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

Monday, November 21, 2011

Occupy vs police repression posted by Richard Seymour

Francis Fox Piven conceives of "disruptive power" as that form of usually implicit power that people have as a result of the interdependencies that social organization gives rise to:

"All societies organize social life through networks of specialized and interdependent activities, and the more complex the society, the more elaborate these interdependent relations. Networks of cooperation and interdependence inevitably give rise to contention, to conflict, as people bound together by social life try to use each other to further their often distinctive interests and outlooks. And the networks of interdependence that bind people together also generate widespread power capacities to act on these distinctive interests and outlooks. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural workers, just as industrial capitalists depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, merchants depend on customers, husbands depend on wives, masters depend on slaves, landlords depend on tenants, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.

"Unlike wealth and force, which are concentrated at the top of social hierarchies, the leverage inherent in interdependencies is potentially widespread, especially in a densely interconnected society where the division of labor is far advanced. This leverage can in principle be activated by all parties to social relations, and it can also be activated from below, by the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations. I call the activation of interdependent power disruption, and I think protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." (Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 20)

This analysis is consistent with many theoretical perspectives, and the concept of disruptive power certainly has an affinity with the marxist conception of class capacities, or more broadly, structural capacities. It follows from this that disruptive power is not a particular tactic. Disruptive power may be violent, depending on the context of the struggle that activates it, but it is not necessarily so. It may be noisy, or carnivalesque - but again, not necessarily. The presumption in social movement literature is, says Piven, against violence and in favour of spectacle; but this dual presumption is based on a misunderstanding of protest movements, conceiving them as essentially a form of communication intended to win the support of wider audiences, whereas this is not always the case. In fact, the exercise of disruptive power is mainly about leverage.

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements. It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned. Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such. For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience." In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience. If there was a textbook, this would be in it. The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is. At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications. Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows. One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage. However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class. The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class. This brings us to the next point.

Disruptive power is distributed widely, but that doesn't mean it is easy to actualise. Piven cites six difficulties that obstruct this: first is the problem of getting people to recognise the relation of interdependence that endows them with disruptive power; the second difficulty is that the exercise of disruptive power requires people to break rules, defying institutional mechanisms that enshrine the cooperative (if fundamentally exploitative and oppressive) relations that sustain daily life, with the resulting risk of repression; third, this disruptive power has to be coordinated across many different groups and individuals who contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations, in order to be effective - "the classical problem of solidarity"; fourth, the people exercising disruptive power are enmeshed in a network of relations with multiple others who may attempt to restrain this disruption (church, family, etc); fifth, those involved have to find ways to endure the suspension of the normal cooperative relations that allow them to effectively reproduce themselves in their normal condition - strikers need to eat, occupiers need tents, etc.; and finally, those engaging in disruption have to consider the threat of exit by those from whom they have withdrawn cooperation - the rich taking off with their capital, partners leaving relationships, etc. The means to overcome these obstacles "are not solved anew with each challenge", but rather enter the "language of resistance", and "become a repertoire" (pp. 21-32)

This will do as an interpretive grid for understanding what the Occupy movements in the US are going through at this moment. Their challenges are all comprehensible as those arising from the exercise of disruptive power: how to attack the dominant ideology, coordinate heterogenous groups, sustain their own 'rule-breaking' and support others in their 'rule-breaking', and resist repression. It is through the prism of the latter question that I want to assess the current state of the Occupy movement in the US. The recent wave of renewed police assaults, some of them apparently co-ordinated across eighteen cities by both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been severe. From pepper-spraying the elderly to macing students, the intention has been to physically atomise these collective enterprises. It is tempting to say that such an over-reaction indicates the degree of apprehension on the part of the ruling class. In fact, however, apprehension has been far more apparent in their hesitations, retreats and fumbling attempts at co-optation, than in the resort to brutality. The latter is their default: far from being a panic reaction, it is how the US ruling class does business. As far as cops are concerned, it is "fairly standard police procedure". Their reliance on such methods may in fact reflect an underlying lack of concern, an insouciance, a feeling that this movement is a nuisance, but ultimately a brittle, shallow affair. To deviate from such methods would show that state planners are concerned that this is a movement which cannot be managed by escalating the costs of participation.

