LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Defend the right to murder posted by Richard Seymour

The police officer who killed Ian Tomlinson has been acquitted. This is a real achievement for the police, in defending PC Simon Harwood. They clearly went to the court with the bigger arsenal. The jury was not aware that the police's key witness, the pathologist Freddy Patel, is such a complete and utter disgrace. They were not aware that he has been struck off the Home Office's register of approved pathologists, that he has made serious 'mistakes' in high profile cases, and that many people believe he is a serial liar (replace 'many people' with 'I', and 'serial' with 'fucking'). They were also not told aware that the suspect, the killer, Simon Harwood, is an accomplished psycho with a string of complaints to his name. One has to assume that the police authorities moved heaven and earth, and used all their considerable institutional power, to ensure this verdict. So, it's an achievement for them.

The question is, why did the police go to such extraordinary efforts? The clue is in the final sentence to the Guardian's report on this: "No police officer has been convicted for manslaughter for a crime committed while on duty since 1986." This is crucial.

To be clear, there have been police officers pursued for crimes committed while off-duty, and these are sometimes taken extremely seriously. There was a well-known recent case of a police officer racially abusing a Pakistani shop owner. He was fired. But the main reason he was fired is because he was silly enough to commit his hate crime while off-duty and inebriated. Had he committed a crime while in uniform and on the job, the authorities would have felt compelled to defend him.

The reasoning can only be this: a) if a crime is committed by a police officer on the job, then it's the police force at stake rather than just one individual, and b) if the crime relates to the handling of members of the public, the police would want to protect the officer's right to determine the parameters of a given situation and use maximum discretion in how they deal with individuals. Implicitly, this means they expect these practices - from racist harrassment to lethal violence - to form part of the repertoire of police action.

This is a major victory for the police in defending the right to murder. One had thought that it couldn't be too long before they killed someone during the student protests, and had they gone on for much longer the strong likelihood is that they would have done. SNow we have a heavily militarised Olympics coming up, which the East End hates. And there is plenty of combustible material in this society, plenty to protest about. And I had already thought it would be surprising if they didn't kill someone this summer. Now I find it hard to imagine that the police won't avail themselves of a right they have so vigorously defended.

Labels: british state, capitalist state, metropolitan police, police, police brutality, protest, repression

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Police racism and brutality: it's the job posted by Richard Seymour

What does it say when a police officer strangles a black man, and racially abuses him in the context of a 'stop and search'? What does it say when on the same evening, his partner batters a fifteen year old boy in the police station later that evening? And what does it say when the CPS declines to pursue charges in both cases?

Just this. We know that the rank and file of the police are racist. This is not a judgment on every single officer, and nor is it simply an institutional analysis. It is a question of their social role. They are bearers of authority and social power delegated to them by the centralised unity of the state, and just as the role of supervisors and managers in the workplace is to secure the subordination of workers in the production process, so the role of the police is to secure the general subordination of workers and subaltern forces, to identify and control 'problem' populations, and thus resolve problems in the reproduction of the system. It is a global supervisory function, but one obviously permeated with the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.

We know that rank and file police officers routinely deploy violence not simply to resolve a bureaucratic impasse (non-cooperation, etc) but often to effect a symbolic reduction of the victim to a status befitting that assigned them in the dominant ideology. This is part of the police's role in the moral regulation of society. In carrying out this role, they exercise a relative autonomy, sufficient to define the situations in which they, as professional law enforcers, must harrass, restrain, beat and detain civilians. And it isn't just their training, as some suggest, that inclines them to do this, to treat civilian populations as an enemy. It is their actual experience of routine conflict in carrying out their mandate, which forms their habitus, that system of skills, dispositions and practices which constitutes the occupational culture of the police. At any rate, this defining role allows them to formulate the information which is then fed back to superiors, the courts and prosecutors, media, politicians, law lords and the solicitor general, and which thus constructs social situations in the language of criminality, abnormality, crisis, etc. As trained professionals, moreover, their word carries far more weight than that of any of their victims.

But there is more to it than that. For this relative autonomy is not a relationship achieved by rank and file police officers through struggle. The police chiefs will always try to rationalise the job, to achieve greater compliance form juniors, and to impose ideas and behaviours consistent with overarching policies. And the state is, as I say, a centralised unity - the executive, or whatever apparatus is dominant at any given moment, can if it wills constrain the behaviour of rank and file officers in various ways. It always does so, in fact. But the limiting factor is that the state desires this relationship of relative autonomy. It wants officers who are sufficiently empowered to act in ways that they see fit in order to effectively reproduce the social order. The result is that there will be antagonisms - officers, for example, can resent having to suppress and contain the social turmoil produced by central state policies - but police chiefs and state executives will tend to protect the autonomy and authority of officers in conducting their role.

Ultimately, moreover, because the police are so central to the state's routine 'intervention' into all aspects of social relations, they will tend to seek concord with officers and maintain their relative material privileges the better to cement their solidarity with the state and, as a corollary, their adversarial relationship with the majority of the population. This is one reason why no police officer is jailed for beating or murdering civilians, and why the CPS would prefer not to charge officers found guilty of criminal conduct. Importantly, when I refer to criminal conduct I am not just talking about repression that appears to go beyond their occupational role. Corruption cases, such as that of Enfield crime squad officers up to their necks in criminal enterprise, disclose a similar pattern. It is not that the police bosses are particularly happy with such corruption being routine, but rather that the premium on guarding the relative independence of officers in such circumstances, on allowing officers to define situations themselves, to act not above the law but in a space in which they themselves define legality, is more important than suppressing corruption.

And this structural relationship is crucial to explaining how and why the police continually 'get away with it', how and why change is so difficult to achieve. Struggle can force the state to adapt its policy, to re-organise its modes of violence, and to lean more heavily on mediating forms (unions, social democracy, 'civil society' groups, and so on) to cope with social antagonisms. But the sheer persistence of institutional brutality and racism in the police over a long period of time (actually, for as long as the police have existed) suggests that deaths in custody, severe beatings, the violent punishment of the mentally ill, the immigrant, the homeless, the poor and the vulnerable, are not supererogatory explosions of individual un-professionalism; rather they are part of what the police do, part of the professional vocation, the repertoire that makes policing what it is.

This is one of the reasons why I disagree with any position, such as that outlined by the activist Ellie Mae O'Hagan here, which argues for support for a Police Federation strike. We know that the Tory cuts to the police budget, alongside the range of institutional reforms planned by the government, are unpopular with the rank and file. Under both parties, the police have been used to generous budgets, higher than average pay and rising recruitment. They have been culturally and politically safeguarded. But the Tories are committed to the systematic down-sizing of the state, and are evidently convinced that the key repressive functions carried out by the police can be protected within a streamlined force. As far as crime prevention goes, the Home Office has always known that more officers makes no difference to the rate of crime whatever. So, there is tension. The Police Federation are unhappy with the government's cuts, and particularly angry about the complacent way in which they have detonated social antagonisms and then simply shoved the blame onto the police when the conflagration duly occurred. So yes, there is an antagonism. It is even, dare we say it, a class antagonism: between the governing party of the ruling class and a force of middle class professionals who see their role as being downgraded. Not that they always see it this way exactly: many officers will insist "we're public sector workers too". Would it be too glib to reply that you rarely see an NHS worker or a teacher giving brain damage to a protester, punching children in the face, or charging at large groups of people on steeds while hurling baton blows?

