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Child sex abuse victims and survivors are often accused of lying when trying to report the abuse to police, according to a report by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales.

The inquiry's team spoke to 56 victims and survivors of child sexual abuse between the ages of 11 and 21, and only "a small number" stated that they were satisfied with the police process.

The Engagement with Children and Young people report, published on Thursday, says: "Many young victims and survivors told us about being accused of lying and ... one young person was referred to as a 'little bitch' by a police officer. Some young victims and survivors told us that the police had not managed their privacy and confidentiality concerns correctly. We heard that this could lead to reprisals from people associated with the abuser. We heard examples of police officers in uniform visiting children at their primary school and family home with no prior warning."

The team only spoke to victims and survivors who had reported their abuse to the police. The majority said there had been no conviction or prosecution in their case, leaving them wondering why they had gone through the traumatic process.

One young victim and survivor said: "Now I regret having gone to the police. If I had to give advice to someone, I would say, 'get help but don't report'."

However, some specialist child sexual abuse support workers told the inquiry that victims and survivors sometimes unfairly blamed police for delays and non-convictions, which were out of officers' hands. Many said the police did a good job given their resources. Seventy-seven support workers were interviewed for the report.

There were also complaints about not being kept informed throughout the police process, so victims and survivors felt disempowered, and found the interviewing traumatic.

The report also has criticism over schools not doing enough to recognise and respond to child sexual abuse and exploitation. An Ofsted report this June found that sexual harassment and online sexual abuse were a routine part of schoolchildren's daily lives and that teachers "consistently underestimated" the scale of the problem.

Many victims and survivors complained of insensitivity, with one saying a teacher stopped them midway through a disclosure to say: "Don't tell me because I will have to repeat this." Another had signposted the child to ChildLine rather than face the conversation.

One pupil reported an experience of peer-on-peer abuse to a headteacher, who shared the information with the perpetrator's parents before a police report was done. They said it had serious consequences for the investigation. They also said the perpetrator continued to attend the same classes as them, which was "very traumatic".

The report also found that, in schools, education about relationships and sex had been largely inadequate, with some children receiving no lessons on the issues at all, echoing the Ofsted report.

Dep Ch Con Ian Critchley, National Police Chiefs' Council lead for child protection, said: "Whilst it is deeply concerning to hear that some young victims and survivors of child sexual abuse have been accused of lying when coming forward to police, I know that we have dedicated, professional staff across the country who treat victims with compassion, respect and take reports of child abuse seriously.

"We will consider very seriously the views of young people within this report and use it to further develop the way we work together with our partners to protect children."

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Child victims of sexual abuse 'often accused of lying to police'

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Child sex abuse victims and survivors are often accused of lying when trying to report the abuse to police, according to a report by the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in England and Wales.

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Differing perspectives on trust: a view from both sides

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Differing perspectives on trust: a view from both sides

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Summary

One of the biggest concerns about unfair treatment of minorities lies in crime and policing.

The data consistently highlights the over-representation of ethnic minority groups - both as perpetrators and victims - when it comes to hate crime, violent crime and drug related offences. Police workforce diversity figures continue to remain low. Past injustices still loom large in perceptions of the police for some ethnic minority Britons, especially Black Caribbean people.

The Commission undertook extensive engagement and examination of data to establish causes of key disparities in crime and policing, commissioning new research and building on previous reviews led by Rt Hon David Lammy MP and Dame Elish Angiolini.

This chapter aims to demonstrate what drives these disparities and propose ways of addressing them with a focus on 4 areas:

re-establishing mutual trust between communities and police service areas

preventing harm and directing young people away from entering the criminal justice system

encouraging affected ethnic minority groups to work with and support police services to improve outcomes for their local communities

improving workforce diversity in a way that encourages those skills needed to better serve multi race and ethnic communities

In its exploration of these areas, the Commission found the following.

Ethnic minority people, and specifically Black people, are disproportionately victims of violent crime and homicide; for every White victim of homicide aged 16 to 24 in 2018/19, there were 24 Black victims, and that young people need a better mechanism to help them escape criminal exploitation before it is too late. Greater emphasis on the importance of community leadership and the value of role models is also required.

Class B drug offences accounted for nearly half of prosecutions for almost all ethnic groups. This chapter outlines a need for public health-oriented out of court diversion (OOCD) approaches to keep young people out of the criminal justice system.

Stop and search is a critical tool for policing when used appropriately, and lawfully. We found that communities are not given enough information about the drivers of police activity that lead to the initiation of stop and search activity in a specific area, and that the statistics have remained unexplained for too long. More also needs to be done, by police services and community citizens, to increase local knowledge of the legitimacy of stop and search, and improve transparency and accountability of its use.

Nearly half (49%) of all stop and searches in England and Wales were made by the Metropolitan Police in London, and this is where the majority (80%) of all stop and searches involving Black people were made. This is also where nearly 60% of all Black people in England and Wales live. Stop and search disparities should be analysed based on smaller geographic areas, and new Safeguarding Trust groups are proposed to align police and community priorities and to help rebuild bridges between the two.

