WeeklyWorker

13.07.2023
Police officers at Pride London: maintaining public image

Silence on the alternative

Crimes, prejudice and sheer incompetence give added weight to the traditional republican slogan of a people’s militia, argues Mike Macnair. So why is the left so reluctant to make the call?

Police misconduct is back in the news. On the other side of the Channel, the June 27 shooting of a 17-year-old who had stopped in his car, followed by the police tear-gassing of an initially peaceful protest, led to spectacular, large-scale riots, as it symbolised the normal abuse of power by the French police in the ethnic-minority banlieues. In this country, the affair of the 1993 racist killing of Stephen Lawrence and the fucked-up (to be polite) police ‘investigation’ into it resurfaced on June 26 with the claim that another participant in the killing, reported to the police at the time, was never pursued.1

Meanwhile, on June 29 the first report of the Undercover Policing Inquiry chaired by retired judge Sir John Mitting reported that the agent provocateur tactics used were not justified; it is perhaps noteworthy that the Lawrence family and campaigners round the Lawrence killing were among those targeted by the ‘spycops’.2

On July 5 the UK Supreme Court ruled that the test of ‘self-defence’ to be applied in police disciplinary proceedings arising out of killing was the civil liability test, under which the policeman’s belief that his life was in danger had to be objectively reasonable - as opposed to the criminal liability test, under which it had merely to be an honest belief.3

On the same day, “home office sources” floated what The Times headlined as an “Overhaul to tackle the scourge of rogue police”, and The Guardian as “2,000 police in England and Wales may face sack in vetting revamp”. Details are not yet forthcoming, but the main proposal floated seems to be to replace external legally-qualified chairs of police disciplinary panels with chief constables. The vagueness of these proposals implies that the press were told of them on July 5 in order to distract attention from the UKSC’s ruling on the killing of Jermaine Baker - which would all too easily bring to mind not only Baker’s killing, but the Nahel M case, and other London police shootings of unarmed car users - Mark Duggan in 2011, Chris Kaba in 2022.4 It did indeed do so.

Culture

The UKSC’s judgment goes at length into the evolution of police disciplinary procedures since the Report of the Taylor Review in 2005 recommended replacing the then-existing ‘court-martial model’, based on military discipline, with an ‘Acas model’ based on ‘good practice’ in employers’ disciplinary procedures (but in fact retaining a good many procedural rights for police officers). Since Taylor there has been considerable tinkering - not only with disciplinary procedures, but also with the definitions of the justified use of force, leading to (their lordships point out) considerable complexity and obscurity in the law and the guidance given to police. But the Taylor Review itself responded to perceived serious problems in police accountability …

This is, in short, a long-running problem. The London Metropolitan Police (‘the Met’) has been recently characterised as “institutionally corrupt”; it is questionable whether anyone believed that the 1970s ‘Operation Countryman’ got near to the core of the problems.5 The white-supremacist and male-supremacist ‘police culture’ certainly extends back to the 1970s and has been notoriously undislodged by managerialist ‘diversity’ initiatives.6

The persistence of the ‘police culture problem’ tells us that it is not merely a matter of history. After all, the very different histories of Britain and France have produced very similar problems in ‘police culture’. Similar phenomena can be seen in the police culture of the USSR starting in the 1920s, and in a more extreme form (because the police culture was given more general political authority) in the Stalin period.7 At the end of the day, the persistence of police corruption, white-supremacism and male-supremacism can be explained by the nature of professional policing as a job.

A good deal has been written about this issue, but a recent pop-psychological treatment of related issues can be found in Brian Klaas’s ‘book of the podcast’, Corruptible: who get power and how it changes us.8 Klaas makes two relevant points. The first is that people who seek power over others are likely to apply for jobs which give them that power, policing being one of the salient examples. White-supremacism and male-supremacism are ideologies of petty power over others, and are therefore likely to be ideas shared by applicants for policing jobs. The second is that power actually does corrupt. This point links to a good deal of the ‘police culture’ research: doing the policing job requires regularly using ‘suspect classifications’ (not enough time to do otherwise). And it also requires prioritising aspects of policing which can produce ‘results’, and so on. It is the nature of the job.9

Hence the ‘overhaul’ of police discipline to bring more power in-house to the chief constables, floated on July 5, will have the opposite effect to that which government spin would have us believe. Instead of clearing out the ‘bad apples’, it will reinforce the internal solidarity of the police in the face of scandals. Klaas makes this point, too: corruption and misconduct can be reduced where those in charge are subject to external surveillance, rather than those below, he argues.

The traditional pre-1914 programme of the socialist movement - including Labour in 1900 - included the abolition of the standing army (and that included the standing professional police force) and its replacement with a people’s militia. It should be clear from what I have said so far that there are two large drivers of police misconduct. The first is the use of the police for ‘purity policing’ initiatives by moral entrepreneurs aiming to hold the lower orders’ noses to the grindstone: eg, the ‘Societies for the Reformation of Manners’ going back to the 1690s, long before the professional police; and today’s ‘War on Drugs’. The second and fundamental driver is the set-up of the police as a long-service career force. Replacing the police career regime with a short-service conscript10 militia would fundamentally alter the incentives which drive police misconduct, and open up the decision processes to the light of day.