But even if the Police Federation were genuine in threatening to go on strike, and I beg leave to doubt it, the question is: what purpose would achieving their goals actually fulfil for striking workers, for protesting students, for women struggingly against rape and domestic violence, for black and Asian communities fighting oppression? If the Police Federation did actually strike, did receive support from the Left, and did actually achieve pay increases, job protection and end to the cuts in the force, who would this serve? It seems obvious to me that it would simply strengthen the police in their repressive role by protecting their numbers; that, far from strategically splitting the force, it would cement them behind the government by conserving their material privileges and morale; that it would strengthen their position within society as a whole by giving them unwarranted prestige in the left and labour movement; and that in the not-very-long-run it would redouble their ability to crush movements like Climate Camp, or like UK Uncut, to batter and prosecute protesters like Alfie Meadows, to corral striking workers within steel walls on the basis of 'total policing', to batter and murder young black men. In a word, they would be empowered to disorganise the social forces now being organised with great difficulty to resist austerity. I think this mistaken judgement, hoping to benefit strategically from a police strike, arises from supposing that the rank and file are just the hired muscle of the ruling class, rather than relatively autonomous bearers of social power in themselves. It is not that one forecloses the concrete analysis of concrete situations, ruling any tactical manouevre in relation to the police a priori out of bounds. One can imagine situations of such severity that there is the real prospect of splitting and disorganising the police force, and the careful handling of such situations might reap dividends. But since such a situation remains incredibly remote, the strategic question of how the Left ought to relate to that doesn't even arise today. Not only is it unlikely that there will be a strike, but the police aren't even asking for the support of the Left, much less bargaining over the conditions of such support. There is the question of how we ought to relate to cuts in policing. To this, some say that if we oppose cuts, then we oppose cuts, end of. I say that's a complete misunderstanding. Just as when pundits say, "surely you can't oppose every cut - even if they were to cut Trident, or arms spending, or even if they cut waste and inefficiency?" The answer is that we oppose cuts in the aggregate; but we want the money to be spent better on things that benefit ordinary people. Hospitals, schools, pensions and infrastructure, not more police and weapons. And you can be damned sure that any increase in spending on police in these circumstances would come at the expense of one of the vital public services. So, no, don't 'support' the Police Federation. And don't think that brutality and racism are in some sense accidental or incidental to policing. It's the job.

Labels: british state, capitalist ideology, capitalist state, metropolitan police, police brutality, racism, repression

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Gangs of London posted by Richard Seymour

1. Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: "You might have 100 people in your gang - we have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan Police."

2. "Entire crime squad is investigated for corruption ... All the officers are based on the Enfield borough crime squad which deals with local robberies and burglaries and the inquiry centres on the "mishandling of property" believed to be stolen electronic goods including televisions."

3. "Video footage shows the detective sergeant and five constables leaping from an unmarked car shouting "attack, attack", before smashing baseball bats and a pickaxe handle into the side windows and windscreen of a Mini stopped in traffic. The plainclothes officers – all members of the Enfield crime squad in north London – then pull out the driver, Jonathan Billinghurst, and push him to the floor, where he is arrested. ... Scotland Yard said on Wednesday that the six officers – who are the first to face disciplinary action as a result of the inquiry – had been found guilty of misconduct but would not be sacked."

Labels: british state, capitalist state, enfield, gangsters, metropolitan police, police, police brutality

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Bad cops, bad cops posted by Richard Seymour

What is policing? In a recent interview with the New Left Project, Robert Reiner argues that "in practice the police are primarily an instrument for regulating the lower orders". Historically, police forces emerge as "a more urban and industrial ruling class" arises and requires "a more predictable, bureaucratic, legal and apparently universal means of maintaining order" than traditional agents of monarchy, armed forces, etc. The "apparently universal" aspect of this has been reinforced by a misleading focus on the police's role in "routine crime prevention" which obscures its role in political policing, but the net effect is to protect a particular order, one based on inequality and hierarchy. This is all very useful, and I expect readers will benefit from reading Reiner's book, Law and Order. (For those looking for a marxist approach to the British police, the late Audrey Farrell's book Crime, Class and Corruption is a must read.)

But this is merely to set up the problem. In my opinion, it still doesn't satisfactorily answer the question as to what policing is. We can agree that in a manner of speaking the police are "an instrument for regulating the lower orders", which is a part of the state's overall regulatory function in daily life. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's classic historical monograph on the English/British state, The Great Arch, covering its transformation from the high middle ages until the late 19th century, argues that the state is fundamentally a cultural form involved in "moral regulation": a "project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word 'obvious', what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order ... Centrally, state agencies attempt to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity." So, this supports two aspects of Reiner's analysis: the police in this perspective would have a regulatory function, and a unifying, apparently universalising function. Moreover, the emphasis on moral regulation specifies something particular about police conduct which is that, as repressive institutions, they are deeply involved in ideological work. The police have a role in maintaining a symbolic order, and deploy violence to that end. Still, we haven't really moved very far forward from the most general of generalities here.

***

I think to take this analysis further it would help to outline what would seem to be a peculiar set of circumstances. The government is introducing a series of substantial changes to policing structures and tactics in England and Wales (devolution in Northern Ireland and Scotland exclude these constituents of the UK from the reforms). First, they are introducing a system of elected commissioners, drawing to some extent from the US model. I think most police officers hate this, and the 'witnesses' before the Home Affairs Committee rejecting the idea - such as Sir Hugh Orde, Sir Paul Stephenson and numerous others - seemed to represent a big chunk of the policing establishment. Coupled with this change is the abolition of the old police authorities in which the police were run by a selected committee made up of elected councillors and 'independent' appointees. There was initially to be an elected committee that would oversee policing, but that was abandoned under pressure from police and previous committees. Instead, the oversight of commissioners will be carried out by appointed panels, with appointees drawn from 'local communities'. The government has made it clear that the main aim of these reforms is to change the relationship of police to the 'local communities' in which they operate. This is a strategic rather than tactical reform: that is, it is less about operational issues than about organising the relationship of the police to society (or rather, to social classes) in such a way as to cultivate a basis for right-wing, populist 'law and order' politics.