Ethnic minority police officers are also experiencing racist abuse from citizens they serve - including from those in their own ethnic minority groups. Racist assaults against police officers in the Metropolitan Police service almost doubled between the year ending November 2019 and November 2020. This and the increasing assaults are issues that seem to be overlooked in public discourse, and seldom discussed with veracity when it comes to police actions or police service recruitment. Yet they both, in the Commission's view, have an impact on addressing entrenched disparities and improving outcomes for all concerned.

No police services were fully ethnically representative of the population they serve[footnote 10] although the Commission has identified some who are, independently, making substantial progress towards achieving that goal and commends them accordingly.

Police services will also need to go beyond just being representative of the ethnic minority population of an area. The Commission proposes a requirement for the police service to identify and fill the gaps in the skills required to best serve diverse communities.

Hate crime and harassment of minorities

Hate crime is a serious offence that can have long-term impacts on individual victims. It is a very personal attack. Experiencing a hate crime is particularly distressing for victims who are targeted based on their identity or how others perceive them. Research shows that victims are more likely to suffer serious psychological effects as a result of hate crime - a trauma that, by association, also easily spreads through their wider community.[footnote 11]

Whilst the decline is significant, the figures still show that a sizeable number of incidents take place. They equate to about 142 racially motivated hate crimes per day. There is no number that is, or should be, acceptable to any civilised society. These incidents cause serious and lasting trauma in people's lives. But we recognise that it is impossible to drive the overall figure down to zero - sadly certain types of people are what they are. That said we can and must continue to make every endeavour to reduce this number to the absolute lowest possible. While the most common offence type of racially-motivated hate crime recorded by the police in the year ending March 2020 was public order offences, such as graffiti or verbal abuse, there were also over 10,000 incidents of violence without injury and about 4,500 incidents of violence with injury.[footnote 15]

Hate crime is also more likely to be experienced by people from ethnic minorities. 1.1% of Asian people experienced a hate crime in the years ending March 2018 to March 2020, as did 1.1% of Black people,[footnote 16] compared with 0.2% of White people. These figures are substantially less than the percentages of people experiencing crime in general (see Figure 12).

Figure 12: Percentage of people experiencing hate crime, and all crime, by ethnicity (England and Wales, April 2017 to March 2020)

Fear of hate crime among ethnic minority communities is also greater than its likelihood of occurring. The year ending March 2018 to March 2020 CSEW shows that 16% of Asian people and 13% of Black people were 'very worried' about being attacked because of their race or ethnicity.[footnote 21]

This perception reinforces the right of everyone to feel safe in their communities. Everyone, no matter their background, should be able to live their lives without fear of becoming a victim of a hate crime. As the data shows, this fear particularly impacts ethnic minority people, and could play a part in limiting integration between different communities, and stop individuals from being involved in wider society. There is no place for hate crime, and when it occurs, communities need to see action being taken to address it. In tandem, there needs to be consistent messaging about the prevalence of hate crime correcting the perceptions of 'a rise in hate crime'. This can help to allay the fears of communities.

Abuse experienced 'online', in other words through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, also has a significant impact on victims. Whether an everyday private citizen or high-profile public figure, being unexpectedly abused in the safety of one's own home - and having it instantly exposed to an international audience - creates a unique torment and fear for the affected individual.

The Home Affairs Select Committee has highlighted how ethnic minority female MPs are particularly vulnerable to egregious online harassment.[footnote 22] Footballers, celebrities and politicians have also spoken of their experiences of being abused in this way, for no other reason than their race.

The Commission strongly urges the government to use its forthcoming online safety legislation to address abuse online, including anonymous abuse. We consider that it is very much possible to do this in a way that also protects the legitimate use of anonymity online by groups such as human rights defenders, whistleblowers and victims of abuse.

Social media companies have a social responsibility - and that means a duty of care to their users. This duty should compel them to address online abuse with effective systems and processes. The largest social media platforms currently claim to prohibit racist abuse on their services. But far too often they fail to take decisive action to tackle it. Asking these platforms to account for the transparent and consistent enforcement of their own terms and conditions is surely a minimum requirement.

Failing to comply should, in the Commission's view, lead to substantial penalties - and public naming and shaming for their seeming intransigence to the pain racism causes its victims. To be clear, the Commission is not seeking to inhibit robust exchanges online, nor censure legitimate debate and freedom of expression in its truest sense. Indeed, it is concerning to see that those campaigning against racism online have found their sites removed for decontextualized racial slurs as evidence of racism.[footnote 25]

Being anonymous online does not give anyone the right to abuse others. The police have a range of existing legal powers to identify and prosecute individuals who attempt to use anonymity to escape sanctions for online abuse, where the activity is illegal. Hate crime exists in UK law across the Public Order Act 1986, the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006, the Communications Act 2003 and the Football (Offences) Act 1991.

The Commission calls on social media companies to work in tandem with the government to remove racially abusive content that is illegal. Government should assess current powers to see if they are sufficient to tackle abuse online - including illegal and anonymous abuse. The outcome of that work should inform the government's future position in relation to illegal anonymous abuse online.

