Editor's Blog

• Print

User Rating: 5 / 5

Details

Parent Category: Editor

Category: Editor's blog

Last Updated: Thursday, 13 August 2026 12:23

Published: Tuesday, 11 August 2020 07:49

Written by Colin Sumner

Hits: 4541

Twitter

A long, long time ago, in the USA, sociologists of policing established that the police modus operandi revolved around suspicion and risk of danger (Skolnick 1966; Piliavin and Briar 1968). An officer, quite understandably, needs a finely tuned sense of both suspicion and fear if s/he is to 'protect and serve' (the motto of police in many states) or keep the peace. In the UK, policing aims at 'keeping the peace', being "impartial and fair", "policing by consent" and of course not starting a riot or escalating an already tense situation (see, for example, the National Policing Improvement Agency's manual on keeping the peace (2010). 

Quite simply then, what an officer sees as suspicious can resolve a situation peacefully or cause a riot or a global explosion of riots as in the George Floyd case. If suspicion is racially selective, based on racist prejudice, racial profiling or some unconscious or conscious bias, it will of course cause huge tensions within a multiracial community. It will also, obviously, lead to a higher rate of crime recorded by the police, prosecuted and convicted, for that racially targeted group. So, in the UK, the number of BAME people in prison has grown sharply since 2004 and now comprises over 27% of the prison population, 22,227 compared to about the 13,000 you would expect if it reflected the number in the general population (Prison Reform Trust 2019). Basically, BAME people are much more likely to be arrested and sent to prison than white people. Just like they are more likley to get CV-19 and be hospitalized and die. If there are deep social inequalities that underpin these unequal facts, there is no science that explains these by genetics or 'anthropology' or eugenics - any such proposition is usually a sign of fascist ideology (as in Germany in the 1930's).

Suspicion is at the very heart of the many recent 'racism' disputes in London. In short, white police tend to be far more suspicious of black people than white people, poorer people than richer people. Suspicious in general it seems, not just of crime commission, suspicious because of sheer incomprehension and ignorance, and finally of people seeming to be in the wrong place, such as a nice car or in London. No crime need be suspected at all in reality, although legally it is required for the stop to be lawful. A situation just alerts an officer's suspiciousness, like being black in a nice car in London with a vehicle registered in Yorkshire. Or a child playing with a toy gun inside its own house. Or wearing an expensive suit. Or driving a really expensive car around the country, in the case of England footballer Danny Rose. Such things generate a knee on the neck, and death in custody, even after the murder of George Floyd. Imagine if white people were stopped regularly when driving nice cars or wearing expensive suits!  Imagine if the police were suspicious to the same extent about the contracts currently being dished out by Tory Ministers to their friends, or the PM's close relations with Putin's people!  

None of this is new. It is frustratingly unchanging and very sad if you are a patriot. Ever since I began to study criminology in 1969, I have been reading one official report or research finding after another that documents dispproportionate stop-and-search of black people. It is a platitude in Western criminology that our policing systems are racist. It is of little scientific interest to many criminologists why this is so, but why do so many white people deny it and why do the police not self-regulate much better?  Do people not know that militaristic police practices were developed and practised in the colonies, notably Ireland, North and South?  Do people not know that prejudiced surveillance and harassment have been the daily method of colonialism for over 150 years? It has become morally repulsive to live in a society that is becoming even more racist, especially an old imperial one that invaded, plundered, ravaged, exploited and massacred its way to world power for about 200 years. The slave trade in black people was the warm-up act to mass murder, terrorism and inhumanity towards black and brown people.

Sorry Cressida Dick, but as a black former detective I know just how racist the Met still is by Kevin Maxwell, in the Independent (10 August 2020)  

Yesterday, the police stopped a car containing Dawn Butler MP, being driven by a black friend, in Hackney, on a Sunday afternoon, close to her constituency. The police have apologised and admitted they had made an error in their identification of the vehicle. The young officer who conducted the interview was polite and of course nobody doubts the right of the police to stop and interview when they have suspicion that a crime may have been committed. They thought the car was from 200 miles away in Yorkshire, apparently. Yes, really; taking your car out of Yorkshire now seems to be grounds for suspicion. Don't you think Sherlock? From now on, any black people from the North thinking of visiting London should either [a] take the train or [b] seek police permission to leave the white zone. 

Sadly, earlier this summer the now Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, absurdly claimed that black people were disproportionately subjected to stop-and-search because they committed crime disproportionately to their fraction of the general population. This ignores the obvious refutation that the records will support that claim if you focus on black people, rather than corporate crime in Grenfell Towers, or governmental corruption or white hate crime or insider trading. This is the officer who gave the order to kill Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005, the innocent young Brazilian electrician on the tube, resulting in his being pinned down and shot in the head seven times from point blank range. He was suspected of being a terrorist, and all the official justifications for that somewhat colossal error, such as his clothing (seriously?), were later found to be false. The Commissioner admitted the police had made a "serious mistake"; mistaken identity. No one was successfully prosecuted for this state murder and the inquest jury rejected a verdict of lawful killing, being told by the coroner to register an open verdict. Even the European Court of Human Rights ruled against prosecutions.