Second, the Tories are cutting police budgets. Contrary to my own expectations, the cuts have not been substantially revised in response to the student protests, industrial militancy, or the riots. This is one of the reasons why you will sometimes encounter low ranking officers policing demos etc, moaning that they too are public sector workers and no one cares about them. (I've witnessed this sort of exchange numerous times, and I think it reflects a real anger being expressed in the rank and file.) And it is in stark contrast to Mrs Thatcher's qualitative expansion and upgrading of police budgets, numbers, technology and legal powers, or indeed to New Labour's policy along similar lines. I had thought this must reflect the degree of the Tories' complacency about the prospects for serious social conflict arising from their deep structural adjustment programme. That certainly can't be excluded as a factor - their handling of union negotiations shows how arrogant they are. It also probably manifests their belief that the technological and organisational re-tooling of the police can make up for the shortfall in central government spending. The rationalization of the police bureaucracy - usually understood in ideological language as making it 'more responsive', filling a 'democratic deficit', 'professionalizing' the force, and so on - is consistent with the neoliberal theory of organisational efficiency in the form of 'public choice theory'. The current Met Commissioner, to whom I'll return in a moment, makes the argument that the police are like every public monopoly in having no competition: they must therefore simulate the basic structures of competitive market efficiency within themselves. But above all, the fact that the Tories are prepared to take such political risks over this - damaging their own public support, as well as their long-standing close relationship with the police - indicates that something fundamental is at stake. That something is the budget, and reducing the burden of taxation on businesses, entrepreneurs, speculators and property owners over the long-term. This is supposed to create an extremely favourable climate for investors, enabling a leaner British capitalism to remain competitive. Rationalising the police force is part of the programme, like it or not.

Thirdly, the government went for the police following the riots, attacking their response as tactically timid. Since the Police Federation had been warning the government of the likelihood of serious social unrest since its election, and since the Home Secretary dismissed these warnings as scaremongering, this was waving a red rag. It was also politically weird when irrational police fetishism was the order of the day. Then, the government announced that it was pursuing further reform along US lines, that it was bringing US 'supercop' Bill Bratton in to advise the government on 'gangs', and that it would be open to an application from him to head up a revamped Metropolitan Police, whose leadership had been taken out by Hackgate. In the end, Bratton didn't work out for them - Cameron thought he was a tough guy advocate of 'zero tolerance' policing. He isn't. But the introduction of this worn out old nostrum pissed off UK police chiefs, who actually aren't very keen on the idea at all. In the end, Bernard Hogan-Howe, who has seemed to be a tacit supporter of the government's reforms and champions something called "total policing", was appointed Commissioner of the Met and given a remit to fundamentally reform the capital's police service.

So, in a very politicised way, policing in the capital is being re-organised in a way that will presumably exert effects right throughout the chain of police authorities in the UK. It is being done in a way that makes policing more confrontational, more explicitly political, and which alienates both the rank and file coppers and a great proportion of the police leadership. Inasmuch as there will be a critical response from social democracy to these developments, it will hinge on the cuts to 'a vital public service', on the inadequacy of the reforms, and on the need to bolster the crime prevention aspect of policing. The Labour right has been most vociferous on the need to protect constabulary independence from politics (meaning, from democratic oversight). Labour's left will have something to say about the politicization of policing, and the growth of authoritarianism alongside the reduction of necessary 'community policing', just as they did under Thatcher. The limits of such an approach, however, become evident when you look at what 'total policing' involves.

***

"Total policing", as practiced by Hogan-Howe in Merseyside and now in London, is not necessarily "total policing" as advocated by some police experts. They argue that it entails breaking down specialization in the police force to allow a more flexible response to emergent problems, whereas Hogan-Howe is committed to retaining specialized units. But inasmuch as it does relate to that basic organizational motif, and Hogan-Howe is explicit in stating that it does, it seems to relate to a set of peculiar institutional and social problems created that arise in the context of austerity. That is, for as long as the political opposition to the Tories is so weak, they can expect the opposition to emerge in a localised, spontaneous, unpredictable manner. In this situation, having big battalions of police ready to fight on all fronts is less important than having a police force with the maximum adaptibility, able to suddenly surround an emerging confrontation and subdue it before it spreads. In practice, and this is where the experts have reservations, it also seems to mean literally having a 'total' architecture of police control in the context of protests and rallies. Rhetorically, Hogan-Howe sticks to the script about ensuring a 'balance' between rights and upholding the law, but even in his highly coded public discourse the emphasis is clearly on treating increased protest as a problem to be contained, demanding an escalated response. The TUC march on November 30th in London was subject to the most extraordinary police restrictions, including the walling off of Trafalgar Square and routes around it with steel - this on a trade union march, where it was highly unlikely that anything was going to 'kick off'.

'Total policing' also entails, of course, a 'total war' on crime, deploying a wide range of tactics - nothing illegal or aggressive, Hogan-Howe insists - to constantly frustrate criminals. Here, the new Met Commissioner's technophilia and fondness for militarised solutions comes through. Thus, instead of spending months surveilling drug gangs, just get a warrant and kick in the door, and reap some surprising rewards. Or, instead of simply going after criminals directly, impound uninsured cars on the premise that 80% of them are owned by people with a criminal conviction, thus impeding the mobility of burglars, robbers etc. (This sounds like something from a popular book expounding behavioural economics.) Technology, Hogan-Howe argues, should also be reconfigured away from 'bureaucratic' apparatuses, toward preventive technology. He contrasts computers which permit number-crunching and 'lists' - how many burglaries were committed in a given area last year - with numberplate-recognition technology which ostensibly allows one to stop crimes in progress, or before they happen.

This is a false dichotomy, since any technology could feasibly be used in the development of prevention tactics. But it illustrates the kind of thinking underpinning this 'total policing' approach. If policing as such reduces complex social phenomena to bureaucratic problems to be resolved through the targeted application of violence, 'total policing' tries to reiterate these bureaucratic problems in the language of technology. And as long as we understand 'technology' in its broad sense, as in a technical process, an ensemble of techniques related to governance, a technology of power, it makes complete sense. Contrary to what one may be tempted to assume, this is policing at its most ideological. For what has happened here is that the dominant ideology has already been materialized in the practices of the state. The dominant ideology, we may say for the sake of brevity, is that which normalizes "ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order". It is an ideology which arises directly from productive relations, from the division of labour and the labour process itself, and which constitutes a particular capitalist form of corporeality.

To elaborate. It is not that the existence of "biological individuals" necessarily generates the ideology of individualism: this is plainly not true, historically, and the concept of "biological individuals" is itself question-begging, avoiding or suppressing the matter of our natural biological dependence. It is that the capitalist mode of production presupposes the individualization of bodies. We are all, in this sense, self-sufficient units engaged in a competitive, self-interested struggle for utility maximization, which is ultimately the aggrandisement of the self. This is not simply a 'theoretical' proposition of capitalism, not a 'premise' in that sense, but a necessary material aspect of its development. We carry out labour processes in relative independence from one another - our cooperation is not enacted by prior engagement and planning, but in the context of market competition. We sell our labour power and purchase the means of its reproduction in this way. In this process, the political, ideological and juridical relations which constitute us as autonomous (rights-bearing, contract-bound, property-owning) subjects are always-already present. Every relation in the capitalist labour process presupposeses this possessive-individualism.

In the practices of the state, specifically for our purposes the legal/juridical practices of the state, these relations are materialised. In the discourses of crime, and law and order, certain social practices and the relations of dominance contained in these practices are normalized and legitimized, whereas practices which disrupt these relations of dominance are criminalized. But in materializing these relations, the state also represents itself as the unifying agent, fusing these individuals, these capitalist bodies, together in a collective national body, the popular-national state. And in so doing, it does not just normalize certain relations, but it universalises them. The ideology of crime already effects this universalisation - mark the point in Hogan-Howe's speech where he says no one benefits from ongoing crime, it is in everyone's interests to stop crime, etc. This 'naturally', in an entirely unforced way, obscures the existence of social interests seriously at odds with the dominant social order, at odds in such a way that they cannot be negotiated or resolved within the extant politico-legal framework.