Primary causes and drivers of crime

The way race and crime can intersect has long been a taboo subject. The spread of well-meaning 'society is to blame' assumptions, and a positive desire not to further stereotype already disadvantaged groups, has created a reluctance to talk honestly about the seriously damaging criminal behaviour of a small minority of people - especially in ethnically diverse inner-city areas.

The Commission has heard views from frontline and senior police officers that communities often overestimate the level of crime in their local areas. All crime, as reported in the CSEW (excluding fraud and computer misuse), peaked in 1995 at 19.8 million crimes, and in 2018 had decreased by 68% to around 6.2 million.[footnote 26] Though these trends in crime rates may differ at a local level, the Commission believes that there is a need to acknowledge and welcome that this country's overall crime rate has reduced.

Figure 13: Number of crimes experienced by Crime Survey respondents, by type of crime (England and Wales, January 1981 to March 2018) [footnote 27]

Note: The figures for 'All crime' exclude fraud and computer misuse. Data for 2019 onwards is not included in the chart as it is not comparable to previous years' data because of methodological changes in the Crime Survey.

In discussion about race in general, the political focus in crime and policing has been on the big disparities in the rates of stop and search between Black and White people, in every police service area in England and Wales.[footnote 30] Yet it is the Commission's view that the story in this area has not been focusing enough on the disparities in crime, and often violent crime, that lie behind stop and search. In addition, there has also been less focus on what the primary causes and drivers of suspected and actual criminal activity can be.

As David Lammy noted in his own review:

These are all issues that are beyond the control or remit of the police service.

The Commission heard evidence from many people, with experience from the perspectives of affected communities and the police, about the change in police attitudes on race over the last 30 to 40 years (notwithstanding the caveats in the final section of this chapter). It is important to acknowledge other factors, in addition to racism, when considering disproportionality between ethnic groups in policing. The police service is imperfect, like all major services and organisations. However the challenges they face when dealing with both victims and perpetrators of crime are complex as the causes are beyond their control. Great strides have been made towards becoming a service that can fairly police a multi-ethnic society. It is important to recognise and acknowledge this.

Understanding disparities: victims of violent crime

Understanding disparities: trends and drivers of homicide

Although the UK homicide figures are much lower than those in the US, the UK figures still make disturbing reading, especially when one considers how young so many of the victims and perpetrators are.

Ethnic minority over-representation in the criminal justice system

More broadly, people from ethnic minorities are overrepresented at many points of the criminal justice system. The largest disparities appear at the point of stop and search and, as the Lammy Review pointed out, at arrest, custodial sentencing and prison population. Among ethnic minority groups, Black people are usually the most overrepresented.[footnote 60]

Figure 14: Percentages of convictions in each offence group, and percentage of the overall population, by ethnicity (England and Wales, 2019)

There are many reasons for the disproportionate numbers of ethnic minority people involved in violent crime as both victims and perpetrators, but the disparity casts a significant shadow over Black life, and also contributes to negative stereotypes of young Black men. Nevertheless, it is important to remember this context when we address the complex issue of stop and search.

Understanding the disparities: stop and search

Stop and search can be used by the police as a tactic to address a number of crimes, from counter-terrorism, burglary, illegal drug use, violent crime and anti-social behaviour. However, successive home secretaries have centred the narratives for the use of stop and search on violent crime, specifically knife crime.

There is, however, a disconnect between this narrative and what is seen on the ground. In engaging with the Commission, several police services cited drugs and hard drug county lines as a key driver for the use of stop and search, and the data shows that the majority of searches are based on suspicion of drugs (although other suspected crimes may also be involved, just not recorded).[footnote 72] More needs to be done to bridge the gap between how the purpose of stop and search is communicated, and how this legal power is actually being used in practice.

This is a finding echoed in the recent report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) on the disproportionate use of police powers, which writes: "The prevalence of self-generated, possession-only drug searches, about a quarter of which find drugs, indicates that stop and search is not always being targeted at offences that are the most serious and high priority for forces, or that matter most to the public... we consider that now is the time for a national debate on the policing of controlled drugs through stop and search".[footnote 73]

Is stop and search tackling the war on drugs? Or is it removing knives from our streets? Both the government and the police's messaging in this area needs greater consistency and clarity in order for communities to understand the drivers of police activity, and why certain areas may require a greater police presence or application of its use. The Commission's view is that this confusion can translate into a lack of transparency, which further damages the already negative impression some communities have of the police.

Interpreting stop and search data accurately

The Metropolitan Police in London had the highest rates of stop and search for every ethnic group except the White and Mixed groups. In almost every police force area, Black people had the highest recorded stop and search rate.

It is sometimes claimed that Black people are 9 times more likely than White people to be stopped and searched.[footnote 76] This relative rate is reported at a national level and does not account for differences in the sizes or characteristics of local populations or the way stop and search is used at a local level. For these reasons, the national relative rate is not always accurate and stop and search rates should be analysed at smaller geographic levels.

Figure 15: Stop and search rate per 1,000 people, by ethnicity in London (Metropolitan Police) and the rest of England and Wales (England and Wales, April 2019 to March 2020) [footnote 77]

Note: Greater Manchester Police were unable to provide data for the year ending March 2020 and are excluded from the analysis.