For the sake of argument, anyway, let me assume that the police actions in Portland, Seattle, Oakland, New York, UC Davis, and elsewhere, all reflect a consensus among ruling elites that a sufficient show of force will produce a collapse in confidence among the occupiers, deter their supporters, disorganise their alliances and leave them reduced to a hardcore of easily contained and potentially vilified activists. The timing would support this, as city managers would expect winter to start thinning the numbers anyway. A disorienting attack, a forcible shutdown, before the occupiers have had the chance to fully conceive and implement strategies for managing the cold months ahead, would be tactically intelligible in this context. Yet, although the police offensives have had some of the sought effects, forcing the occupiers onto the back foot, depriving many of them of their secured bedrock, they have nonetheless failed to thwart the momentum. The scale of the mobilisation in New York last Thursday, where an estimated 32,000 people took part in a day of action to shut down parts of the city, followed an ostensible victory on the part of city authorities three days earlier. This was when the police attacked the camp at 2am, and the mayor obtained a court ruling denying occupiers the right to camp in Liberty Square - though the city could not stop protesters from actually gathering there. The evictions demanded a bigger response from the occupiers and their periphery of active support, and Thursday provided it. Liberty Square is still occupied every day; it is still a meeting place, a pedagogical forum, and a launch pad for further action. So, the initiative remains in the hands of the protesters; not the state.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, this is a movement that is still in its upswing. A full-frontal attack on a movement which is still growing, and still popular, can be a dangerous mistake to make. The problem for the authorities is that such an assault isn't a technical operation but a political wager. As technically proficient as a repressive manouevre may be, the political effects aren't easily calculable: the same tactic that kills a movement today may consolidate it tomorrow. Second, as the statement from Occupy Wall Street following the eviction notes, the movement is serious. This seems nebulous, moralising even, but it has a precise political meaning: most of those joining the movement fully expected repression, and were mentally prepared for it. There are arguments that the police are just blue collar workers who should be on the side of the 99% - though, when former NYPD police capitain Ray Lewis asserts that his ex-colleagues are "workers for the 1%" and "mercenaries for Wall Street", one can safely say that such arguments are losing traction. But the occupation in Wall Street came to national prominence following a particularly brutal NYPD assault. It is a simple but reasonable inference that those who joined OWS and embarked on similar projects after this, knew that repression was a risk. So, the movement is far less brittle in this respect than its opponents perhaps estimated.

Third, as a former head of the CBI has pointed out, the ideology of free market capitalism has lost a significant part of its material basis: it cannot as easily claim to be more efficient than rival forms of organisation, or delivery greater prosperity for the majority over the long run. The increasing sympathy for socialism and communism among Americans has something to do with this disintegration of capitalist ideology. There is enormous sympathy for this left-populist movement, and those deemed complicit in its repression run the risk of being publicly shamed and of losing allies rapidly. Fourth, and relatedly, the repressive response from the ruling class may be coordinated and bipartisan, but it is far from unanimous. Some elements of the ruling class have preferred to try and co-opt the movement rather than simply attack it. This is most visible in the liberal segments of the capitalist media. From the very early days, it was obvious that the New York Times and perhaps also MSNBC favoured co-option rather than simple coercion. The fear of the banking industry, as their professional lobbyists have summarised it, is that this strategic fracturing of US ruling class opinion may be disadvantageous to their position. As they are not their own best advocates, they require public advocates - and the fear is that politicians under pressure to respond to such a movement will consider it imprudent to publicly defend financial capital. But the more the repressive option fails, the more the emphasis will fall on co-option. Finally, the occupiers have worked hard to build alliances with groups who already know how to wield disruptive power and have their own sets of repertoires. The response to the first attempted assault on Occupy Wall Street was based on an alliance with unions; the response to the first assault on Occupy Oakland, a city-wide 'general strike', was based on an alliance with the unions too. Of course, one must be wary of what Glenn Greenwald detects is an effort by pro-Obama union leaders to direct the movement into the Democratic fold. And solidarity work has taken other forms, such as the attempt to obstruct foreclosures. But there is a genuine convergence of interests between organised labor and the heterogenous groups assembled at OWS - whether debt-shackled students, workers, the unemployed, or dissident former soldiers. The union leadership knows it, especially after the defeat of the union-bashers in Ohio. The alliance between these groups has to be negotiated and constructed. But the material basis for it, which the slogan 'we are the 99%' communicates, is a shared class interest. This shared interest, at a time of sharpening class antagonisms, is making solidarity easier to achieve, and is laying the basis for a new Left.

