Cop out? John Tranter on the Casey Report

‘Without a broader debate on what it means for a community to be safe, we will have the same conversation for years to come.’

In 1984 I witnessed the Brixton uprising. I was working and living around the area, and the unleashing of the pent-up frustration of the Afro-Caribbean community was no surprise. I heard two narratives: one from the state, implemented via the police and supported by the mainstream media, and the other, the voices of those that had been routinely abused, arrested, and assaulted. This was a formative time for a young white man from a privileged background.

So, the years passed. Stop and search laws were repealed. The Scarman Report promised change, but nothing was done. The Macpherson Inquiry came and went. Police regularly killed black people, mainly men, without any justice from our legal system. Police failings were hidden in plain sight for anyone wanting to see. But white people constantly looked the other way; white people did not need to look. Until Sarah Everard. And even then, the government supported the status quo while the mayor of London was lambasted in the mainstream media for daring to challenge the leadership of the Metropolitan Police.

Last year, at a black-tie dinner, I explained to a fellow guest why I had decided to take a sabbatical to read for an MA in postcolonial studies. One reason was that I could see that, over forty years, nothing had changed; I didn’t want to grow old venting my anger at the television screen every time there was another policing tragedy. I was forcefully told that things had improved, and the police were much better than in the 1980s.

This is the crux of the issue. Police officers don’t act alone; they are supported by a state that routinely uses them for its own ends: witness the 1984 miners’ strike through to last year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. And it is worth remembering that The Met was set up in 1829 by a government elected by less than ten per cent of the male population, while the majority of the British public was against the idea. The first of the Peelian Principles, which underpin the notion of policing by consent, is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to their repression by military force. I guess if the alternative was martial law, agreement to the lesser of two evils was consent.

Now we have the Casey Review. Nothing in the report, from the descriptions of bacon deposited in a Muslim policemen’s boot, to the mismanagement of rape cases, comes as a surprise. In the coming months, the public debate will focus on changing The Met and how it works and recruits. The Met will remain an arm of the state. Without a broader debate on what it means for a community to be safe, with processes and structures which bring people together, healing the harms we do to each other, we will have the same conversation for years to come. More people will suffer and die at the hands of the police, and our society will remain unsafe. The Casey Review is an opportunity, a challenge for us to broaden our thinking and to stop looking the other way.

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