The Race Disparity Unit outlines 3 main factors affecting the interpretation of stop and search rates and can distort the national relative disparity between Black people and White people:

population changes

the number of people who do not report their ethnicity

geographic clustering (where stop and search is used as well as where people live) [footnote 78]

Figure 15 shows the rates of stop and search in London (the Metropolitan Police area) compared with the rates for the rest of England and Wales. Almost half (49%) of all stops and searches took place in London. However, even within London there are differences in the use of stop and search depending on the neighbourhood. For example, half of the stop and searches carried out in London between July and September 2020 took place in just 9% of neighbourhoods.[footnote 79]

For Black people, the Metropolitan Police force area is the one which most influences the national disparity figures often quoted in the media and by public commentators. This is where 4 out of 5 stop and searches of Black people happen, and where nearly 60% of Black people live.[footnote 80] For White people, it is the very low stop and search rate in police services outside the London area that most strongly influences the national disparity. In these areas, the stop and search rate for White people is 5 for every 1,000 people, and around 90% of White people live in them.

There clearly are big disparities in stop and search, but the relative national disparity takes national populations as its reference point - not the relevant resident populations of smaller, urban areas with relatively high crime rates where stop and search is used more. Stop and search disparities should therefore be analysed at smaller geographic areas, preferably below police force area. As such, users of stop and search data need to exercise caution when interpreting and reporting ethnic disparities based on areas with small numbers of stop and search and small ethnic minority populations.

Between April 2010 and March 2019, rates of stop and search decreased for all ethnic groups.[footnote 83] In this timeframe, the stop and search rate decreased the most for White people, by 79% (from 19 stops per 1,000 to 4 per 1,000). Rates for Asian people decreased by 72% (from 39 to 11 per 1,000) and for people from Mixed ethnic groups by 69% (from 35 to 11 per 1,000). Rates of stop and search decreased the least for Black people, by 68% (from 117 per 1,000 to 38) and for people in the Other (including Chinese) ethnic group, also by 68% (from 21 to 7 per 1,000 people).

These reductions varied by police force area. For example, in the same time period, the stop and search rate for Asian people decreased in all police force areas except Durham and South Wales where it increased. The rate for Black people decreased in almost all police force areas, except Kent, West Midlands, Staffordshire, Cheshire, South Wales and Essex where it increased.[footnote 84]

Numbers of stop and search have also significantly reduced since the year ending March 2010, from nearly 1.4 million to about 570,000 in the year ending March 2020. However, in recent years (between the year ending March 2019 and March 2020), the total number of stop and searches increased by 51% from around 370,000 to around 570,000.[footnote 85]

Drivers of stop and search activity (a): tackling violent crime

Dame Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, defending the stop and search policy said that 72% of killings of youths under 25 years old involved Black victims in London.[footnote 89] She said Black people were 4 times more likely to be a victim of violence than White people, and 8 times more likely to be a perpetrator in London. The knowledge that stop and search can lawfully be conducted on any individual can be, in and of itself, an effective deterrent against this - one of the most heinous of crimes.

We know that stop and search is designed as a crime prevention, indeed life saving, policing tactic but the Commission believes that issues with the way in which it is carried out need to be addressed by both police services and the communities they work with. And there is a bigger story here, behind these cold numbers, that our politics and public conversation has not been facing head on. The Commission is concerned that there has been insufficient leadership on these issues of violent crime from affected ethnic minority communities, and believes that more individual and collective agency is needed to tackle these issues directly. Even before the police need to get involved.

Some respondents to the Commission's call for evidence also provided views that long-term experiences of racism can have an effect on people, arguing that consistent experiences of racism can add to feelings of disenfranchisement and cause violence, involvement in gangs or make crime to seem either more appealing or feel less serious. Additionally, respondents believed that people may be drawn towards crime in order to prosper, feel respect and a sense of identity or belonging to something. The Commission recognises that people involved in violent crime can often trace their problems back to a combination of traumas experienced in their lives.

Understanding youth involvement in serious gang activity

While narratives on gang involvement predominantly focus on young men and boys, the Commission acknowledges that gang-involvement also impacts women and girls. In a report providing analysis of Children in Need census data for the year ending March 2018, the Children's Commissioner found that 34% of gang-associated children and young people were female. That report states: "we have been told that younger children, particularly girls, are being recruited by gangs because their profile makes them less likely to be noticed by the authorities".[footnote 94]

We also know that while some young people get drawn into county lines gangs and other forms of violence, most even from the same circumstances do not. So what is it that makes some young people more vulnerable than others? And how can they be supported to escape harm and criminality?

The Home Office's Serious Violence Strategy (2018) [footnote 97] identified possible risk factors for involvement in serious gang activity, including childhood abuse and neglect, past criminality, parental criminality, drug taking, truancy from school, living in high crime areas and having delinquent peers.

Evidence also shows that factors of girls' involvement in gangs include "family breakdown, domestic violence in the home, a lack of positive role models and low self-esteem".[footnote 98]

The Commission has heard views that some gang crime is based on drug turf war conflict or money but at least as much appears to be revenge attacks based on fairly trivial incidents. A Children's Commissioner report on improving safeguarding responses to gang violence and criminal exploitation highlights a case where a child was "stabbed in revenge for failure to repay a 'debt' arising from an arrest".[footnote 99]

Ivan Congreve, a former Salvation Army leader at Springfield Lodge in south London told the BBC in 2008:

Springfield Lodge[footnote 103] provides 16 to 21 year olds with a home and teaches them the skills to become independent.

