AEC

The police tried to reject the findings of the Macpherson Report as soon as it was published. As time passed, they started to do this in a more open, regular, and systematic way, and now refer to institutional racism in the past tense, if they refer to it at all. Of the many recommendations in the report, to my knowledge none have been satisfactorily implemented.

On the contrary, as I have written elsewhere, police racial equality training seems to largely be focused on teaching officers what language to use if they are caught committing racial abuse. For example, police officers who compared black people to monkeys and Neanderthals were found not to have violated the Race Relations Act. Instead, it was claimed that they were having a debate on evolution. In 2012, a police officer knelt on the chest of a black man and told him “the problem with you is you will always be a n****r.” The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) found no grounds to prosecute, after hearing that the officers involved were attempting to boost the self-esteem of a young black man who apparently viewed his own ethnicity negatively.

We even saw a case recently when a black firefighter pulled over to try to assist some officers. They dragged him out of his car, tasered him, beat him, and verbally abused him. While they were being investigated for racism and assault by the Independent Police Complaint Commission (IPCC), one of them received a promotion.

A personal anecdote also shows how little the idea of institutional racism is understood. While monitoring police during the 2012 Olympics, I challenged an officer who had stopped and searched a young black guy in Stratford and told him that I was going to make a complaint. When I mentioned institutional racism, the officer angrily asked me if I was accusing him personally of being institutionally racist. I had to explain that that wasn’t possible, as he was an individual, not an institution. That was met with total confusion. So there is no understanding of the problem or any idea of what should be done about it.

These examples begin to show why justice cannot be achieved through the existing state-sanctioned channels. According to most mainstream reactions to BLMUK, we should operate through such channels in a “responsible,” non-disruptive fashion.

Such arguments imply that resistance to state violence began on August 5 2016, when BLMUK activists blocked the road to Heathrow Airport, apparently as a first, rather than a last, resort. This of course is nonsense. We have been using the “legitimate channels” for decades without achieving satisfactory results — we have tried the court system through inquiries and civil cases, we have tried the IPCC, we have tried different forms of education and community organizing. We have conducted non-disruptive marches, we have written articles, books, countless letters, and petitions.

But despite these efforts, and despite the fact that, as I mentioned, on average one person a week dies at the hands of the police in this country, there has not been a single conviction of a police officer for a death in custody since 1969.

There are only two possibilities: either the legitimized channels available to us are not fit for purpose and do not function in our interests; or there is a very unfortunate coincidence of people just dropping dead at the hands of the police and it simply isn’t their fault in a single case. Most people who are honest will recognize the former explanation as being correct.