Far left

Mysteriously, however, this traditional plank of the programme of the workers’ movement has disappeared from the arsenal of the larger part of the far left. That it should be absent from the ideas of the Labour left is unsurprising; their state loyalism makes them naturally support utopian ideas of a ‘reformed’ police force in spite of 50-plus years of failures. But the far left?

Socialist Worker’s web page carried on July 4 an article by Matt Foot headlined “Met Police needs disbanding now”. The story is mainly about the Stephen Lawrence case and ‘spycops’, but mentions also the rape/murder of Sarah Everard and the police attack on the vigil for her, the findings of institutional corruption in the 2021 report on the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan and of institutional racism and sexism in the Casey review earlier this year, and the case of serial sex attacker David Carrick. The conclusion: “What else do the Met have to do before it is disbanded?”

OK, but what happens after the Met is disbanded? It is rumoured that ‘Countryman’ made this proposal: to actually expand the neighbouring police forces to cover London outside the City (whose police force cannot be abolished because of the constitutional right of the City to undisturbed self-government, settled as part of 1688-89). It should be obvious that this would be a merely cosmetic reform - all the more so since the reduction of democratic accountability over the last 60 years, with the separation of police authorities from local authorities under the 1964 Act and the 2012 creation of “police and crime commissioners”.11

In the following issue of Socialist Worker Charlie Kimber, writing from Lyon, on the riots in France, had an article headlined “Stand with the rioters against the French state and police”.12 Kimber was mainly engaged in polemic against parties and leaders of the French left who have condemned, or failed to give clear support to, the riots. His conclusion is that:

… our criticism of riots is that they do not go far enough. They do not have the power to tear down the whole system of capitalism. Moving from riot to revolution does not mean becoming more ‘respectable’ or diluting the fury against the system.

It requires an insurrectionary fusion of the power of the workplace and the power of the street. But the first step is to stand with the rioters now.

This is, in fact, delusional. It is plainly Bakuninist, which makes it appropriate that Kimber should be writing from Lyon, where on September 17 1870 Mikhail Bakunin helped draft a proclamation which announced: “The state’s administrative and governmental machine, having become powerless, is abolished.” It did not take more than a couple of days for the “abolished” state to get rid of this ‘Lyon Commune’.13 The problem is not the “fusion of the power of the workplace and the power of the street”, but organisation that can offer an alternative to the decision-processes of capitalism and its state.

Socialist Appeal carried back on May 26 a story headlined “Police and Tories to blame! Overthrow their system!”, on the riots in Ely, Cardiff, triggered by the killing of two teenagers in a crash after their electric bike was chased by a police van - and the police then lied about the circumstances. “Above all,” says Socialist Appeal, “this episode has once again demonstrated that the police are not our protectors, but exist to protect the capitalist class and their rotten system. Both must be overthrown.” But, of course, the connection between police car chases of teenagers and the protection of capitalist class interests, though real, is decidedly indirect (via young men as a target group and purity-policing as an indirect means of controlling the lower orders). And all that can be said by way of conclusion is that “It’s time for workers and youth to sweep capitalism - and the vicious armed bodies of men that uphold it - into the dustbin of history, where they belong.” Nothing specifically about the police?

The same is true of Rob Sewell’s July 6 article on the riots in France: ‘Rising discontent and social explosions: riots or revolution?’ He says nothing specifically about the police and policing; only:

Rioting offers no way forward for workers and youth. Instead, the fight must be for revolution: to overthrow this rotten dog-eat-dog system, and to transform society along socialist lines.

What is required is the forging of a revolutionary leadership; a Marxist leadership that is capable of matching up to the challenges facing us.

So tell us, Rob: what alternative can this ‘revolutionary leadership’ offer to capitalism’s professional police force? Why not raise the traditional socialist demand for a militia? Like the SWP, Socialist Appeal is in the business of ‘leading workers by the nose’ to make revolution - and this means silence on the possible alternative to capitalist governance.

  1. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65989993. There will be a debate in Westminster Hall on July 12: commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2023-0160.↩︎

  2. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66020767.↩︎

  3. UKSC 24 (2023).↩︎

  4. irr.org.uk/article/reading-the-riots-from-mark-duggan-to-nahel-merzouk.↩︎

  5. blogs.sussex.ac.uk/centre-for-the-study-of-corruption/2023/03/28/is-the-metropolitan-police-institutionally-corrupt. On ‘Countryman’, there is a convenient reference at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Countryman.↩︎

  6. A recent discussion with the extensive literature cited is M Hasan, ‘Racist bullying of BAME women within police services in England: race, gender and police culture’ International Journal of Police Science and Management vol 23, pp182-95 (2021).↩︎

  7. DR Shearer Policing Stalin’s socialism New Haven 2009; P Hagenloh Stalin’s police Baltimore 2009.↩︎

  8. London 2022.↩︎

  9. Cf also M Rowe Disassembling police culture Abingdon 2023 - especially chapters 7 and 8.↩︎

  10. Conscript: a volunteer militia would be a different matter, dominated by the ‘respectable’ upper and middle classes - like the volunteer Yeomanry who attacked the Peterloo demonstrators in 1819.↩︎

  11. There is a summary account of the 1964 act at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Act_1964. Police and crime commissioners: lordslibrary.parliament.uk/police-and-crime-commissioners-powers-and-functions reports on the institution and a 2020 government review.↩︎

  12. Socialist Worker July 11.↩︎

  13. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyon_Commune.↩︎