The Centre for Social Justice and urban youth charity XLP highlight a case study example of this:

When I was 15... I met a 20 year-old who was in a gang. He had money, a car and he said that he was going to protect me, that no one was going to touch me and that if I needed anything he would give it to me. Instead of going to school I began to sit at his house with his friends smoking weed, becoming exposed to gang violence and becoming sexually active.

How young people develop their place and identity in society will depend on their exposure to peers and role models, expectations of those in authority with whom they interact, and their link to other adults. This notion of the alternative family can extend to encompass a deeper idea of 'community'. The African American Anthropologist Signithia Fordham has talked about 'fictive kinship', meaning a collective social identity that distinguishes 'us' from 'them'.[footnote 109] Many ethnic minority young people get trapped in this form of alternative family, where to break-out means a betrayal of deep kinship loyalties.

Community based initiatives to divert young people away from criminal activity

The Commission believes that community leadership and role models are at the heart of helping young people redirect their energies into actions that provide opportunities for progression in society, and prevent their involvement in violent crime. We recognise the power of young people to be an instrumental part of this leadership, and heard insights from young people themselves who were calling for role models:

(Anonymous, age 15)

The Commission further recognises the wisdom and lived experience of the Windrush generation that has seen the changing shape of race relations in the UK, from which the young can learn. This knowledge needs to be framed into a message that speaks more about responsibilities, conflict resolution, and the building of bridges.

Richard Taylor OBE, father of Damilola Taylor, speaking after an event marking the 19th anniversary of his 10-year-old son's death, emphasised this need to build bridges:

Parents, teachers, social workers and policy makers, individually and collectively, need to better understand and address the complex pressures faced by young people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds. Acting on the potential missteps between childhood and adulthood is vital to helping them to overcome disadvantage.

But, in tandem with these efforts, there are also things that can be done now to aid the sea change on violent crime needed within local communities themselves. And the Commission notes that a national approach to this work has already begun - an example of which is described here.

First launched in 2005, the Scottish Violence Reduction Units were formed in response to high rates of homicide and gang violence across the Strathclyde Police area, and particularly Glasgow. By adopting a public health approach that treats violence as a preventable disease, their approach focuses 'on the power of relationships to help reduce violence', giving gang members the chance to leave their past life behind, alongside increased stop and search and tougher sentencing for knife carrying in Scotland. An evaluation of the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence in Glasgow found that violent crime fell by 46% among CIRV participants, weapon carrying fell by 85%, knife carrying fell by 58%, and gang fighting fell by 73%.[footnote 115] A number of respondents to the Commission's call for evidence referenced the Glasgow approach as a successful initiative for knife crime reduction, and many suggested that a similar strategy would work in other UK cities.

This approach was emulated in England and Wales in 2019 when the Home Office announced that 18 police service areas would receive funding to 'establish (or build upon existing) Violence Reduction Units' (VRUs). The VRUs adopted a public health approach across their activities, commissioning a broad range of interventions to tackle serious violence. A Home Office process evaluation of the VRUs in 2020 found that 'good progress had generally been made by the VRUs over the first year of the programme'.[footnote 116]

Although these initiatives are in their early stages, the Commission commends the work of VRUs across the UK for the overall impact they are already having on addressing violent crime.

However, despite perceptions, drug-related crime and its consequences are not always found in large cities. For example, by 2017, drug-related deaths in Yorkshire and Humber had risen by more than 75% in 6 years.[footnote 124]

As outlined earlier in the chapter, criminality can stem from adverse childhood experiences as well as deprivation.[footnote 129] Yet the concept of 'personal agency' is at the core of the Commission's outlook, and it recognises that all individuals regardless of their ethnicity, personal attributes, or economic circumstances have the moral capacity to discriminate between different courses of behaviour. Offending behaviour should not be excused as a consequence of dire personal circumstances.

However, the Commission is also careful to note that there are exceptions to this, for example, exploitation and grooming into criminal activity, where the notion of 'choice' may not be as easily identifiable, and where young individuals may not always be as free to make these choices.

Improving stop and search encounters

The Commission recognises that the police can only operate with the trust, respect and consent of the people. This is the original notion of Robert Peel's police service whose role was to prevent crime and disorder with the consent and respect of the public.[footnote 130]

The police do not bear the only responsibility for preventing crime and disorder. Involvement is required from the community to prevent criminality in society. We all need the police, regardless of our ethnicity, to safeguard our lives, liberty, and property. Those most affected are those grieving parents who have just lost a child, and arguably those at risk of being drawn into crime.

Stop and search is a useful tactic, governed by legislation, and is used to investigate various forms of criminal activity including burglary and violent crime. The Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act 1984 Code A states that police require reasonable grounds for suspicion before a stop and search is carried out.

