South Wales Police At The Justice for Mohamud Hassan Protests. Photo, Glyn Owen
BY CRIMINALISING BLACK, WORKING CLASS COMMUNITIES, THE STATE CAN JUSTIFY GREATER POLICING OF OUR NEIGHBOURHOODS, BUT THEIR SOLUTION TO MOST PROBLEMS SIMPLY MAKES THINGS WORSE. TO REALLY ‘FIGHT CRIME’, WE DON’T NEED MORE COPS – WE NEED MORE JOBS, MORE EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVES, MORE COMMUNITY CENTRES, AND A COMPLETE REALLOCATION OF RESOURCES.
On Friday, 8 January 2021 Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, aged 24, was arrested at his home and forcibly taken to Cardiff Bay Police station. Around noon on Saturday 10th, Mohamud was released from Cardiff Bay Police Station without being charged. He was so severely injured he took a taxi home.
When he returned home, Mohamud slept for a few hours, and when a friend attempted to wake him later that Saturday evening, he was unresponsive. His friend called an ambulance, and a first responder arrived on a bike. Two ambulance paramedics later arrived and declared him dead.
Shaken, the community organised a protest outside South Wales Police (SWP) station, and we, as a group, supported it, and used our social media presence to publicise the protests and the wider case of injustice as best we could.
For four days, for hours at a time, over two hundred of us occupied James Street. For many, the police station is a symbol of trauma, of brutality, and of a system that does not value Black lives. Community members spoke of their own personal experiences with SWP and what the police represents to them.
And with each passing day, the protests became more radical, almost as if people felt comforted by their community, comforted hearing that they were not alone, that they also have been a victim of racist, violent policing. By the fourth day people were chanting, without fear, what they really thought of the police.
Racism and corruption
Cases of brutality, racism, and general corruption are synonymous with the police. Nearly 30 officers in South Wales Police have been charged with alleged criminal offences over the past five years.
The crimes range from assault, perverting the course of justice, to possession of indecent images and rape. A freedom of information request found SWP to have had the joint highest number of officers charged in the UK, with ten serving police officers charged with offences since 2013.
On top of this, there are the ongoing campaigns for justice for Christopher Kapessa and Siyanda Mngaza, two shocking examples of the way the police and criminal justice system disregard Black lives. And of course there is the historic injustice of the Cardiff 3, for which no officer in South Wales Police was ever charged.
But the problems go beyond one force, they relate to the whole system, and this is why we call for abolition.
Often, the knee jerk response to this position is something along the lines of: ‘isn’t that a bit unrealistic?’, a bit ‘utopian’? But we must remember that the police as an institution is not an especially old one, set up by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, it had two main purposes: to manage the revolts in Ireland and crush worker uprisings in response to industrialisation.
In fact, what we argue is completely realistic, practical and logical. Abolishing the police is not an overnight process, but it is a gradual reallocation of resources from the police, and a systemic shift in how we approach, understand and confront crime. And most importantly, how we understand the role of the police within our society.
The police are ineffective and inefficient
Despite the rates of crime being on the decline for a considerable amount of time, the police, relative to austerity, continue to get substantial funding. We have the second largest policing budget per capita in Europe, and only last year did each police force in England and Wales get their biggest funding boost in a decade, with an increase in funding of 7.48% (SWP gained £384 million).
Yet, even with the funding, the percentage of those who are actually charged or summonsed by the police is incredibly low (7.8% in 2019). It is very unlikely, for example, that a rapist will ever see a courtroom, let alone a prison cell.
The reality is that the majority of police time is spent patrolling poor neighbourhoods, filing reports, issuing tickets and carrying out arrests for minor crimes (small scale drug possession, disorderly conduct, etc.)
Due to vulnerable and people of colour’s distrust of and past traumatic experiences with the police, many victims do not call the police as they simply do not believe they will help them, but instead make the situation worse.
A cogent example can be found in the USA, when the New York Police Department (NYPD) took a break from ‘pro-active policing’ in 2014/15. Given this fact, the majority of people would rush to the judgement that law and order broke down, and crime became rampant. Yet, the reality is that crime went down, not up.
