA – it’s been going on for over 400 years.

2. What is new is that someone with a smart phone recorded the obscenity (with a sound track revealing a fragment of racist taunting from the murderer) and it went global.

3. So in the context of the biggest global pandemic for over a century which has stripped bare the gross inequalities in the richest country in the world, another black person is killed while being arrested by an officer of the law, on “suspicion of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 note”.

4. Trump declares himself the President of Law and Order and threatens the protesters and the American people with first the National Guard and then the Army under the Insurrection Act. He knows the latter isn’t feasible (just yet…..) but in the meantime he’s mobilising his base – including it’s armed militia wing. And for good measure he’s mobilising God as well, after having the steps of St. John’s Church in Washington DC cleared by tear gas of peaceful protesters.

5. Apparently recent polls show that 82% of Americans believe in God. 62% of them believe that the virus is a message telling humanity to change; 55 per cent believe that God will protect them.

6. There is more to it. He (that’s Trump!) brandishes a bible in defence of the divine rights of property over and above the people’s claim to human rights – the Founding Fathers would be proud. Not for him any liberal style support for protests at an injustice whilst denouncing the rioting and looting – no, the message is very clear - just get off the streets and get back to work and back into your ghettos. 

In a leaked conversation with former staff members, Obama called the US response to the Covid epidemic “an absolute chaotic disaster”. Majority Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, reinforcing the stereotype of the white Southerner telling the black man he ought know his place, said “Obama should have kept his mouth shut”.

7. But ideology and its constant reproduction can only continue to work effectively if it has a secure basis in material reality. The material reality for most working and middle class Americans is that their standards of living, job security, pensions and health care have been systematically trashed over the last 40 years – and that includes the Obama years. And then came the Crash of 2008 and the plague of 2019. 

Now half of all Americans receive health insurance through their employers. If the unemployment rate, caused by the lockdowns, continues at 20% it is estimated that as many as 43 million will loose their insurance.

8. With long practised speed and precision, the mass media both in the USA and UK, frame the events as rioters versus protestors and outside agitators versus legitimate local citizens to turn attention away from how heavy law enforcement de-legitimises all policing, at the same time as taking the spotlight off the impunity with which neo-fascists wield assault rifles both inside and outside state capitols.

9. As one American civil rights activist, Cornel West, says;


“ It also obscures the role of the repressive apparatus in preserving an order so unjust and cruel. The rule of big money, class and gender hierarchies and global militarism must be highlighted in our profound concern with anti – black police murder and brutality.”

10. The explosion of solidarity across much of the USA and finding a strong echo here in the UK and elsewhere, mark a new and decisive chapter. The response was immediate and strong – no laborious build up – just anti – racist action. Home made placards and leadership on the road, on the day and collective. Tens of thousands of overwhelmingly young people in a multi- racial rejection of a barbaric killing and the system that spawned it. It takes guts to face off riot police, deal with tear gas and batons and defy curfews. It takes magnificent moral and physical courage and the clean, clear sightedness of youth, uncluttered by the heavy loads of serial defeats, to do the right thing.

Such events set a seal with the future for those who directly partake in them and many will take up those challenges. They will form a new leadership in their communities and their workplaces. They will need to reach out to form united fronts with others who will step up to the plate. At the same time the struggle of the BAME community needs no lectures from anyone on how to conduct that struggle. They have the right to use whatever means are necessary to achieve their liberation from oppression

Trump thinks he needs a civil war

The murder of George Floyd is not some incredible moment of police madness. It is the result of the legitimisation of legal killing of black people in the USA. The reason why George Floyd's killer has been charged with murder is because millions of Americans, led by the black population, have revolted against this well-known fact. There will be huge results.

The black leadership in the US (and across the globe, including the UK) has rolled out (yet again) the many, socially and politically-hidden truths, of consistent, regular, organised, systemic, racism and its often deadly consequences. This blog is narrowed to Trump's reaction.

First is the the measure and strength of genuine mass movements of the people. The effect on the system and the regime of the mightiest power in the world is spectacular. The action, on the streets, by the millions, proves unstoppable. This is demonstrated by the utter failure of the Obama presidency, who mobilised an enormous movement to win his election, but who incessantly closed  down action by the people when it came to challenging the power of the state and government - even for his mild reforms. His response today to Trump? 'Vote'. Obama, even in his own terms, is still failing.

But the mass movement that emerged from the murder of George Floyd is not waiting or relying on Obama's call to 'vote' in November. The movement, if it fully succeeds, will certainly change the new President but also the effective implementation of reform by changing society. Already, following days of mass action, the whole picture in the US is starting to shift. Obama could not do it in his eight years.

So how is Trump facing this? For the first time since his election in 2016 he is frightened. He was always entirely interested in his own victory. For years, in which his poisonous, self-seeking behaviour seemed to have ranged from comedy to danger, his polling numbers remained stable from the mid 30%s to the low 40s. (Even after his recommendation to use bleach to 'defeat' the Coronavirus.)  For the first time since 2016 that has shifted. Can anybody believe that this is the product of Biden and the leadership of the Democrats? The defining strength of the anti-racist upsurge is indisputable. Even the Fox polls, focussed on the key states, are now showing failure for Trump in Arizona, Ohio, Wisconsin. Even Texas has come close. Trump had 306 electoral votes from the states in 2016. Now he has 270 and falling.

This has frightened Trump to the soles of his feet. Even Trump's violent efforts to clear 'the terrorists' outside the White House when he made his 'God like' photo shot, complete with a curled-up Churchilian style bottom lip, did not push up the polls. Which brings in his play with the military. Legally and technically he can do it. If the movement subsides he won't do it - for now. But if the movement continues, and the polls do not lift, Trump will put US soldiers on American streets.

Everybody knows the dangers, including Trump. At the bottom line soldiers do not calm down rioters, they are solely trained to shoot them. Many black leaders suggest that the murder of George Floyd might lead to the continuation and hopefully a positive resolution of the American Civil War - 155 years later. This is not a fantasy. Trump is not worried by a serious, albeit a mini-collision in society - so long as he succeeds. In his idiot way he imagines a battle where he has all the power. Is it necessary, after all lots of old generals don't want it? Big capital are scared, but impotent in the coming slump when the state has all the cards. Meanwhile Trump is toying with his new hot uniform.