Labels: american ruling class, american working class, capitalist crisis, capitalist ideology, democratic party, left, police brutality, socialism, us politics

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Police terror in Oakland posted by Richard Seymour

The question was always going to be posed. How do you stop the police from physically dismantling your protest by sheer overwhelming force of arms? How can you uphold your right to protest when that right is gainsayed by tear gas, rubber bullets, and bean bag rounds? When armed paramilitary police are running around like storm troopers - the cliche is appropriate - assaulting unarmed and non-violent protesters? When, having literally broken bones and smashed skulls, the chief of the police department can tell the press, "I think we allowed people to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly"? And when the mayor - who was herself a target of Occupy Oakland's criticisms - can commend the police on a "a generally peaceful resolution to a situation that deteriorated"?

The debates on LBO Talk suggest two reasons not to be surprised by the police action. The first is that local Democratic Party machines are just as apt to resort to repression as the Republicans; and the second is the proliferation of Joint Terrorism Task Force franchises throughout the police during the Bush era - as is typical, a 'counter-terrorist' weapon has been largely refined and used in combat with workers and the Left. So what can one do? If you resort to tooling up and having running battles with the police, like the Black Bloc do, the police always win. At any rate, the problem isn't ultimately kinetic force, it's political force. Even at the moment when the police bring out their weapons, the chances of their being successfully faced down depend on political organisation not weapons. It is at the level of politics that the problem has to be countered. Yet, if you try to work around it by negotiating with local authorities, the mayor's office etc, you may end up having making your protest inoffensive and ineffective, at which point you may as well pack up and go home. The bourgeoisie fears "mob rule" more than anything at this point - by which they mean, they fear a surfeit of democracy. If you're doing anything remotely effective, the ruling class should be put out.

As far as I can see, the only possible solution is the one opted for by Occupy Wall Street - broaden the movement within the working class. The tactical alliance with unions was probably decisive in stopping NYPD's attempt to 'clean up' Liberty Plaza. Even that isn't necessarily sufficient. The Oakland occupation was, until last night, one of the largest in the US. It had already made links with major unions, as well as with several other occupations across the country. Labour organizers had come along to help out. They were doing everything they could do, and making a success of it. But this didn't stop the police waiting until the early hours of morning, and going on the rampage against children, women in wheelchairs, whoever - the cops weren't there to discriminate, they were there to break limbs. Even so, if Occupy Oakland has a chance of reviving and facing down this terror, it is because of the organisational alliances they formed, the political support they assembled, and the coalition of forces willing to continue to support them.

Labels: capitalist state, class struggle, democratic party, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy wall street, police, police brutality, ruling class, us politics

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Police attack Wall Street occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Odd how you get these spaces for dissent in the US capitalist media. You rarely see anything like this in the UK:

Labels: capitalist crisis, class struggle, finance capital, police brutality, ruling class, us politics, wall street

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

A couple of recent police killings posted by Richard Seymour

Not longer after the execution of Mark Duggan, I read a story about a man who was pepper sprayed and tasered to his death by police. Dale Burns, it seems, was tasered several times and pepper sprayed while police were arresting him. He died. The IPCC are investigating but, as usual, it is very unlikely that anyone will be prosecuted or charged as a result. Jacob Michaels was pepper sprayed repeatedly while being arrested by eleven police officers, after he had called the police over a threat made to him. Eyewitness accounts suggest the eleven officers beat him and punched him while he was on the ground, handcuffed. He died. The IPCC are investigating. In both cases, the police will no doubt argue that each arrestee was belligerent and a danger to the public. That is the pretext for using such weapons. They are retailed as safer alternatives to lethal weapons such as pistols or rifles where immediate, debilitating force is necessary.