Reasonable grounds refers to the fact that there "must be an objective basis for that suspicion based on facts, information and/or intelligence which are relevant to the likelihood that the object in question will be found, so that a reasonable person would be entitled to reach the same conclusion based on the same facts and information and/or intelligence."[footnote 131]

There is a tension where some communities are supportive of the use of stop and search, whilst others call for the end of the policing tactic altogether. Some respondents in the Commission's call for evidence said that there is a need to end the use of stop and search, citing the tool as an opportunity for racial profiling. But the alternative to no stop and search would likely mean an instant arrest on suspicion in lieu, and the individual would then need to be taken to a police station to have a similar process carried out before being released - if no further action was required.

The Commission has also heard evidence[footnote 132] that communities impacted by violent crime are often supportive of stop and search being used in circumstances when: a) the reasons for the use of the tool in their area are explained to them, and b) they understand the benefits of stop and search in the context of their neighbourhood. This was echoed in some responses to the Commission's call for evidence, where respondents indicated an acceptance of the use of stop and search, as long as it is used fairly and properly.

Differing perspectives on trust: a view from both sides

The Commission recognises that stop and search is a critical tool for policing and, when used fairly and properly, it can lead to positive outcomes. This is also the view of academics, police officers and citizens (including young people) from whom the Commission has received and heard evidence. However, it is also clear that there are some ethnic minority communities who remain deeply mistrustful of both the practice and the police services themselves. The reasons for this mistrust are often steeped in a terrible legacy of historical incidents of racism and racist behaviour, carried out under the auspices of a few different police services.

These instances have, understandably cut deeply into those affected generations within ethnic minority communities. We also note that there are more recent examples of abhorrent encounters between individual police officers and citizens. Sadly, for some, these have served only to open old wounds and reinforce suspicion and legacy mistrust, which has been directed at the wider police service - not just to those few rogue elements within.

The Commission states unequivocally that the overwhelming majority of those who serve in police force areas across the country are decent and good people. These are men and women who work to protect and serve us all. They put themselves in harm's way so that we don't have to. They are the ones we turn to, sometimes when we are in the most desperate circumstances. It is an injustice in itself to portray them, or the wider police service as a whole, as anything less.

But as with all workforces cross-sector, and all corners of society as a whole, there are a minority of individuals who bring shame and dishonour to themselves and to those they represent.

Addressing concerns that destabilise community trust

We noted earlier that HMICFRS deemed the vast majority of stop and searches they looked into met the requirement for 'reasonable grounds'. Of the remaining in their sample, however, 22% of the recorded grounds were assessed as weak, and 14% were assessed as 'not reasonable'.

The Commission is supportive of HMICFRS' conclusion that "forces need to place more emphasis on ensuring that officers and their supervisors understand what constitutes reasonable grounds and how to record them accurately... Forces should work to improve their find rates by focusing officers' efforts on searches that are based on strong grounds".[footnote 138]

Going beyond this, the Commission also believes that a greater distinction is required between 'weak' or 'not reasonable' grounds, and also a better understanding of what constitutes unlawful grounds. Where grounds for searches are legitimate, and the search is conducted fairly and appropriately, disparities that arise are more easily and justifiably explained. It is in instances where the use of the tactic is deemed unlawful that further investigation of disparities arising as a consequence would be required.

Another area that plays a role in driving mistrust between communities and the police service is the use of force and restraint and the tragic outcomes that can occur as a result.

The Commission supports the Angiolini Review recommendations aimed at addressing disproportionality in the use of restraint and notes that, in the year ending March 2020, there were 18 deaths - 14 White people, 3 Black people and 1 person of unknown ethnicity - in or following police contact in England and Wales.[footnote 144]

On the issue of racism itself, Dame Elish Angiolini makes it clear that this is not easily proven. She writes:

It is difficult to be able to prove that racism was a factor in deaths in police custody unless sufficient evidence exists and racism can be inferred from the specific facts and circumstances of that case or from a series of such cases of a similar nature arising from the conduct of the suspended officer. Racial stereotyping may or may not be a significant contributory factor in some deaths in custody.

Going further with training

Another issue is that police service areas do not appear to take a uniform approach to training their police officers on how to conduct stop and search. The College of Policing has produced comprehensive training products but it is a matter for individual police services to decide how to use them.[footnote 145]

Better training is often proposed as a potential solution to tackling biases in stop and search. However, the College of Policing conducted a trial[footnote 146] in which 6 police services were given pilot stop and search training. The study concluded that the problems with stop and search would not be solved by training alone.

Evidence shared during the Commission's engagement with senior officers, frontline officers and academics highlighted good practice models for stop and search. This includes police services having a forum to inform the public of why the police are using the stop and search tactic in their area before it is employed, officers approaching stop and searches with an informed understanding of different ethnic and faith cultures, asking the right questions, and officers knowing how to disengage appropriately from members of the public when nothing is found. Both the police officer and the citizen need to be able to exit this encounter in a positive way.[footnote 147]

Similarly, the Commission has heard views of what does not work in relation to stop and search from community citizens and young people. Qualitative research with young Black and Asian people showed that those who had experienced stop and search felt that grounds used to initiate stops often lacked legitimacy, and that the legal basis for stops varied. They also reported mixed experiences of stop and search, ranging from calm and friendly, to negative and hostile.[footnote 148]

Evidence describing training for young people on how to handle such encounters was also considered. Some community organisations affiliated with their local police service deliver this to good effect. They teach young people what stop and search is, what their rights are, what the process that they can expect to undergo is; and how to behave, react and respond to police officers who are carrying it out. The young people undergoing this training also gave positive feedback and expressed a better understanding of the process and why it may come about.