And the reason for that is because, simply, the police ‘solution’ to most problems often makes things worse. Drug overdoses? Criminalise users. Precarious immigration status? Deportation. Each police ‘solution’ is to further ingrain oppression – to punish, not to rehabilitate. To cage, not to heal.
Who are the real criminals?
Crime control is in fact a very small part of policing, leading to many police officers being sent into situations they do not have the expertise for. For example, it is the police who are often first responders to someone having a mental health crisis. Added to the fact that it is Black people who statistically suffer most with their mental health and you have a recipe for racist, abusive policing. Because of this reality, a primary function of the police is to create a myth that crime is rampant in Black communities, that Black culture is inherently savage, which creates their disproportionate rates of poverty and imprisonment.
The way in which the system achieves this, is two-fold. The first is through media and our broken education system. From cop shows, news media, movies set in Black neighbourhoods, to your school classrooms, they have all perpetuated this misconception.
The second is inexorably linked to the way our system functions. Namely, by ensuring that unemployment and income inequality is a permanent feature within capitalist society. This inevitably impacts poorer, working class communities greater, of which Black people disproportionately comprise.
These communities will then be plagued by desperation, lack of opportunities, and inevitably will be pushed into alternative methods of survival, many of which will be criminalised and involve illegal business. It is income inequality that drives crime, not race. When Black neighbourhoods are compared with white neighbourhoods of similar income levels, you see similar rates of crime.
By keeping Black communities weak, disenfranchised and desperate, and ensuring media and education propaganda continues pushing the myth of Black criminality, the State can justify greater policing of Black neighbourhoods. And if we want to take back what is ours, to strike for better pay, to fight against exploitation, or stop the gentrification of our communities, who is there to stop us? The police.
To really ‘fight crime’, we don’t need more police – we need more jobs, more educational initiatives, more community centres, and a complete reallocation of resources.
Can we reform the police?
Reforming the police doesn’t work because it misunderstands the role of the police within society. Crucially, the evidence shows us this.
The Minneapolis Police Department – who’s officer killed George Floyd – implemented trainings on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, and crisis intervention; diversified the department’s leadership; created tighter use-of-force standards; adopted body cameras; initiated a series of police-community dialogues; and enhanced early-warning systems to identify problem officers. Yet none of it has been effective in stopping police abuse.
The NYPD similarly spent millions of dollars on police reform, yet it also had little to no impact on police brutality.
Similarly, in the UK, the IPCC (now the IOPC), set up as a watchdog to keep the police accountable to the public, is incredibly ineffective. Fewer than one in ten police officers are dismissed after a finding of gross misconduct. Unconscious bias training has also proven to have little impact on police racism, with stop and search rates, Taser usage, and deaths in custody all continuing to disproportionately impact Black folks.
Diversifying the police and recruiting more Black people does little to nothing in combating police brutality. Studies carried out in the USA, for instance, suggest that there is no relationship between the officer’s race and policing outcomes.
Some studies even show that Black officers may be more likely to discriminate against Black civilians due to increased pressure to conform. Equally, this phenomenon is not just isolated to the USA, but can also be observed in South Africa.
Simply put, the experience of racist and abusive policing is not a consequence of discretionary acts by individual officers. It is an institution that prioritise the pervasive harassment of Black youth for congregating in public spaces, racial profiling in vehicle stops, the war on drugs, and much more.
Communities are experiencing the criminalization of racialized poverty, not the implicit bias of a few white police officers.
Defunding to abolition
We believe defunding does not go far enough and is only the beginning, not the conclusion.
In Britain, the police, although still funded far too much, have had some funding cut in the past decade. ‘Defunded’, if you like. But what has that given us? It has increased the militarisation of the police, and the racialized, violent policing of Black people and their communities has continued.
You can argue that this would not be the case if we funded community initiatives, social workers, etc. and shifted the responsibility away from the police in the majority of situations.
And we would agree, but it also begs the question, why then even bother with the police? Their ongoing existence makes the kind of society we should want – one in which people are not exploited and oppressed, and where they can democratically decide how resources are allocated – far harder to achieve.
We must move on from the police. We must imagine a different world. And we must fight for it.