It is mistaken to think that this is always necessarily effective. The whole field of social (class) relations is a field of struggle, and therefore the materialization of these relations will necessarily be riven with antagonisms. This is clear if you look at how, historically, the police have been rejected in many working class communities - a pattern that has persisted to this day, in a way never quite captured in The Bill, but obvious enough in the context of the riots. This is why the government feels the urgent need to re-organise the relationship between the police and 'local communities'. It may also be one reason why Hogan-Howe feels the need to change the police's approach to 'stop and search', about which more later.

Finally, in materializing the relations of dominance, the state also works to constitute them at every level, and this is where its practices form an ensemble of technologies of power. The technology that we are invited to focus on, to think fondly about, to imagine in thrilling action, is nothing other than the technology involved in the production of i) social relations themselves, and ii) the capitalist bodies in which those relations are inscribed.

***

This helps to explain why the social democratic response is necessarily limited at best. During the miners' strike, Paul Gilroy and Joe Simm published an article, brimming with embarrassing detail, which attacked certain Labour left mythologies on crime and punishment. These commonplace myths held that Thatcher's very real augmentation and militarisation of the state's repressive apparatuses was a fundamental departure from the practice of the welfare state 'golden era'. During the years of class compromise, it was held, policing was focused on clearing up crime in a civic fashion, while national bargaining institutions and parliamentary democracy resolved political differences. Gilroy and Simm demolished this fairly comprehensively, showing that from the first post-war Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, up to Merlyn Rees, Callaghan's Home Secretary, Labour administrations had always dealt with class conflict, crime, and of course political struggle in Northern Ireland, in a militarized, politicized and authoritarian fashion. The 'golden age' never was.

We will similarly have no difficulty in recalling the extraordinary authoritarianism of New Labour, from ASBOs to the threatened use of troops to break a firefighters' strike. But the point of detailing all of this was and is to indicate the limits of an analysis of policing which treats it centrally as a 'public service' in which a municipal agency delivers 'law and order' to a tax-paying community. Such was a contention not just of Labourites but of marxists such as E P Thompson. That analysis is what led many on the left to blame Thatcher for police misconduct in the 1980s, and to demand more police on the beat. In fact, and this is something I assume Cameron's reformers are well aware of, more police officers on the beat makes practically zero difference to crime rates. This is something that Home Office figures, as well as academic research, constantly indicates. By demanding more police, the left just played into Thatcher's strategy of beefing up capacity in anticipation of major social conflicts.

Policing is about something other than crime. That something else is, to put it crudely, violence and coercion. To put it less crudely, the police force contains within itself both 'legal' and 'illegal' forms of behaviour. It's not just that there is well known corruption, the beating of suspects, harrassing activists, and so on. It is that the apparent "gap between the democratic rhetoric of law and the actual practice of justice", as Gilroy and Simm put it, is expressive of the process of legality in itself. This process supposedly involves the collection, presentation and assimilation of evidence, a set of procedures designed to evaluate the objective truth of a situation: a person broke the law, or they didn't. But the process itself is constituted by power: the power of the police to determine, within limits, the laws and restraints applicable to them and their immediate relations with their subjects, to reconstruct events in a self-justifying way, to frame suspects; the power of judges to act arbitrarily, to sermonise, to unduly restrain solicitors, to (mis)instruct the jury, to inflict harsh punishments and thereby 'send a message'; the power of the media to identify crime 'scandals' or determine a person's guilt or innocence in advance; and so on. The product, 'justice', is a resolution of antagonisms and conflicts in society, generally to the advantage of the dominant classes and to the particular disadvantage of the poorest sections of the working class.

To grasp the specific role of the police in this production process, let me just return to something Hogan-Howe said. He referred to the disproportionate use of 'stop and search' powers by police against black and ethnic minorities. This was a constant flash-point of struggle with the police in the twentieth century, more explicitly racialised in the post-war era. Reducing its use would seem to be a plausible goal. However, it is important not to get too swept up in the idea that there will be a reduction in racist harrassment by police. Hogan-Howe favours a more targeted, smarter 'stop and search' policy - the technological solution again - and a more 'professional' manner of interaction between police and the subject of 'stop and search'. Now, it is notable that this does not any specific legal or even necessarily administrative restraint. Hogan-Howe mentions none, at any rate. Rather, it involves discretion in the use of police powers. And this discretion, coming under the rubric of 'professionalism', is something that actively undermines accountability, because it renders their conduct dependent on the immediate calculable variables of a given situation, for which no one can legislate or even dictate guidelines. Gilroy and Simm point out that the logic of professionalization has always been to free the police from legal accountability.

Moreover, and this is very far from the commonplace idea that the beat copper is an authentic proletarian, this freedom is one enjoyed in relation not just to suspects and courts, but principally in relation to senior officers and managers. It doesn't matter what the official line is, the culture of rank and file policing, the officers' understanding of their role, based on training, ideology, the institutional matrix, the particular kinds of cop sociality, etc. determine far more than managerial edict how crimes are dealt with on a daily basis. This is not to say that managers do not ultimately manage, that legal and political power over the police isn't ultimately centralised through a fairly inflexible hierarchy up to the executive. It is not to say that the average police officer has complete freedom of action. But the information on which policing is based, court judgements processed, and political decisions made, flows to a considerable extent up the chain from the police, giving them a degree of relative autonomy as professional managers of the social body. In the context of techniques such as 'stop and search', this increases police freedoms to define situations as ones requiring intervention and coercion. It empowers them to harrass, to brutalise, to demean, or to abstain from these if they see fit. Reports, ethnographies, research, etc. all show where this leads. The police in reality don't spend much of their time carrying out investigative work. Most of the time, they do little. They walk around, or drive around, or sit around. But when active, they engage in routine confrontation with certain subaltern social groups, pursue vendettas or indeed criminal enterprises. They work up 'results' based on certain tried and tested techniques, which may or may not coincide with actual crimes (of which they deal with a vanishingly small proportion at any rate). And they do all this within their understanding of what their role is in relation to society, formed by racist and sexist occupational sub-cultures, hatred for the 'underclass', and so on. What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defence of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defence of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police. And that is what policing is.

Labels: british state, capitalism, capitalist state, metropolitan police, police, police brutality, racism, repression

Monday, December 05, 2011

For a people's inquiry into the summer riots posted by Richard Seymour

The Guardian and the LSE have published their findings on the summer riots. There is no doubt that this presents valuable data, which broadly supports the argument of those on the Left who said it was primarily a response to political injustice. The analysis acknowledges that, for some, the riots presented an opportunity to obtain free goods. But it does not support the claim that the riots were predominantly an outburst of criminality, or that gangs played a significant role. The riots were mainly political.

