Policing the Racialised Other

internetjournalofcriminology.com

In April of 1993, a young black man by the name of Stephen Lawrence was murdered in London in what is generally agreed to have been a racially motivated assault. However, the subsequent investigation by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) failed to lead to any convictions of ...

This article presents evidence from a detailed qualitative study to demonstrate the signi cance of personal knowledge to black people's understanding of police/black relations. It explains how the stories told by respondents to illustrate their views revealed that previous explanations of the relationship have over-stressed the role of the black community and underplayed the importance of personal experiences in helping to form the perspectives of black people. The article outlines three central assumed truths contained within the stories, each of which leads to the conclusion that policing is irrefutably racialized. It is argued that the stories are underpinned by a dominant narrative of racialized policing which has grave implications for efforts to address the mistrust of the police evident among the black population. In highlighting the social role of stories, the article draws attention to their analytical signi cance in sociological analysis. It also draws attention to the importance of increasing the focus on the experiences and views of those on the receiving end of criminal justice in order to improve our understanding of everyday processes of racialization.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018

For black people in Britain, policing has long been a site of oppression and resistance. Whilst substantive change has been lacking, institutional racism within the British police has at least been acknowledged. Concomitantly, Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) has shown that much of the race and ethnicity literature ignores the experiences of mixed-race populations. In this article, we utilise two studies to consider black mixed-race men's perceptions and experience of policing in Britain. In total, we draw upon interviews with 17 black mixedrace men. Whilst we recognise that their experiences are often homogenised with blackness, in the context of police contact, we show that many black mixed-race men believe they are seen as part of a black monolith. We conclude that, in this context, mixedness does not bring about clearly differentiated experiences from that of black men. The absence of clear particularities to mixedness is of significance to CMRS.

By presenting detailed evidence from an evaluation of a help on arrest scheme for black detainees, this paper examines critically the meaning of race in the police custody process. It presents the understanding of a group of custody officers in order to reveal a specific racialization of police custody whereby any role for race is denied and removed from the officers' work agenda. It argues that the officers' unchallenged control of the custody process enabled them to employ a number of strategies to protect collegial and institutional priorities and prevent the scheme from fulfilling its practical objectives. The paper highlights the failure of a convenient 'race relations' initiative of senior officers and raises important questions about the potential value of independent civilian representation in police custody.

The British journal of sociology, 2006

Social Identities, 2022

In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police’s racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police’s martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain.

originally published in in Roger Matthews and Jock Young eds. (1986) Confronting Crime London: Sage Publications pp 145-165

Criminal Justice Matters, 2012