In fact, both weapons simply tend to increase the range of possibilities for use of potentially lethal force. Amnesty points out that most cases where people have died from the use of Tasers involved unarmed people who did not pose a risk to anyone. (Neither Michaels nor Burns, as far as we know, were armed.) Similarly, pepper spray is associated with positional asphyxia, as it makes breathing much more difficult. So when a high-strength dose is used repeatedly on someone, there is a real risk of their being killed. Yet despite scientific reservations about its use, and worries over its potentially carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic effects, it was approved for widespread use in the US and is now being used by UK police. Self-evidently, the tendency for the UK to imitate US methods of repression is a danger to the public. And it could get much worse, particularly with all of this hysterical nonsense about 'feral youths' which could easily lead us down the route of turning schools into prisons and disseminating lethal technology among wider cadres of security officials and so on. In the US, tasers are routinely carried by security personnel in schools, and have been used on a number of children, in one case resulting in the child's death. And that could be coming to a school near you soon.

This is the problem with moral panics. A lot of people showed some very nasty streaks during the UK riots. Social media was groaning with almost Streicherite hate-mongering and calls for violent repression that a Ustashe would think twice about. Bring in the army! Water cannons! Plastic bullets! Live bullets! Shoot them all! Massacre them! Massacre them! And now that's all over and the state has regained control, and the explicit bloodthirst has receded back into its usual subterranean psychic flow, there's no need to do anything rash. The police will simply take whatever new repressive technologies are handed to them, add them to the repertoire and continue to maim and consume bodies, perhaps at a slightly higher rate. The intensified social antagonisms will be resolved with the carefully scripted, bureaucratic application of violence. A few hundred deaths, a few thousands injuries, a few bad headlines, a little more fear and resentment, more CCTV, and the retooling of the state for the age of austerity is complete.

Labels: austerity, british state, capitalist state, police, police brutality, repression, tories

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

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

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

Sunday, August 07, 2011

The plot thickens. posted by Richard Seymour

"Initial ballistics tests on the bullet that lodged in a police officer's radio when Mark Duggan died on Thursday night show it was a police issue bullet..."

Labels: enfield, mark duggan, metropolitian police, murder, police brutality, police shooting, riots, tottenham

Enfield not calling posted by Richard Seymour

Just to make this absolutely clear. There have been mass arrests in Enfield. But the rumours that were spread on Twitter, and apparently repeated at the Telegraph, of riots beginning in Enfield Town are absolutely untrue. I visited the town centre this afternoon to pick up some shopping, and saw none of the damage or violence people referred to. The falsehoods being put about include the idea that Enfield Town library is on fire. It's completely untrue. What I saw was a phalanx of police vans, and a large number of arrests taking place such as this one. The police are not arresting people because they've done anything, but because of what they were alleged to be intent on doing.

Specifically, police and local media claim that a large number of kids from outside the area had come in after rumours on social media indicating that there would be a riot. Shops were being closed down in anticipation of violence, apparently on the advice of police. I was told by shopkeepers and security that about 200 young people had been arrested this afternoon. (This was about 3.45pm). For its part, the Enfield Independent claims (at about 5.45pm) that police are targeting around 100 young people who have gathered around the train station in small groups of four or five, wearing hoods. (For what it's worth, none of the people whom I saw being arrested were wearing hoods - as if that's against the law now. They were just boys dressed normally.)

Frankly, I don't find the Independent's story entirely credible. First because 100 people gathered around the train station would be very conspicuous - it's a tiny area - and breaking off into groups of four and five would be pointless. Second because if the area around the train station is extended to include the contiguous promenade of shops and the abutting roads and footpaths, then it's normally a well populated area with lots of young people about. It's an assumption on their part that these were troublemakers. Third because this paper is well known for scaremongering, and has been supporting the campaign by local Tory MPs Nick de Bois and David Burrowes to lower the age at which young boys can be jailed for violent offenses. (By the by, it's also a scab newspaper, as management worked flat out to break a recent NUJ reporters' strike.) It's just possible that the perceptions of whoever is manning the local rag's office have been shaped by the hysteria of police and local businesses.

At any rate, there is no evidence of anyone seeking to cause any kind of trouble in Enfield Town (except for these guys). There is only evidence of provocative behaviour by the police. People keep trying to justify this as a necessary preemptive step against further riots. A far better way to prevent further riots would be to stop shooting people, don't beat up sixteen year old girls, and stop aggravating citizens with provocative bullshit.