In 1984, I had the privilege of supervising the Master's thesis of the late Chief Superintendent Wilf Knight, at Cambridge University's Institute of Criminology. On my advice and after becoming a little dismayed by his younger colleagues, Wilf decided to survey his own Metropolitan police attitudes to black people and he not only got support from the Met Commissioner to do the research but each of the 650 respondents was given a signed letter from the Commissioner himself ordering them to respond. Quite incredibly, despite the order from the London police chief, about 45% of the officers refused to do the survey. That fact never saw the light of day. The responses from the other 55% contained many profoundly racist comments, drawings of monkeys and bananas etc, and demonstrated unequivocally that the level of racism amongst serving officers was so deep they were even prepared to flaunt it in front of the Commissioner. That fact never saw the light of day either, because Cambridge University put the final thesis on 'restricted access'. So I am probably the only person who ever read it!

Some years later, I was again privileged to work with a high-flyer in the police who at that time was middle management, Paul Condon, now Baron Condon, who became Metropolitan Police Commissioner from 1993 to 2000. The occasion was a conference on race in criminal justice management, again in Cambridge, I believe, in 1986. Paul and I got talking after my session on policing colonialism. He, quite voluntarily wrote a long essay for me on institutionalized racism in the police, documenting its roots in our imperial past. As I remember it, he had no doubt that there was institutionalized racism in the Met and that it stemmed from tactics, ideas and attitudes deployed in managing a quarter of the world's population, the colonized, especially in Northern Ireland and Nigeria, and was embedded in police training. The McPherson Report enquiring into the death of Stephen Lawrence also found there to be institutionalized racism in the Met, and, it being on his watch as Commissioner, Paul resigned, somehat ironically, and went on to police corruption in cricket for the ICC.

I just want to comment briefly on the response to the Dawn Butler business on Twitter. The level of nonsense put out made me ashamed to be English and European, just like when I watched Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, that coruscating study of French colonial brutality against a decolonization movement. At 18, I worked with black kids at a summer camp near Chicago. I was proud of their Tamla Motown performance at the final evening's event. At 33, I was honoured to become the External Examiner in the Law Faculty of the University of Dar es Salaam, the only white guy on the panel of senior judges. On that trip in 1982, the then Chief Justice of Zanzibar invited me to sit with him at the trial of a gang of  young robbers (I refused the honour, despite his respect and my temptation, because I am not a qualified lawyer). Finally, I watched a soccer match in Dar with 20,000 black people - the only other white guy was the Brazilian coach of the Dar Lions' team and, despite my father being a professional footballer, I refused his offer to sit with him on the team bench, to assist coaching the team, because I could not stand his arrogant racism towards his own players. Racism is not only stupid it is an affront to humanity and on the wrong side of history. It also stands against the rise of black people from slavery to full citizenship over a period of 400 years.

The point of these stories is that I have never known black people talk like the white morons on Twitter today who have called for Dawn Butler's resignation (from what?) for stirring up anti-police feeling, who plainly didn't like her being 'uppety', who said, incredibly, that her driver was white, who ignore 'the Tory on rape charges' and who said Butler weaponised a routine stop that was no big deal, 'we all have to go through it'. The whole point is that white people do NOT have to go through this disproportionate intrusion and harassment every week!  This happens every day to black people, especially in London where there actually are black people. What is shocking is the ferocity of the denial of institutionalised police racism (on the denial of horrible events, see Stan Cohen's States of Denial (2001) . The Guardian reports the racist incidents daily and the ensuing protest demonstrations. What is so Malice in Wonderland about all this is that the police do not argue about their need to prevent racist perversions of the stop-and-search procedure. They are aware of the racism in their midst, especially in London, and have training programmes to minimize it, I believe; but just not the depth of it. And when politicians and members of the general public sustain a regular display of racist nonsense, in line with a eugenics-oriented far-right Tory government, it would be surprising if the police, feeling validated, did not fall into line to the same extent.

If the police do not rein it in, recognize that racism is as at least as common as in other institutions, and look much deeper into their training, there will be major explosions of rage ahead. These days they do plenty of criminology and know that, in its terms, excessive social censure can produce the 'deviancy amplification' effect. My advice to them would be to focus on the concept of suspicion and explore what that means to us as Brits today. My main suspicion, and that of millions, is that this government is corrupt and self-aggrandizing, negligent, careless and ideological, causing massive national damage and unnecessary deaths, and needs investigating by the brightest in blue.  

References

Prison Reform Trust (2019) Prison: the Facts.

The Stephen Lawrence Enquiry (1999).

Stan Cohen (2001) States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge: Polity.

Written by Colin Sumner, editor of CrimeTalk, former professor of criminology and sociology, for 18 years sociology lecturer at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. Author of Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary and Reading Ideologies; Editor of The Blackwell Companion to Criminology, Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, Violence, Culture and Censure, Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment, Social Control and Political Order (with the late Roberto Bergalli) and Multicultural Policing in a Democracy. Founder and editor, with Professor Piers Beirne, of the international academic journal Theoretical Criminology.