It finds: just under half of those rioters interviewed were students, and a significant component of their anger came from the sense of injustice over the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees, cutting off higher education and thus life chances for millions; of those who were not students, 59% were unemployed, in contrast to some misleading coverage claiming that a disproportionate number were in work or even middle class; gang members played at most a peripheral role; while there was a wider perception of social injustice motivating the involvement rioters, the issue of police injustice, horrificially underscored by the murder of Mark Duggan, was the most significant cause of the riots; 73% of those interviewed had been stopped and searched in the previous three months. Now, the issue of the police was always marked by a strange silence in the accounts of those who said that it was primarily a matter of 'looting'. Much of the rioting that took place centred on confrontations with the police rather than theft or vandalism. Such theft as did take place was not always clearly pecuniary in motive - often it appeared to be targeted, as did some of the vandalism. In fact, the main form of 'opportunism' that is apparent is where young people, often on the receiving end of police harrassment and violence, saw an opportunity in the breakdown of police control to exact revenge. Because of this, many of the interviewees express pride, not remorse. They say they felt empowered, and would do it again. This is not new. So, all this data is useful and should be scoured carefully, the findings reviewed in their full complexity. Have a look at this video by Guardian journalist Paul Lewis:

However, as I understand it, this study is a limited review of one aspect of the story, that being the motivations and views of the rioters. The other main reports come from the Metropolitan Police, and the government's 'independent panel'. It is undoubtedly possible, through a reading of all of these reports, against the grain where necessary, to acquire a workable political understanding of what took place, and what is highly likely to take place again. It's important that such an understanding should inform a broad political response. The government, far from retreating on its agenda, is gearing up for major confrontations. The police, far from facing justice, have recently been let off the hook over the death of 'Smiley Culture', and now have more weapons with which to threaten people - as student protesters menaced with the possibility of water cannon and rubber bullets can attest. One would like to think that the dominant response will be in the form of social struggles, protests, strikes and occupations. Indeed, that is more or less what one expects. However, the most implausible scenario is that the riots will be a one off. And that's something that we have to be ready for, especially given how insanely most people reacted.

So, here's a proposal - a bit late, but still worth thinking about. We need a people's inquiry into the issues, the narrative, the outcomes and the appropriate response to the riots. It should be funded by subscription or donations, and it would require the participation of people able to put in a lot of hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing evidence. There is a model for this. Recently, I was directed to a number of reports published in the 1980s concerning riots that had taken place. These were unofficial people's inquiries, conducted in a judicious manner with the aim of establishing a full narrative which would disclose what public authorities were reluctant to acknowledge, and what was occluded in media coverage focused on vandalism and violence: police brutality, official racism, and so on. For example, in response to the events in Southall in April 1979, an Unofficial Committee of Enquiry was set up, chaired by Michael Dummett, to establish the narrative, the causes and failure on the part of the authorites. It heard evidence from eyewitnesses, participants, those directly or indirectly affected in Southall. It collated and scrutinised data published by the authorities. The final report was published by the National Council of Civil Liberties. Among the Committee's members were Stuart Hall, who wrote much of the report, as well as Labour MPs such as Joan Lestor and Patricia Hewitt (uh huh), alongside trade unionists, clerics and a representative of the Asian Resources Centre in Birmingham. This doesn't seem to be available online, but I got what I think is a rare copy from Amazon, and I shall be scanning it and making it publicly available as soon as I can. The idea here isn't to retrospectively endorse every conclusion reached, or to say that we can simply mimic every principle of organisation adopted then. Rather, it is to illustrate how a well-organised inquiry bringing together a relatively broad coalition of elements can form the basis for a political response. Now, I don't know how one would begin to go about materially constructing the coalition necessary to get an inquiry up and running today. I don't know what it would cost or who would supply the personnel. But I bet some of the people reading this have a better idea than I do. So, think about it.

Labels: education maintenance allowance, metropolitan police, neoliberalism, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tories, tottenham, tuition fees

Saturday, September 03, 2011

The Metropolitan Police and the EDL posted by Richard Seymour

If you want to understand why the police are not to be relied upon when dealing with the far right, this story offers part of the answer:

Scotland Yard has been accused of underestimating the threat from the English Defence League (EDL) after the head of the unit monitoring hate groups declared it was not an extremist organisation.
In an email obtained by the Guardian, Adrian Tudway, National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism, said he formed the view the EDL were not extreme after reading their website.
Today the EDL, accused by Muslims of fostering hate against them, will stage a "static" demonstration in Tower Hamlets, east London, in one of their most potentially provocative displays so far.
The Metropolitan police obtained a ban against a planned march through east London by the EDL, fearing clashes with anti-fascist groups and also the prospect of British Muslim youths taking to the streets to defend their communities against feared racist attacks.
British Muslims have claimed police have not done enough to protect them against the EDL.
In an email sent on 27 April 2011, Tudway told a Muslim group they should try opening up a "line of dialogue" with the EDL, who have been accused of staging attacks and directing hostility at British Muslims.
Tudway wrote: "In terms of the position with EDL, the original stance stands, they are not extreme right wing as a group, indeed if you look at their published material on their web-site, they are actively moving away from the right and violence with their mission statement etc.
"As we discussed last time we met, I really think you need to open a direct line of dialogue with them, that might be the best way to engage them and re-direct their activity?"

Labels: anti-fascism, edl, english defence league, fascism, islamophobia, metropolitan police, muslims, racism

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The sadistic state posted by Richard Seymour

The supererogatory nature of many of these sentences, related - often very distantly related - to the riots, is eye-catching. Here we have a 22 year old woman locked up for six months for intention to steal. Here a couple of young man, 20 and 22, are locked up for four years for allegedly inciting riotous conduct on their Facebook pages, even though not a single incident could be said to have resulted from their behaviour. Here a 17 year old boy is given community service, a curfew and banned from social media sites for a joke on Facebook. These are in addition to the recent cases of a mother of two in Manchester being jailed for receiving looted shorts, a young man getting six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water, and another young man who will probably go to jail for stealing two scoops of ice cream. There will be more, no doubt. The logic of such harsh sentencing is disclosed in the homilies of judges:

Sitting at Manchester Crown Court, sentencing Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said: "I have no doubt at all that the principal purpose is that the courts should show that outbursts of criminal behaviour like this will be and must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation.
"For those reasons I consider that the sentencing guidelines for specific offences are of much less weight in the context of the current case, and can properly be departed from." [Emphasis added]

This isn't just one magistrate's view. It's being rolled out across the country:

Camberwell magistrate Novello Noades let slip that courts were ordered to send all rioters and looters to jail.
Court clerk Claire Luxford said “guidance” had gone out “saying that when sentencing guidelines were written no one envisaged events like these—and therefore they do not apply”.
This has meant harsh sentences for crimes normally considered minor.