Update: Well, there wasn't trouble before. There is now.

Labels: enfield, metropolitian police, police, police brutality, riots, tottenham

Police started the riots posted by Richard Seymour

An eyewitness says the riots began after a 16 year old girl approached police lines and was attacked by riot cops with batons:

Labels: austerity, metropolitian police, police brutality, policing the crisis, racism, riots, tories

Tottenham calling posted by Richard Seymour

The Metropolitan Police shot dead a young man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham on Thursday. As soon as the news emerged, albeit in the rather coy presentation of the television media, it was obvious that something would kick off. The circumstances of the killing are not entirely clear. It is known that the police were from an Operation Trident unit, which deals with gun crime 'in the black community' (because black people need extra special policing, you know). It is known that they pursued Mark Duggan while he was a passenger in a cab, stopped the cab and, during the arrest, shot him dead on the scene. From what I can gather, they seem to have pulled him out of the cab and shot him four times on the spot.

The police seem to have let it be known that they were shot at first, and that a police officer was injured. The impression was thus given in the early media reports that they killed the young man in self-defence. Whatever the officer's injury, he was only kept in hospital overnight. Later, the police claimed that the bullet miraculously struck the officer's police radio which, like a bible or a piece of the true cross, absorbed the shot. They say that in the seconds following this they opened fire in self-defence. An eyewitness, however, claimed that the young man was already restrained on the ground when the shots were fired. If true, this would bear the hallmarks of an extra-legal execution. Suffice to say, anyone who takes the police's version of events at face value at this point must either be a fool, or enjoy being made a fool of.

In Tottenham today, a group of local residents set out to march in anger against the killing. The police allege that 'clashes' began when some marchers threw missiles at cop cars. For what it's worth, some of those present appear to believe these cars were left there as bait. However it began, though, it has certainly become a riot. This is not just a black community response to racist policing - several reports say that local Hasidic Jews have joined the protesters in force. Police cars have been set on fire. Numerous Twitter reports from people at the scene say the high street cop station itself is ablaze, though I have not yet seen this mentioned on the news. Buses are ablaze, as are shops and banks. Eyewitnesses say that locals have set up burning barricades to stop the police from advancing. This has posed a serious problem for riot cops attempting to charge at the crowds on horseback, as the horses can't penetrate the barriers. Meanwhile, the police's own attempt at setting up roadblocks have apparently faced difficulties as one roadblock south of the cop shop was 'taken out'. There are reports of the crowd being 'on the offensive'. But, importantly, the police have manpower, technology, and the advantage of having fully expected this to happen. They may well have lost control, especially as the protests appear to have swollen throughout the evening, but it would short-sighted not to anticipate a sophisticated operation to trap the main body of protesters.

There are rumours - just rumours for now - of deaths at the riots already. Frankly, I think we would have heard a bit more detail if that was true. But given that the police are sending dozens of vans full of riot squad to the scene, and given that at least one was witnessed speeding toward the riot with 'Knight Rider' music playing at top volume, I would not rule out the possibility of another killing. There are also rumours, which BBC Radio 5 Live appears to have fuelled, that riots have also spread to Brixton, Peckham and Croydon. I have seen no confirmation of this anywhere. And in fact, the overall thrust of the BBC's approach has been to play down the 'disturbances' and abort coverage for some stirring patriotic insight into Britain's Olympic aspirations. "Keep Calm and Carry On", as the irritatingly smug, not-quite-ironic, retro poster has it.

Tottenham is ablaze. Not for the first time in its history. Not for the first time over police violence and killing either. But nor is this is the first major riot since the Tories took office. It may well be the first to make a serious impact on national politics, but remember the riots in Bristol and Lewisham. The party of order expected this. That is why the police handling of protests has been so provocative and brutal. That is why 'exemplary' sentences have been handed out for minor protest offenses, with even Murdoch's pie-man being given a custodial sentence. The intention has been to show that the party of order can keep control throughout the coming battles. I hope, with every fibre in my being, that they cannot.

Labels: austerity, metropolitian police, police brutality, police shooting, protest, riots, tories, tottenham