 p
until recently, an assertion that the police were racist
was on a par with saying the pope was Catholic and bears
relieve themselves in the woods. Prejudiced attitudes on
the part of officers would not have been regarded as worthy
of reprimand because they were expected to share exactly
the same racist values as the property-owning segments of
society. While across the towns and cities of Britain the
local gentries running industry, commerce, the town hall
and the magistrates' court were racist, and not ashamed to
admit the fact.
The real reason why the views of officer Rob Pulling and
his colleagues caused so much outrage after the broadcast
of Mark Daly's undercover documentary in October last year
was that Britain's modernised ruling class has evolved a
degree or two beyond the crude, overt racism of the old petty
bourgeois gentry who formerly called the shots on the local
police committees and from the magistrates' bench. The local
basis of political power has itself been eclipsed by the
centralised bureaucracies who act as guardians for 'social
cohesion' and who see themselves as the vanguard of a new
multiculturalism.
The indignation which came on stream from the ruling clerisy
came from the discovery that the plebeian storm troopers
of law and order, at the level of their lower ranks, were
resolutely not singing from the 'rainbow Britain' hymn-sheet.
The massive post-Lawrence Inquiry investment in racial awareness
courses and touchy-feely bobbying simply hasn't been paying
the dividends that had been hoped for.
The 'Secret Policeman' case presented the problem as being
a failure on the part of management to root out its bad apples.
This is simplistic in the extreme. The really important question
is why, despite the sincerity of management in wanting to
tackle the issue, police racism has proven so resilient and
continues to flourish throughout the ranks. The plethora
of management tricks, from race awareness through to disciplinary
action, and the unquestioned determination of black and Asian
officers to tackle racism appears to have been of little
avail. Is there anything that can be done to fight the menace
of police racism?
New anti-racism
Firstly, let's set out the reasons why both the political
elites and police management should want to eradicate racism
from the ranks of the law enforcement agencies. The UK is
no longer governed through a network of local chiefdoms which
once bound chief constables to the magistrates, the town
hall clerk, the chamber of commerce and other luminaries.
The centralised state has displaced local authority and the
hegemonic values are now those of the sleek transnational
operators who rule the roost in trade, finance and the elite
professions. Racism is an anachronism for most of these people,
and its continued existence an embarrassment. With power
bases deeply entrenched in dynamic, 'global' cities, whose
connectedness with the international relays of capital has
typically guaranteed an immigrant presence of between a quarter
and a third of the urban population, racism, rather than
an easy tactic of divide and rule, looks more like a game
of Russian roulette. They want nothing to do with it.
The police chiefs themselves, an organic part of the new
ruling political caste, have additional reason for wanting
to see an end to crude racism. The cities where law and order
is a high profile issue, and where what happens decides the
trajectory of promising careers, are replete with minority
ethnic communities, some of whom (but by no means all) have
influence with respect to the governing powers. The statistics
show that black and ethnic minority people are more likely
to be the victims of crime than other groups, and at the
most basic and practical level, the maintenance of law and
order requires the support and commitment of these groups.
To this we have to add the complexities which arise from
living in an era of human rights, where a judiciary has learned
to be much more sensitive to the crass police techniques
of earlier years which had secured convictions in the local
magistrates' and crown courts. All of these issues, and more,
were brought together in the conclusions of the stupendous
Lawrence inquiry report, which can be seen as a manifesto
for those representing these new forces as to what needed
to change, and the urgency of doing it.
Structural imperatives
So the resilience of police racism cannot be assumed to
arise from an absence of a strong compelling reason to counter
it, or of a failure of will on the part of the management
tops. Instead we have to look at the structural imperatives
imposed on the police service which arise as a consequence
of it being a force imposing law and order in a society driven
by a capitalist dynamic.
A competitive market economy necessarily divides the social
entity into haves and have-nots. Defenders of the system
opine that this is not a problem when even the poorest segments
can take their consolation in the modern equivalents of bread
and circuses - MacDonald's burgers and Sky television. But
that doesn't seem to be the judgment of subaltern classes,
who continue to feel the material gap in wealth and culture
which exists between themselves and their 'betters' as bitter
grief.
A culture of antipathy and revolt is utterly predictable
in these circumstances, and crime and other forms of deviance
are a large part of it.
The police occupy a peculiar position in this confrontation,
in that they exist to enforce the law of the ruling groups,
but their professional ethic generates both empathy with
the subordinate strata (they need this to do their jobs with
a degree of efficiency) and contempt of their toffee-nosed
rulers who won't get themselves mucky doing the dirty job
they require to be done. In these circumstances, police culture
is itself a version of plebeian deviance, as the better TV
cop shows constantly remind us.
Sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists have offered
a veritable zoo of typologies which describe the outlooks
and character traits which are utilised by those on the beat
as survival techniques. In-group solidarity, a professional
ethos and value system, the postulates derived from functional
cynicism, isolation from the rest of society, and techniques
for dealing with a constant, high level of stress, are all
components of the police world view. The force's bureaucratic
and military structure privileges authoritarian personality
traits, and the circular, self-reinforcing behaviours which
using an American model, are presented as, variously, the
Wyatt Earp, the John Wayne, the Doc Holliday, the Custer,
the Parker, the HEW (police burnout), and the Ganzer syndromes.
The point is that the occupational hazard of policing a
divided, fractionalised society, in a force necessarily granted
autonomy in its roaming on the dangerous frontier between
law and disorder generates a complex response from the plebeian
foot soldiers caste in the role.This makes it ambivalent
to exhortations to 'good' and 'virtuous' behaviour from its
paymasters. Racism has taken deep root in this complexity,
and is unlikely to be banished simply because the bosses
have ordained it so.
The deviant, racist culture of police services seems to
be a universal feature of modern urban societies, and is
demonstrated with numerous examples from Europe to North
American and Japan, and is seen taking root in the post-socialist
and post-colonial societies in the East and South.
Policing and capitalism
This sounds like a counsel of despair, and it probably would
be if we were obliged to suppose that the task of maintaining
law and order is forever to be identified with preserving
the structural imperatives of a society organised along the
lines of capitalist market competitive divisions. Suppose
this wasn't the case, and we imagined instead a type of policing
which meshed with the innate preference of most human beings
for order as opposed to disorder; where the protection of
human rights was at least on a par with property rights;
and where the crucial disputes which had to be resolved amongst
citizens was the most efficient allocation of resources for
the maintenance of the optimum levels of mutual benefit.
It might be supposed that authoritarian, militaristic and
racist cultures would find it harder to get a foothold in
such a police service.
Maybe indeed the mechanisms of policing are in need of such
fundamental revision that we should talk rather of measures
to reinforce the capacity of civil society for self-governance
and self-policing, rather than maintain a separate force
at all? |
This
month
Archive
of past articles