The Violence of the State

The fundamental problem with the police force is that it employs the wrong people. I don't mean that it attracts "wrong uns" and is poor at weeding them out. Rather I mean that there is a fundamental difference between the expectations of the majority of the population and the attitude of the state, which for argument's sake we can summarise as "policing by consent" versus "everyone is a suspect". The former is grounded in the assumption of mutual respect, while the latter is clearly asymmetrical. This is evident not just in the police service's institutional prejudice and abuse of power against the working class, ethnic minorities and activists, but in its routine dismissal of the population at large. It may be expressed politely if you're middle-class, but a refusal to investigate a burglary or bike theft on the grounds that they "don't have the resources" is still institutional contempt. In this context, the Prime Minister's rejection of calls for misogyny to be considered a hate crime isn't really a desire to avoid stretching resources but a refusal to accept that crime should be determined by public opinion, whether in respect of violence against women or industrial-scale tax dodging. 

This contempt is not just directed outwards, it also festers internally, hence the racism, sexism and homophobia reported by many who have ended up leaving the police service in frustration. One characteristic of the force is a suspicion of theory, which despite attempts to recruit more graduates remains pronounced. This is not just a conservative favouring of "common sense" or a pragmatic preference for the tried and tested. It reflects a fundamental rejection of epistemology: the idea that the police are in the knowledge business. The fictional image of policing, where a sympathetic detective doggedly sets out to discover the author of a crime, is obviously unrealistic, but it can be read as a popular desire for a style of policing concerned with truth as the prerequisite of justice. The reality is that the police often go out of their way to maintain their ignorance ("In my experience, too many police officers and staff lack investigative professional curiosity", according to one ex-officer). This is often assumed to be motivated by corruption, but that assumption (while not without grounds in some cases) reflects a public bafflement at the idea that the police might not be interested in the truth.

The tension between the ideal of policing and its reality can best be seen in the use of data. Despite decades of investment in IT systems, CCTV and the promotion of "intelligence-led" methods, the effectiveness of the police has not noticeably improved, measured either in raw crime numbers or rates of conviction. This isn't because criminals are cleverer, and nor is it proof that the value of data has been over-sold (see the many breakthroughs due to DNA testing). It is partly explained by incompetence (note the many lost records and compromised evidence in high-profile cases), and partly by systems being undermined in the field (note the racial profiling of stop-and-search), but more fundamentally it suggests that the effectiveness of the police is not highly-correlated with resources and thus the acquisition of data. Overall levels of crime tend to correlate with socio-economic factors, such as poverty and unemployment or the state of the drug market, while fluctuations between different crimes tend to reflect changes in material circumstances and technology.

This combination of a generalised contempt for "civilians" and an anti-intellectualism that verges on the celebration of ignorance isn't particular to any one country or indeed to the police. It is the culture of the state. It is perhaps most pronounced in the police, but it isn't limited to them, and one of the reasons why successive inquiries and reforms have made little progress is precisely because the remit stops at the boundary of the service. To blame the failings of the police on rotten apples is obviously a deflection, but it would also be naive to imagine that the systemic problem is limited to the barrel. "A drastic change that rethinks policing, so as to make it less open to abuses of power but also more effective" sounds radical, but it still assumes the problem is limited to a sub-system of the state and that it can be dealt with in isolation. Even the demand to defund the police suffers from this limiting focus. Diverting funds away from the police to mental health support might well help reduce crime, but mental health has its own problems of institutional neglect and the abuse of power. Perhaps we need to be more ambitious and talk about the failings of the state.

