The recent Casey report into the London Metropolitan Police found that the police force was institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic. The report found the force was defensive, resistant to change, negligent in ensuring the integrity of its officers, lacking accountability and transparency and unwilling to engage with communities. Public trust in the institution had fallen below 50 per cent.
The Casey report sits atop a mass of high-profile judicial inquiries, presidential commissions, royal commissions and national reports into one policing crisis after another across a spectrum of countries. In many respects, the recommendations of the Casey report mirror those of previous reports that call for the reform of police forces. While these reports have varied in terms of scope and content, there are many commonalities in the broad focus of recommendations, particularly in the need to enhance police legitimacy and make adjustments through a suite of internal police reform mechanisms and improved measures for accountability.
The key police reform priorities often identified (and endlessly repeated from one inquiry to the next) include enhancing community policing, introducing diversity quotas and recruitment initiatives, implementing technical solutions such as body cameras, placing a greater reliance on evidence-based policing and launching various measures to improve citizen complaints systems. Added to this catalogue is recommended investment in an almost never-ending list of training courses: from de-escalation techniques and the use of force and physical restraints to cross-cultural awareness, anti-racism and unconscious bias.
The reform agenda sets out to strengthen policing, not to challenge it. It fails to question the nature and role of police power in upholding and protecting the structural inequalities and systemic oppressions and harms embedded within society. Let’s take the proposal to increase diversity within police ranks as an example. It has a long history. One form of it dates back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries in relation to employing more women in police forces to better respond to the needs of women citizens. The rationale is the same today: if we can employ more women, LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, ethnic, religious or cultural minoritised groups within the police, then the organisation will change to be more reflective of the needs of all citizens and increase its overall legitimacy and trust among the wider population.
There are several problems with this approach. First, for a variety of reasons many police forces seem incapable of diversifying their recruitment – for example, more than 20 years have passed since the McPherson report recommended diversification within the Met, yet it is still 71 per cent male and 82 per cent white. Second, it ignores the historical function of policing which has adversely targeted and terrorised the very groups it now seeks to include, a factor which is further compounded by the discriminatory treatment of those minoritised groups that join the police. Third, the assumption that diversification changes the policing of diverse groups, or indeed changes policing more generally, seems dramatically misplaced.
There is an essentialism to the idea that identity based on gender, ethnicity or race will trump institutional culture and practices, rather than become absorbed into the fabric of police work regarding, for example, stop and searches, the use of force and the overpolicing of particular types of offences, social groups, neighbourhoods or other locations. Indeed, as Alex Vitale has found, examples in the US show that more diverse police forces do not enhance community satisfaction, particularly for minoritised groups, and continue to reflect problems of use of force and discriminatory application of stop-and-search powers. Social diversity among police does not equate to police legitimacy.
The prioritisation of trust, legitimacy and consent evident in the Casey report is reflected in other reports such as the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing established in the US after the Ferguson uprising. Despite a critique of the failures of policing, the focus belies a fundamentally conservative approach designed to ensure that citizens consent to being policed, rather than reimagining the nature and function of state police. The proposed solutions reinvigorate and reinforce the centrality of the institution of policing. Police can command even greater resources through reforms; police power is enhanced rather than contested.
The global uprisings of 2020 directed against policing and state repression brought to the fore both the depth and breadth of police violence and of popular resistance. Many of these protests were in solidarity with the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and took on references to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. However, the global demonstrations were quintessentially part of ongoing local protest movements against unaccountable state violence, bloated police budgets, corruption and repression. There were many shared themes across these anti-police protest movements, including that police violence and abuse goes largely unpunished – that police can kill with apparent impunity. Another recurrent theme across the Global North and South was that the histories of colonialism, slavery, racism and dispossession were fundamental to understanding the contemporary targets of policing; the vast majority of people killed by police are Black, Brown, Indigenous or from other minoritised or disempowered groups. In many countries attention was also drawn to police violence against women, people with disabilities and people from LGBTQIA+ communities.
In a global perspective, what we do not see on the reform lists of police inquiries is a recommendation for the retraction or dismantling of the police. The long-term failure of police forces to reform themselves has been one of the key drivers behind the BLM movement and calls to defund, dismantle and eventually abolish the police. Core demands have been to divest resources from police and invest in structures and processes that reduce harm and enhance community safety. It is a perspective which works towards diminishing police power by questioning the necessity of police – thus unlike reformism the institutional role of police is no longer seen as unassailable. The liberal reform agenda has absolutely no sense of history, either of the institution of police nor of the continually failing reform agendas. In the Casey report we see a call to return to Peelian principles. Were these ever a reality in practice in Britain? Were they ever a reality in the colonial policing of the British Empire?
The Casey report into the London Met heavily criticises the police force and provides an agenda for reform. However, the agenda largely follows a well-trodden path of police reformism which leaves the nature of police power unchanged.
Chris Cunneen is Professor of Criminology at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Defund the Police by Chris Cunneen is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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Image Black Lives Matter via Wikimedia Commons
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