For the following essay I am indebted to Benjamin Zephaniah, Samantha Rigg-David, Jody McIntyre, Merlin Emmanuel, Logic MC, and all those who spoke at or were in attendance of the Equality Movement’s ‘Who Polices The Police? – Public Meeting’ event, which I attended last night in Lambeth Town Hall, Brixton Hill, as much of what follows is inspired by their words.
So, who does police the police? The short answer is, we do. Through our attitudes, through our actions, and through our social consciousness, it is up to us as citizens to police the police, to regulate the regulators, to enforce our collective will upon the agents of our sociality.
The police are an institution who supposedly serve the people through popular consent, and act as a deterrent to committing social crimes, thus protecting each member of society from one another, and the society as a whole from itself.
In reality, what they actually do is serve the state, and protect elite interests. They do this by making private property sacred and deterring people to rise up in a popular movement and enact social change.
This has been proved time and again over the last year of protests and industrial action. Written into British law is that any man, woman, or child, has the right to free protest in the UK. We have the right to free speech, and the right to free action. Yet the police, backed by the state, has criminalised protestors, ‘kettling’ them for hours (depriving children as young as 12 of water, food, and toilet facilities for up to 8 or 9 hours, in the middle of winter), beating them with truncheons, and arresting them in their hundreds, even when (as was the case with the 145 students and young people arrested after the occupation of Fortnums and Mason in March) there is video evidence of police officers describing the occupiers as “peaceful” and “legal”.
But let us not be surprised, for these are the same police officers who seek to criminalise and deligitimise any person they come in contact with, including – but not limited to - the human beings who die in their custody, the families of these victims who seek justice for their loved ones, and in fact anyone who dares speak out against the tyranny and brutality of these racist, imperialist thugs. I could name one hundred names here, but I will cite the case of just one, of which I first heard last night.
It is the story of Sean Rigg, a young black man with no criminal record, who was arrested, violently restrained and bundled into the bck of a police van. When he was removed and thrown onto the cold floor of the yard at the back of Brixton Police Station, he was in a collapsed state, and the Brixton police force stood around and watched as he slowly lost his life. His family’s two-year battle for evidence of what happened to him that night, a struggle which is not nearly over, was emotionally described to those at the meeting by his sister last night in Brixton.
In the last ten years, over 400 people have died in the cutody of the Brtish police, which is almost one a week. That means that once every 7-10 days a human life is taken, either through direct force or neglect, by the very people who are supposedly there to serve and protect us.
The Metropolitan police claim they are working together with us to make a ‘safer London’. Yet, as a young boy I met yesterday (who had more knowledge, awareness, and revelation than many a university graduate I know) pointed out, the crime rate has not dropped since the highs of the 1950s. And, like the openly racist society of this era, it is black and minority ethnic groups who are still by far suffering the heaviest at the hands of this brutal police state.
Benjamin Zephaniah yesterday said “People ask me where I got my socialist politics from. Well I’ll tell you – once when I was locked up in a police cell, being kicked in by some big black boots, I grabbed a hold of one of the boots assaulting me and thought ‘hold on, who’s paying for these boots?’”
And this is where the insult is added to the injury. Not only are we oppressed, abused and intimidated by a highly paid, indoctrinated, equipped and motivated gang of thugs, but the wages, equipment, and indoctrination of these gang members is paid for out of our taxes, out of our parents taxes, and out of our childrens’ future taxes. It is our money that will pay for the tools necessary to oppress and intimidate our children.
But what if there were no police? What if we had to deal with each other then? What if we actually had to live in a society ruled by consent and democracy? Isn’t anarchy an extremely frightening prospect?
Well, as Jody McIntyre eloquently put it last night, who are you more scared of? The person next to you, your neighbour, your fellow demonstrator, the man you cross paths with on the high street? Or the racist, brainwashed agent of the state who openly wields weapons and threatens to physically or psychologically cause harm to you, and who is effectively above the law? And who believes that the garments he wears are more important than the human inside, and the actions he takes, rather than vice versa? Which of these two characters scares you more?
Many people here might argue that the police are not above the law, and in theory, they aren’t. But in practice, they are above the law - to the extent that only 2% of all complaints made against the police force are upheld as ‘legitimate’ complaints (by the police themselves, as they have the right to investigate themselves). And this, despite over 400 people dying from their hands or in their care in the past 10 years, none of which have resulted in a single criminal conviction – even though these are investigated by the so-called ‘Independent’ Police Complaints Commission, the IPCC.
So who would you rather make a decision with, or have make a decision about you? I know which group of individuals I would rather interact with. As citizens of late capitalism, we are obligated to stand up for our rights, because in the end that is all we have.
I would encourage everyone reading this blog to keep in mind the following when dealing with the British Police Force;
1) Under no circumstances should you ever trust the police. They are not there to help, protect, or serve you. They are there to help, protect and serve private property and vested interests. They are institutionalised racists. They do not believe in equality before the law, they believe in capitalism and inequality of wealth and therefore resources. They will always protect their own, and will always choose to pursue the end goal of any situation that most benefits them.
2) The reason that the police can get away with a lot of the injustices and inequalities they inflict upon the general public is because the vast majority of people are uneducated on the law and on their rights. The British legal system is one of the oldest and most complicated ever devised by humankind. But there is a lot in there which can be used to the layman’s advantage, over the power of the police. Educate yourselves, and others around you, about your rights, about the police’s obligations to you, and about the limits of their power.
3) Every interaction with an officer of the state (such as a police officer), is an interaction with an agent of the state. During these interactions, make sure you keep the power balance in your favour. When they ask you a question, respond with the same question. When they talk down to you, remind them politely that you are both equals on the eyes of the law, no matter what uniform you are both wearing, and therefore they should interact with you as equals, and not as masters. When they ask you to do something, ask why they have asked you to do it, and under what law must you consent to doing it. The police rule by power of consent. Law in Britain is based on consent. Do not give your consent for any officer of the law to violate your rights as a free-willed individual. Withhold all of your rights, all of the time, and explicitly say so.
4) The legal system, and the actors within it, are biased in favour of the police, and against you as an individual. But indisputable proof is indisputable proof. If you can, record any interactions you have with any police officers. Be this via recording phone calls, recorded delivery letters, or by recording face-to-face interaction through the camera and voice recorder on your phone, don’t let the lies which the state (and the officers of that state) continually tell, and will tell if any case which comes against them, overpower and overwhelm the truth.
5) The police and the legal system are not independent, they are not impartial, and they are not governed by democracy or popular consent. They are the armed wing of an imperialist, racist, elitist state which values the accumulation of personal wealth over the wellbeing, happiness, health and life of human beings, both within and outside of its boundaries. The current cuts facing higher education and the public sector, the war on drugs, the oppression and degradation of the most economically poor in our society, the bombing campaign in Libya, the racist British empire in Africa and Asia, and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, are all extensions of the same programme which we are resisting and writing against here. Resist the police, the legal system, and all that they stand for, because they stand in front, and behind, all of the dehumanising and murderous regimes of late capitalist Britain.
Check out and support http://defendtherighttoprotest.org , The Sean Rigg Justice and Change Campaign, The Network for Police Monitoring and The Equality Movement for more information.