Judges throwing aside the guidelines and handing people ridiculously punitive sentences for petty or non-offences is a recipe for appeals. There will at the very least be plenty of work for defence lawyers. But that's not the point. Sentencing is only the logical terminus of a process that is off the leash. Think of the police who made the initial arrests, and pressed charges. Think of the prosecutor's office who approved the charges. Think of the police who charged two young men for organising a water fight in Colchester using their Blackberries, and then let the media know that they were doing this. The criminal justice system is engaged in a demonstration of the state's ability to control the territory, because that very ability is just what has recently been in doubt. The moral and ideological pedagogy behind this disciplining and consumption of bodies teaches us that the party of order is in control, because its claim to rule hinges considerably on its ability to rule. This is, of course, the hallmark of a very brittle social order.

Labels: austerity, british state, criminal justice, metropolitan police, police, racism, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

Blame it on the boogie-woogie posted by Richard Seymour

On the history of British reactionaries blaming black music for riots and disorder:

"It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge."

Labels: austerity, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism, riots, tories, tottenham

Sunday, August 14, 2011

The competing common senses of the riots posted by Richard Seymour

The polls on the riots don't disclose a single logic, but two competing logics. The first is the repressive response which we have become used to: blame gangs, use water cannons, bring in the army, support curfews, lock them up. The other is the emerging consensus that Tory cuts are a substantial cause of the riots. (Spending cuts doesn't really do it justice - we're talking about radical structural adjustment, which will severely reduce the income and living standards of the working class). In a ComRes poll for the Indy, 50% blamed cuts, while 36% did not. In a way, this is impressive given the hysterical media coverage and political taboo on mentioning such causes. However, in another way, this is predictable: people do tend to entertain complex, conflicting ideas. And no matter what politicians or hacks say, the relationship is fairly obvious. The denial is purely performative, a theatrical gesture designed to buttress one's apparent probity. The real problem is that, at the moment, the right-wing narrative is dominant. This makes it important to get the argument right about the relationship between a Tory government implementing cuts (and it's important that it's a Tory government doing this - I suspect the SNP being in power in Scotland is one reason why no riots in Glasgow), and the incidence of riots.

The US social movements scholar Jack Goldstone points out the fruit of scholarship on this issue which, he points out in another forum, has been particularly detailed since the Rodney King riots. The first significant point is this: "The key to understanding why people riot is not poverty – it is injustice." In this case, the most pressing, acute injustice is that of police repression and institutional racism. But the class injustices resulting in high youth unemployment, concentrations of poverty, almost static social mobility, and urban degeneration, are present here as well. This is evident in the rioters' description of their motives in media interviews. It's also evident in the historical pattern of rioting, and at least suggested in the prognoses made by figures as distinct as the TUC and Nick Clegg, both of whom anticipated riots as a result of austerity.

But of course, this would not be a sufficient condition by itself. There would also need to be a proximate cause - some abuse, some intolerable injustice by the forces of law and order - as well as an opportunity provided by a breakdown in policing (related, I have argued, to a wider breakdown of the police leadership and the discourses securing the unity of the state). Both of these conditions presented themselves here. In light of this, the repressive responses have to be seen as ranging from the delusional to the obscene. Among the delusional, bring back national service. A simple point: Greece has national service. You work it out. Equally delusional are the hopes invested in using bigger and better weapons. The policing breakdown here was not military - the gun that apparently killed Mark Duggan was not a toy. Look at it. That gun is a beast. It's designed to decimate flesh. Police use these weapons on citizens. The idea that they haven't got enough weapons or powers is fuelled by a juvenile revenge fantasy, not reality. What happened was a breakdown of leadership and legitimacy. Resorting to more repression as a way of ironing out these problems will both intensify them in the long run and hurt and damage a lot of people along the way

Among the obscene: evict the families of rioters from council housing. Wandsworth council has apparently already issued a family with an eviction notice. I'm not even sure how this can be legal. Other examples: put a guy in jail for six months for 'looting' £3.50 worth of bottled water. Jail a mother of two for accepting 'looted' shorts for five months - then gloat about it. Arrest a 15 year old boy for a comment on Facebook. The party of order has been seeking to demonstrate its willingness to break all signs of disorder with the most aggressive policing and sentencing, from the student protests onward. This isn't simply a terroristic response: they don't just want to intimidate people into remaining compliant while their future is shredded. It is always heavily moralised with the aim of isolating radicals and militants within society as a whole, which isolation comes from the mere act of punishment. Punishment itself, whatever its merits, confers a degraded, marginalised social status. In the case of riots, it isn't just about morally and socially isolating those who (allegedly) directly participated in rioting. It's about associating rioting with the 'underclass' - hence the attacks on council housing tenants and the talking points about taking away their benefits, as if every rioter is a 'welfare scrounger' - and somehow quarantining dissent among the criminalised, socially reviled poor. Obviously, racism plays a key role in this. Since the cuts are going to hurt such people the most, the austerity agenda is validated when they are demonised as anti-social burdens best dealt with by bullets and batons. Clearly, this does nothing to prevent future riots. It's not supposed to. In all likelihood it will produce further rioting. But the point is to ensure that when it does, the ideological terrain is so prepared that people react to it as an outburst of raw feral energy rather than an intelligible response to injustice. Which means that in resisting the right's interpretation of the riots, the Left has a particularly urgent need to challenge the obscenities being processed through the criminal justice system at the moment.

***

ps: I expect most of you missed my two minutes of fame on BBC Sunday Morning Live, but I am reliably informed that, mic problems aside, I got the point across. Which is as well, because the alternative is that you'd have to rely on Terry Christian to say something half-sensible. I'll let you know if/as/when there's a video... pps: Okay, here it is. About 36m 30 seconds in.

Labels: austerity, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism, riots, tories, tottenham

Friday, August 12, 2011

Why riot? posted by Richard Seymour

I did this for ABC Australia:

No-one wants to hear social and economic justifications for rioting, least of all anyone in the UK political class. But justification is not what is at stake. The issue is explanation, as that will determine the response.
Prime Minister Cameron, and London mayor Boris Johnson, have a very simple explanation: it is opportunism, a chance to smash, grab, burn and run.
Their response, therefore, is a simple policing one. Increase the numbers of police forces on the street, and arrest more people. Some go further. Liberal MP Simon Hughes called for the use of the water cannon. Tory MEP Roger Helmer urged that the army be sent in, and looters shot on sight. With towns and cities rioting across the UK, involving at least thousands of youths, this would result in a bloodbath - if a condign one by Helmer's standards.
In fact, the government's response is totally empty: it amounts to saying, people loot because they want to loot, a circular argument that explains nothing. The question remains: why here, why now...?