Did the Windrush scandal show that the police were racist? No, it showed that the Home Office was racist. Did the Grenfell tragedy show that the police treated social housing tenants with contempt? No, it showed that the local council did. Did the Hillsborough tragedy show that the police regarded football fans as animals? Yes, but it also showed that the government of the day considered the reputation of the police to be more important than 94 (later 97) deaths. Another "independent review" of the Met's culture and standards, led by a seasoned state apparatchik, won't tell us much that we didn't already know. It is unlikely to inquire too deeply into the intersection of the political and psychosexual that came to tragic prominence in the case of Sarah Everard and in the Met's handling of the subsequent protests, despite the wealth of theory on precisely this dimension and how it can mutate into Fascism (e.g. Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies). The distinguishing feature of this culture is not its attraction to pyschopaths and petty tyrants, or its reliance on bigotry as a form of in-group bonding, but its protection and indulgence by the state. A state-led inquiry isn't going to highlight that.

The derisory response of the Met to the conclusion of the Everard case produced an immediate vote of confidence by both the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London in the Commissioner, Cressida Dick. This is consistent. That the Met is institutionally racist was officially established decades ago. Its homophobia and generalised contempt for the working class has never been formally identified, but there is little doubt that it exists. A futher inquiry to establish its institutional misogyny may satisfy some liberal commentators but it won't lead to a change in attitudes, any more than the Macpherson Report in 1999 removed all traces of racist thinking. This is because the police cannot be reformed independently of the state. Though the force is the most overt manifestation of the state's violence, it is merely the tip of the iceberg. The problem then is the violence of the state. It is this that elevates some of the worst people in society to positions of petty tyranny, and corrupts or intimidates others to the point where they acquiesce in the culture of contempt. So what can be done? 

The first thing we have to recognise is that it is an epistemological problem, in the sense of an institutional commitment to social ignorance, rather than a management failing that can be addressed by technocratic means. That might appear an odd claim given the history of the state: the ever-growing appetite for social data, the increased use of biopolitical techniques, the disciplinary demand for greater surveillance. But that secular trend has been an anti-humanist one of abstraction. Indeed, the state's violence can be seen as a resentful refusal to engage with the human as the technical ability to do so has increased. Again, this operates at two levels. For example, ignorance is displayed in both the police's external dealings with the public and in its internal lack of self-reflection (giving someone the nickname "the rapist" should have been pause for thought). The former can be addressed by diversifying hiring, so there are more officers with an understanding of and sympathy towards social diversity, but this is ultimately insufficient if the latter, the canteen culture, remains dominated by the social elitism of those who consider themselves the true nation - i.e. cis, white, male officers. There are two ways in which we can counter this. 

The first is a radical commitment to democracy. In other words, at every opportunity we need to expand the oversight of the public over the state and devolve it to the lowest practicable level. For example, instead of elected Police Commissioners covering huge areas of the country we need accountability at the level of the police station. An insensitive, failed politician seeking a sinecure is no substitute for open engagement with the local community. The second is for the state to become more consciously "woke". That's a provocative way of putting it, but we shouldn't shy away from admitting that "anti-wokeism" is a performative denial of respect and therefore central to the culture of contempt. The problem is that we have a political establishment that dislikes democracy and remains determined to defend established hierarchies and privileges. At present, the two main parties are operating like a tag-team, with Labour looking to stamp out participative democracy and the Tories seeking to reinforce the state through illiberal laws that curtail protest and the public's ability to seek redress against abuses. 

In respect of the police, both are determined to give the force more power and resources while the media remain obsessed with crackdowns on dissent and migrants. So long as that remains the case, the reform of the police will be superficial at best and any attempt to moderate its culture of violence will be undermined by moral panics about threats to the social order. The media will never lose its prurient interest in crime, nor its structural bias to exaggerate its prevalence, so the focus of attention has to be on the politicians, while acknowledging that many are negatively influenced by the media, particularly newspapers. It may appear a bit of a stretch, but one thing that might help prevent another Sarah Everard tragedy would be for some rightwing Labour MPs to be deselected for their bigotry. We need to reform the state before we can properly reform the police, and that inescapably means reforming the Labour Party. Despite advocating increased police numbers, Jeremy Corbyn was seen as a threat precisely because he wasn't prepared to unequivocally endorse the violence of the state. That the party is now led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions isn't a coincidence.