The Commission encourages more communities to consider where and how they can work together with their local police service to better inform themselves about the law, the process they should expect during an encounter, and what their rights are.

Case Study: Stop and Search Know Your Rights, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner

The West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner funds a 'Stop and Search Know Your Rights' project that aims to raise young people's awareness around stop and search, to explain why police use this power and to inform them of their rights. The objective is to encourage young people to handle a Stop positively, with confidence and control.

The project is delivered in schools and within the community, with information cards distributed at events. Feedback from young people who have been part of the project includes:

'We now know what a stop and search is'

'We understand our rights'

'We realise stop and search is monitored and police are held to account'

Stop and Search trainers work with West Midlands Police to promote trust and transparency, and also attend colleges and universities to promote and recruit for West Midlands Stop and Search scrutiny panels in order to hear youth perspectives. To date the programme has delivered over 400 workshops, reaching in excess of 15,000 people.

Other organisations have adopted a similar approach. Release and StopWatch are developing programmes to ensure that 'young people are given the tools to interact with the police in as safe a manner as possible, equipping them with the skills and knowledge to handle situations where they are stopped and searched'. The project includes developing training and materials over a twelve-month period to help young people deal with stop and search exchanges, providing them with skills to manage a situation and reduce negative outcomes. Release describes the project as 'a harm reduction approach to the policing of young people'.[footnote 149]

Anecdotal evidence, as well as submissions to the Commission's call for evidence, also highlighted a need for more training on de-escalation techniques, and discouraging the use of force in certain encounters.

The HMICFRS report on stop and search similarly alludes to this issue:[footnote 150]

In too many forces, officers and staff are not being provided with the skills they need to understand how they come across in everyday interactions. Nor are they being shown how they can build rapport to help prevent conflict and escalation in order to secure public cooperation and reduce the need for conflict management, de-escalation and the use of force.

The Commission is supportive of the need for effective training which provides de-escalation skills, to avoid unnecessary conflict during stop and search, arrest, and police custody. There is also a need for better training on communication skills, to ensure messages are delivered accurately and effectively to the individuals concerned, their families and, as appropriate, to the wider public.

Recommendation 5: Build trust - Improve training to provide police officers with practical skills to interact with communities

The Commission recommends that the College of Policing, working alongside the NPCC and APCC, develop a strategy to improve the efficacy and implementation of stop and search, and de-escalation training, ensuring a consistent person-centred approach is taken by all police service areas.

De-escalation training will be required for all new police officers joining the service, and upscaled to include all current serving officers who are expected to interact with the public as part of their role. This would be a requirement not just at the point of initial police training, but as a key aspect of continual professional development within different stages and levels of policing.

Transparency and accountability to re-establish trust

But, as outlined above, training alone cannot address the inconsistency in police conduct during stop and search. Pace Code A highlights that:

The Commission believes that senior accountability is required when monitoring how stop and search is conducted in a police service. We also acknowledge that body-worn video (BWV) cameras provide an additional means to build transparency and monitor conduct during encounters with the public, supporting the police to do their job, whilst helping to safeguard trust from the public . While there are varied findings on the effectiveness of BWV cameras for improving criminal justice outcomes, there are indications that its use can reduce the number of allegations made against officers and change behaviour relating to both police-conduct and public conduct.[footnote 152]

The College of Policing Authorised Professional Practice outlines guidance on the operational use of BWV, stating:

HMICFRS also points to BWV cameras as a potential means for continuous professional development, and posited 3 recommendations pertaining to the use of BWV across police services in their 2021 report on the use of stop and search and use of force. Their recommendation included a requirement for police services to ensure BWV cameras are utilised for the entirety of all stop and search encounters; a need for internal monitoring of BWV footage; and, a requirement for external scrutiny of BWV footage.[footnote 154] The inspectorate has also announced the intention to examine the extent to which services use BWV footage in their internal monitoring and external scrutiny processes as part of future Police Effectiveness, Efficiency and Legitimacy (PEEL) inspections.

Recommendation 14: Promote fairness - Increase legitimacy and accountability of stop and search through body-worn video

In this context, there is a strong presumption that in all police services body-worn video (BWV) cameras will be switched on if the officer is in a situation which they believe could lead to a stop and search, or as soon as it is practicable to do so during that encounter. Building on the recommendations posited by HMICFRS, the Commission recommends that for instances where BWV cameras are not switched on during a stop and search, the officer is required to provide a written explanation as to why it was not switched on. Operational guidelines for this requirement should be developed by the College of Policing, and included in the Authorised Professional Practice for stop and search.

Officers must include this written explanation on the stop and search record slip, and it must be available for the individual who was stopped and searched to access following the encounter. The written explanation should be reviewed by a supervising officer to confirm whether the explanation provided is reasonable, and appropriate action should be taken where the rationale provided is of concern. This can, for example, be through performance or misconduct procedures.