Labels: austerity, media, metropolitan police, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tories, tottenham

Thursday, August 11, 2011

The spirit of the Blitz - god, how I hate the spirit of the Blitz posted by Richard Seymour

I admit I was initially rather taken with the idea of #riotcleanup. The spectacle of dozens of people gathering in town centres to help clear up the debris seemed to be an attempt to find a response to the riots that wasn't merely trapped in the policing vocabulary. And it was being pushed on Twitter by nice folks, left-liberals, people who you would trust on this sort of thing. Yet before long it started to resemble something like submerged vigilantism - from the 'looters are scum' tops to the Blitz references to the piffle about 'taking pride in our communities' when it's patently obvious that these riots are happening because 'our communities' are going to the dogs. Luckily, the University of Strategic Optimism has patiently and carefully anatomised what's wrong with the whole thing:

It’s going to take more than posturing, ‘blitz-spirit’, keep-calm-and-carry-on clap-trap and colonial Kipling-esque “keeping your head” to fix this mess. The strikingly middle-class, broadly white efforts to sweep issues of inequality under the carpet of a simulated big-society photo-op has been a telling, if little discussed, aspect of the recent rioting, making little headway in the scramble of blogposts and tweets attempting hasty analyses of the unfolding turmoil. This doughty bunch of volunteer cleaners, the substitution for a non-existent community, appeared right on cue to fill the media narrative all day following a night of London’s most extensive social unrest in decades. Even Mayor Boris had leisurely returned from holiday to be snapped with the broom-wielding bourgeoisie of Clapham as they amassed for a bit of symbolic social cleansing.

Labels: 'community', austerity, hackney, metropolitan police, riots, tories, tottenham, vigilantism

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

On Russia Today posted by Richard Seymour

Yours truly interviewed on Russia Today:

Labels: austerity, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism, riots, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, tories, tottenham

On Democracy Now posted by Richard Seymour

You can have a look at myself and Darcus Howe talking about the London riots on today's Democracy Now - about 14 mins in, I think.

Labels: darcus howe, democracy now, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism, riots, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, tottenham

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Al Jazeera on the riots posted by Richard Seymour

Al Jazeera interviewed me for this article:

Tottenham, where Duggan was killed, is a Haringey neighbourhood which has among the highest unemployment rates in London - and a larger than average youth population. People of colour here have particularly felt the effects of deteriorating social services and targeted police harassment and violence, said author Richard Seymour.

"There's kids here who basically no one cares about, and nobody does anything for," said Seymour, a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics. "When the rioters themselves are asked, they will say that they are abused by police, harassed by them, and nobody's done a thing about it."

Seymour also explained that after many of the 333 deaths in police custody between 1998 and 2010 in Britain, "Large, peaceful protests in response [to the in-custody deaths] were more or less ignored" and not a single officer has been prosecuted.

As a result, Duggan's killing crossed a threshold for young people, angry with the systems that have left them behind, and tired of non-violent protest that goes without much response....

Labels: austerity, london, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism, riots, tories, tottenham

Racist vigilantes on the loose posted by Richard Seymour

This is terrifying. I did tell you the Right was going crazy. Now, the racists have an opportunity to go on the rampage. In Enfield, dozens of white men aged between 30 and 40 were out earlier, chasing down Hertford Road yelling "Get the p**is". Paul Lewis reports:

It was only a minor skirmish, but a potentially bad sign for community relations. Police, who have flooded the streets, were quickly on the scene when about 70 men
started chasing local youths.
I wouldn't mention their ethnicity, but it seemed to be relevant. The men were white - in their 30s and 40s - and shouting that they wanted to get the "blacks" and "pakis". Lots of them seemed drunk. One man being held back by police shouted: "They're rats, they mugged my Auntie the other night."
Jay Bradley, 30, a witness, told me: "What happened here? What I just saw - everyone from this area aren't gonna have any looting.
What I saw was a couple of ethnic lads, if you can call them that, black lads, and they chased them away.
A lot of it is alcohol - I don't think the kids were doing anything. They were just on bikes and in masks.
But no-one around here is going to stand for any looting. What are we supposed to do. The Co-op is closed and we're running out of food."

I don't believe that this is just a spontaneous response to looters. When the BNP membership list was leaked, it emerged that there were a number of members scattered around the lower middle class areas, and I wouldn't be surprised if they, along with local EDL supporters, were among those out tonight. The emergence of racist vigilantism is not unique to Enfield. It's also emerged that racist Millwall fans are supposedly 'protecting' Eltham tonight. Apparently, the EDL have been marching through the area. [Update: local residents and Millwall fans both assure me that this is untrue, and that it's just locals protecting themselves. Which, if true, is a relief - but one is still uneasy about vigilantes in football gear posing as defenders of the community.] This is why we urgently need a political response to these riots that organises communities around the issue of justice for victims of police violence. The IPCC have said tonight that Mark Duggan did not shoot at police officers. This, to me, suggests that his death was an execution, and that the bullet in the police radio may have been post-mortem framing. Either way, the police certainly lied about the circumstances of Mark Duggan's death, and this is a major cause of the anger in black communities, as it should be everywhere. There urgently needs to be an intervention on this by anti-racists and the Left.

Update: Given that there are lots of unsupported rumours flying about, I think it's important to add a couple of important qualifications to this post. A lot of the rumours going about are originating from the far right themselves - part of their propaganda about being men of action, etc. And some of them could result in people getting hurt. Naturally, I have no wish to contribute to either, so I'm just being cautious. First of all, I have heard conflicting things about the far right being involved in Enfield, but as yet no proof of this has emerged. It may well be just local racists. Guardian journalist Paul Lewis is being careful to say he only witnessed a brief skirmish (though, from the footage I've seen, it was a really nasty, scary event). Second, loads of people have been tweeting me to say it's not the EDL in Eltham. (There is some footage of what appear to be EDL being kettled there, but not the 400-strong mob that the casuals were bragging about). I'm still not okay with vigilantism, but there are degrees of danger. I'm not arguing for complacency. There are some real fascist efforts at stirring. Most of it has been kettled by the cops so far, however. So, I would bear these points in mind when you're scanning social media for updates.

Labels: fascism, metropolitan police, police shooting, racism

"Shoot on sight" posted by Richard Seymour

Tory MEP Roger Helmer's preferred option for dealing with riots:

I told you the Right were going mental.

Labels: austerity, martial law, metropolitan police, reactionaries, riots, tories, tottenham

BBC vs Darcus Howe posted by Richard Seymour

This is astonishing. The BBC presenter could not possibly be any more biased, hostile and vicious. At one point she engages in a straightforward smear:

Labels: bbc, metropolitan police, police brutality, police shooting, propaganda, racism, riots, tottenham

Monday, August 08, 2011

A crisis of ideology and political leadership. posted by Richard Seymour

You've probably heard it said a dozen times today: "It's like 28 Days Later out there." Every thirty seconds, there's a new riot zone. I've rarely known the capital to be this wound up. It's kicked off in East Ham, then Whitechapel, then Ealing Broadway (really?), then Waltham Forest... It's kicked off in Croydon, then Birmingham, then (just a rumour so far) Bradford... The banlieues of Britain are erupting in mass civil unrest. Until now, the claim has been that this is merely a criminal enterprise. At a stretch, it was orchestrated criminality, using Twitter and Blackberry messenger. If you're following what's happening in the UK, that's an impossible position to sustain. A few looters here and there might be evidence of little more than opportunism. But clashes with police in several major cities, including the two largest cities, doesn't look like mere entrepreneurialism to me. And as it spreads to hitherto unexpected places, it certainly doesn't look orchestrated.

