How can the Met police Gaza protests when it can't solve its own racism crisis?

While I agree with critiques of the prison system and police that justify calls to “abolish the police” or “abolish prison”, I’ve never thought it was a particularly effective slogan - particularly outside the US, where it gains traction by association with the struggle to abolish slavery in the South.

But there is one police force in the UK that was abolished: the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The RUC’s irredeemably sectarian character meant that it had to go. It was replaced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as part of the peace process in Ireland.

There is a case that such a moment is arriving for London’s Metropolitan Police. 

The Met’s decision to reinterpret the law to make the phrase "Globalise the Intifada" illegal is only the latest in a long line of decisions which make the Met the author of law as well as its enforcer. At a stroke the Met made a slogan that was perfectly legal only a day before into an arrestable offence the next day without any recourse to new legislation or even to a court ruling.

And with the Met it’s long been recognised that there are structural issues at stake. Over recent months alone, a pair of devastating new reports showed how police are getting extremism wrong, and how the Met itself is riddled with racism.

An independent investigation concluded in November that racism is systemic and maintained by “institutional design” within the Met. Commissioned from the consultancy HR Rewired, the report concluded that darker-skinned Met staff were “labelled confrontational”, while lighter-skinned employees might receive greater leniency.

The findings came just two years after the Casey Review - commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer - concluded that the police force was institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic.

The latest damning verdict on the Met came on the heels of the annual report on the Prevent anti-extremism programme, which showed that referrals for far-right extremism were more than double those for so-called Islamic extremism last year. 

Some 21 percent, or 1,798 referrals, were due to “extreme right-wing concerns”, while 10 percent, or 870, were connected to Islamist ideology. But by far the largest proportion of referrals - 56 percent, or 4,917 - were for individuals judged to have no identified ideology. This raises the question of whether the Prevent programme, inaugurated as part of the “war on terror” to tackle so-called Islamic extremism, is fit for purpose.

Institutional racism

This is not the first time that far-right extremism has been reported as the dominant form of extremism. Six years ago, the Guardian reported that police had “vowed to thwart the rise of the far right, which they have said is the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the UK”. 

That promise has obviously not been kept. And with the Met continuously accused of institutional racism, it is far from clear that they are capable of dealing with the far right.

Another recent investigation, this one by BBC’s Panorama programme, revealed deeply ingrained racist and sexist attitudes among officers at Charing Cross police station, with Met officers recorded “calling for immigrants to be shot, bragging about excessive force, being dismissive about a rape complaint and making anti-Muslim and anti-women comments”, according to a Guardian summary.

It is time that politicians dump their knee-jerk support for the police and start campaigning for the only realistic alternative: the root-and-branch abolition of the Met

Responding to the Panorama findings, London Mayor Sadiq Khan described the Metropolitan Police as an “institutionally racist”, “institutionally sexist” and “institutionally homophobic” organisation. Seven police officers have been sacked so far in the wake of the Panorama expose. 

Exposes of police racism in London have a long history. As far back as the early 1980s, police cadets at the Hendon Police College “multicultural unit” were asked to write anonymous essays on the topic of Black people in Britain.

The essays revealed vicious racist attitudes among some recruits, who described Black people in Britain as “a pest” and “by nature unintelligent”, while musing that they “must fall into line under white British dictators”, among other disturbing comments.

Most famously, the Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence described the Met as “institutionally racist”. The report came out in 1999, a generation ago - but the actual events it was describing, the botched police investigation into Lawrence’s murder, took place six years earlier. 

And then we have the interim findings of John Mitting, chair of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, which is examining the decades-long deployment of Met officers to spy on left-wing campaigners, including by having sexual relationships with female activists.

Mitting concluded: “The question is whether or not the end justified the means … I have come to the firm conclusion that, for a unit of a police force, it did not; and that had the use of these means been publicly known at the time, the [Special Demonstration Squad] would have been brought to a rapid end.”

Incapable of reform

So can the Met be reformed? Well, if tokenism could do the job, it would have happened by now. But in fact, although around 13 percent of Londoners are Black, only 3.5 percent of Met officers are Black. Asians make up 20.8 percent of London’s population, but only 5.9 percent of Met officers, while fewer than a third of officers are female.

But even if these figures were to improve, there is no evidence that the force could overcome its institutionally reactionary nature. After all, Cressida Dick, the first woman Met commissioner, presided over the Everard case and the grossly repressive policing used against people holding a vigil for the slain woman.

London's Metropolitan Police must be disbanded

Read More »

The Met currently has 878 officers who are suspended or on restricted duties as a result of misconduct, including 46 who hold the rank of inspector or higher. But the current commissioner, Mark Rowley, is a hardliner who refuses even to acknowledge that the Met is institutionally racist, despite the findings of repeated inquiries. 

And now, the Met is tasked with increasingly contentious political law enforcement. 

It is in charge of implementing increasingly authoritarian anti-protest legislation, which places severe restrictions on “cumulative” demonstrations. It is tasked with the extension of anti-terrorism laws to domestic protests - a process that has been criticised for allegedly rounding up more political prisoners than Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Met is also supposed to be dealing with the rise of far-right extremism.

It is clearly radically unfit for any of these tasks. Moreover, it has repeatedly shown that it is incapable of reforming itself or of being reformed. 

It is time that politicians dump their knee-jerk support for police and start campaigning for the only realistic alternative: the root-and-branch abolition of the Met. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.