Book Review/Kristian Williams

Abuse by Police is an International Problem

Americans, even radicals, tend to idealize the British police. We retain an archaic image of unarmed men in long blue coats and funny bell-shaped helmets, and have combined it with the helpful professionalism depicted in BBC crime dramas. We think of them as “bobbies,” and not, as a Brit might, “the filth.”

This anodyne view is not altogether irrational. By American standards, the British system of criminal justice seems nearly utopian. American police kill as many people in a week as police in England and Wales have killed in a decade. Police in the U.S. shot and killed 1,004 people in 2019; their British counterparts killed three. British police kill fewer than one person in 10 million annually; American cops kill 31. A resident of the United States is three times as likely to be arrested in a given year as a resident of the United Kingdom. And, there are at present 78,000 people in prison in the UK (140 individuals per 100,000 population), compared to 2.2 million people in the US (655 per 100,000).

But it is probably a mistake to judge an institution based simply on an idea of how much worse it could be.

“Abolishing the Police,” a new collection from Dog Section Press, edited by Koshka Duff, is a good corrective. The American police may be particularly murder-happy, but the quotidian injustices of policing — in one sense, the deeper problems of the institution — can persist, even without the repulsive body count. For instance, Becka Hudson informs us, “The [London] Metropolitan Police’s Gang Matrix … stores the information of almost 4,000 people, 78% of whom are black, and the majority of whom — by the police’s own estimation — pose no threat.” Clearly there are reasons that parts of the British public took up the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and cheerfully dumped statues of slave-traders into the harbor.

Still, though the contributors to “Abolishing the Police” — some academics, some activists, some both — mostly write from and of the UK, the discussion periodically circles back to the United States. This, too, is a benefit to American readers: to see one’s own country as it appears from abroad is defamiliarizing even as it delivers the shock of recognition.

Despite the unique gravitational pull the United States seems to exercise on any discussion of policing, the book’s internationalism is actually much more reaching and quite deliberate, a reflection of the imperial nature of British policing. In “Why Borders and Prisons, Border Guards and Police?”, Tom Kemp and Phe Amis observe, “the development of policing in Britain is intimately tied to the histories of colonial governance and resistance to colonial rule.” To illustrate the point, they remind us that “Sir Robert Peel modeled the Metropolitan Police on the Peace Preservation Force he had recently established in Ireland;” officers “with experience … policing in the colonies were brought to the UK … in response to the uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s;” and, “The Royal Ulster Constabulary in the North of Ireland, which was the UK’s only fully-armed territorial police force, provides the blue-print for global ‘peace-keeping missions’ in Iraq Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo that extend British investment in imperialism as it operates today.”

This emphasis on imperialism makes up one element of a sustained argument. Over the course of the volume, the discussion of imperialism leads naturally to a discussion of borders, of war, of arms sales, and of politicized constructions of citizenship, criminality, and public safety. The latter, Daniel Loick argues, is built around an idea of what the police do. “Public safety” in the usual discourse, thus includes concerns about prostitution, drugs, and minor property crimes, while excluding workplace hazards, environmental degradation, and other potentially lethal threats to human life.

However, other contributors note, it is clearly not enough to concentrate on the police, either as a body of people or as an institution. Policing, as a practice and as a process, is much broader. The introduction posits,

“Policing … includes the whole criminal punishment system of courts, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, electronic tagging. It includes the mechanisms of border enforcement such as detention centres, walls and barbed wire fences, chartered deportation flights. It spreads into the most intimate aspects of life in the form of mass and targeted surveillance, and it spreads beyond state boundaries in the form of colonial and neocolonial ‘counter-insurgency’ operations, the pacification of unruly populations, and the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of terror suspects.”

Conversely, abolition must be conceived just as expansively, reaching beyond any particular institution: “Abolition is not just a call for the end of formal police forces, but an insurrection against policing as a strategy of administering structural violence.” As a political project, abolition involves a great deal besides the mere fact of abolishing. The dismantling of the oppressive institutions must happen alongside the construction of a new and freer society: “abolitionists insist that the process of abolition is as much about inventing new institutions as it is about abolishing the old ones.”

“Abolishing the Police” makes a worthy contribution to the effort to understand the full scope and precise contours of policing and the struggle to eliminate it. Concise and yet comprehensive, its 13 chapters relate policing to colonialism, border enforcement, and counter-subversion campaigns; they contemplate abolition in terms of radical democracy, transformative justice, and alternatives to coercion. The writing throughout is clear and fresh, and pleasantly light on jargon. The thinking, too, is careful and practically-oriented, with none of the outraged histrionics and wish-thinking that so often characterizes the left. Each chapter is paired with a beautiful and moving illustration from Cat Sims, capturing dynamics of exclusion and oppression — but also moments of resistance and joy.

Kristian Williams is the author of “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America” and “Fire the Cops!” He is an occasional contributor to Three Way Fight.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2021

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