Part of the reason for the spread is probably that the aura of invincibility on the part of UK riot police has been seriously damaged by these riots. Protesters in the UK are used to being contained and out-manouevered by police. That makes it seem as if the police are omnipotent. This situation has underlined very clearly that law and order is generally maintained by consent, not coercion. The police are not all powerful, despite their technological and organizational advantages, which is why they rely on good 'community relations'. In those areas where there are long-standing grievances and sources of resentment, it seems, that consent has been withdrawn. As a result of the unpredictable way in which this unrest has unfolded, the police have ended up being out-played, and sometimes out-numbered.

Yet, as important, there is also an underlying crisis of ideology and political leadership for the police. Amid the Hackgate scandal, which has shattered their credibility, and following the killing of a suspect under circumstances that were only ineffectually and temporarily concealed, they are [potentially facing a complete collapse in relations with black British communities. Cameron and the police leadership will be evacuating themselves over this prospect. The painstaking attempts to overcome the complete mutual hatred and distrust that characterised such relations in the 1980s made some headway. Of course, police harrassment, brutality, killing in custody, and so on, did not come to an end. Institutional racism proved durable. But there was definitely an amelioration between Broadwater Farm and the Lawrence Inquiry. And that is one advance which, I believe, they don't want to put through the historical shredder.

So, despite politicians like the Liberal Simon Hughes ranting and demanding that the police use the water cannon, and despite the ritual denunciations and tough talk about the law from (another Liberal) Lynne Featherstone, I suspect the police are quite unsure as to how they're supposed to be handling this. The fact that Cameron has, with remarkable arrogance, hitherto refused to shift from his Tuscany villa and arouse parliament from its recess, cannot have helped here. (Boris Johnson's absence has merely allowed Ken Livingstone to start his re-election campaign early.) One doesn't expect this disorientation, if that's what it is, to last long. The police and the executive will coordinate some sort of policy response that seeks to isolate the 'troublemakers' while making reassuring noises about 'understanding' that 'people have many valid questions' etc. But for now, the crisis is sufficient to allow these openings and, as a result, riots are breaking out in new places with stunning frequency. (Just as I write, I've learned that Woolwich has joined the riot zones).

Though the media is putting a lot of labour into the effort of racialising this issue, the underlying class dimension is just as obvious. The US press seems to get it. The New York Times' report ascribes the riots to a combination of spending cuts and anti-police sentiment amid a generalised ideological crisis for the cops:

Frustration in this impoverished neighborhood, as in many others in Britain, has mounted as the government’s austerity budget has forced deep cuts in social services. At the same time, a widely held disdain for law enforcement here, where a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse, has only intensified through the drumbeat of scandal that has racked Scotland Yard in recent weeks and led to the resignation of the force’s two top commanders.

They also quote a rioter saying they're taking on "the ruling class". And of course, the ruling class press is deeply attuned to this sort of scenario. Only a month ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote of how the global rich fear the coming violence of the poor:

A new survey from Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today. ... the numbers are backed up by other trends seen throughout the world of wealth today: the rich keeping a lower profile, hiring $230,000 guard dogs, and arming their yachts, planes and cars with military-style security features.

So, even if politicians are in denial, the rich aren't. You may well say, "bollocks, they're not taking on the ruling class, they're just destroying their own nest, hurting working class people and small businesses". I can hear this, just as I can hear the sanctimony in its enunciation. The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people. There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound. There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics. That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality. The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

Somewhat less on your high horse, you may go on: "but even if there is some sort of mediated logic of political class struggle unfolding here, the rich have nothing to fear as this sort of destruction is at best counterproductive". That may be correct, though it's the sort of thing people tend to assume rather than argue for. Major riots in the twentieth century included Soweto, in South Africa, and in US inner cities in the 1960s up to and including the Watts rebellion. Major riots in recent British history have included those in Brixton in 1981, and Broadwater Farm in 1986, as well as the poll tax riots in 1990. It would be foolish to claim that these made no contribution to achieving the objectives of their participants. The fact is that whatever problems riots bring to the communities affected by them - and they're real, no question - it can't just be assumed that they're stupid. The participants may not be glibly articulate, and some of them may be engaging in indefensible behaviour, but they shouldn't just be written off as mindless, apolitical thugs.

A more sensible assumption, perhaps, is that you have a lot of young people with complex motives - avarice and adventure, sure, but also anger and defiance - some of whom are educated in certain traditions of resistance. For example, The Guardian reporter Paul Lewis (who is worth following on Twitter, by the way) was surprised that Tottenham residents all knew of the IPCC and were very critical of it. This surprise was misplaced. Those who are most likely to suffer police repression, and thus have to make use of complaints procedures, are of course going to be in possession of certain repertoires of knowledge concerning policing and the criminal justice system. They would make it their business to be informed, out of self-defence. I don't buy the idea that these kids are just clueless about the political background of their oppression. And I think they're most likely on a learning curve now, as yet undecided as to what wider political conclusions they will draw from all of this. Like it or not, they are now part of the wider ideological crisis, now a key ingredient in the slow-motion collapse of the political leadership. How they see their involvement here, and how their perception changes, long after the smoke has cleared and the empty rhetoric has stopped, should be of some interest.

Labels: austerity, capitalist ideology, london, metropolitan police, police brutality, police shooting, riots, ruling class, tories, tottenham

Reactionary birdsong posted by Richard Seymour

While we await a pronunciamento from Cameron (ie not from his butler), there is a seam of political reaction already in the post in response to the riots. The right-wing is going stir crazy over these events. You need only follow the Tweets relating to each new hotspot and the Twitterers who express, far more concisely than the 'vox pops' on the news, the instapundits, the right-wing blogs, and those politicians who have so far been dragged out their hangovers by the media, where this is all going. Here's a brief songsheet.

Bestiary: The people who did this are "animals", exhibiting a "pack mentality". (Cf, "plague of locusts") They should be "put down".

Mindless: These people have no issues. They're not protesting. It's just mindless violence for the sake of mindless violence. They should be shot.

Opportunists: These people are social lurkers, awaiting the opportunity for a bit of mayhem and looting. It's just "needless opportunistic theft and violence" (dixit the tea boy). They should be sent back.

Leftists: The rioters are leftists, and clearly express the criminal urges of the left. They are like UK Uncut. They should have their benefits taken away.

Violence: There is no excuse for violence. Unless it's police violence (which is 'mindful' violence). Bring back the water cannon, the rubber bullets, and internment. They should be sent to Afghanistan.

Multiculturalism: These rioters are black and Jewish. Multiculturalism has failed. This isn't Basra or Baghdad. This is Tottenham, South London [sic]. This is Enfield, Wood Green, Hackney, Brixton, Lewisham, New Cross, Waltham Cross, Croydon, East Ham, Islington, Peckham and now Birmingham. These people should be forcibly integrated, then sent back.

You may think this brief, sarcastic itinerary of reaction is exaggerated. But, if anything, I have understated the violence, panic and seige mentality of the right, for reasons of taste apart from anything else. If you doubt me, spend an hour or so scanning tweets about the riots. There's a genuinely nasty, resentful, frightened seam of opinion that seems to become more bunkered with every new challenge to the sense of relative security and prosperity they had enjoyed just five years ago.

Labels: enfield, london, metropolitan police, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tottenham