The BWV footage of stop and searches should also be scrutinised at 2 levels through dip-sampling:

a) First, external scrutiny through community Safeguarding Trust groups (a recommendation for the formation of these groups is found in the following section) who should be able to request BWV camera footage from a specified date for review. b) Second, police services must implement an internal performance framework that includes dip-sampling review of BWV footage by supervising officers. Feedback should then be given to officers conducting stop and search, and appropriate action should be taken where interactions require improvement. For example, individual officers may be directed to further training or, in most serious instances, be referred to appropriate misconduct procedures.

Equip communities with information on the drivers of police activity

The Commission considers the key issue with stop and search is a lack of consistency, transparency and oversight that allows the perpetuation of charges of racism in public discourse and the media. A large part of this perception of over-policing, and biases in policing, may also be rooted in the lack of information provided to communities about the drivers of police activity in their local areas.

Our research set out 3 main factors informing a decision to establish reasonable grounds to initiate stop and search.[footnote 155] First, long established local intelligence, including knowledge of particular crime 'hotspots' or patterns of crime within an area. Second, direct information regarding an alleged offender or offence, including physical description of the alleged offender(s) and/or accounts of the crime undertaken (often provided by members of the public and/or CCTV operators). Third, assessment of the situation and interaction with the alleged offender.

The Commission pays tribute to the many admirable steps already taken by the police, community representatives, advocacy groups, as well as ordinary individuals to build better relations. However, there is currently no uniform approach across the 43 police service areas to promote transparency, community involvement and scrutiny.

Build transparency and community involvement in policing

But there is guidance that can be built on. The College of Policing Authorised Professional Practice (APP) guidance highlights the fact that the police are legally required to engage with local communities, and under section 34 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, Chief Officers must make arrangements in each neighbourhood to obtain the views of the public on crime and disorder in the local area, provide local information about crime and policing, and hold regular public meetings.[footnote 156]

In addition, the guidance states that:

The APP guidance outlines the key principles required for independent scrutiny processes introduced by police services and their PCCs, such as independent advisory groups. This includes recognition that panels need to be representative, reflecting the diversity of their local areas and independently chaired by someone independent of the police.[footnote 158]

The Commission recognises that the legislation and guidance are still open to interpretation by each police service area, leading to large degrees of variance on how community scrutiny and involvement works. We also note the need for members of scrutiny groups to be well-informed and given the necessary support to scrutinise and work with policing. This is an issue that HMICFRS points to, highlighting that "some panels were ineffective because members were not given the tools they needed to perform the role. And a small number of forces either had no arrangements in place or their panels met too infrequently".[footnote 159]

In the Commission's view, scrutiny and community engagement should be operational in all police services at 2 levels: borough or community safety partnership level, with oversight and direct lines of reporting to Police and Crime Commissioners and the Chief Constable; and at service level with ability to scrutinise the Chief Constable.

Some police services advertise scrutiny as 'ride alongs' with police officers, where community members can experience policing from within and provide feedback. However, others demonstrate good practice in community scrutiny and involvement. The Criminal Justice Alliance report particularly identified Bedfordshire Police as having a transparent, informed, independent and representative approach to community scrutiny.[footnote 160]

Case study: Bedfordshire Police

Bedfordshire Stop Search Scrutiny Panel uses a traffic light system to 'rate' officers' use of stop and search. Where a search is graded green, the officer is provided with positive feedback. If amber, the officer is given advice on how to improve. A red-graded search will be escalated to be reviewed by the Professional Standards Department and then raised with local senior management of the officer to ensure direct accountability and management action. Feedback is provided at the next panel meeting. Approximately 5% of stop and searches are scrutinised on a monthly basis.

The scrutiny panel has a membership pool of 50 and recruitment is independent of the police. Membership is 50% male 50% female with representation from people in Asian, Black, Mixed and White ethnic groups; there is also some youth representation with the minimum age set at 16.

The scrutiny panel also undertakes a wide range of community engagement activities to ensure its panel is open and representative of both age and demographics of the country. This includes using radio stations, sports centres, community centres, schools and colleges to raise awareness of the work of the panel. The Bedfordshire stop search scrutiny panel also works alongside the police Community Cohesion Team with the aim of engaging people with experience of stop and search.

The scrutiny panel meetings occur in a variety of locations accessible to the general public, including youth centres, local charity Youthscape and Bedfordshire Police HQ. Bedfordshire works closely with the community through a dedicated community cohesion lead who liaises with the stop and search lead and the scrutiny panel.

Chief Inspector Hob Hoque stated in October 2020:

It is of course great news that the panel were happy with how our officers used force on these occasions. We have still identified some great feedback from the panel, which we will be taking back to the officers involved as well as the wider organisation to help us improve how we do things.

Panel Chair Montell Neufville said:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutiny panels have continued to take place, but have been coordinated through the use of virtual meetings, enabling the panel to view the body-worn video footage and review the numerical data from remote locations.

Recommendation 4: Build trust - Bridge divides and create partnerships between the police and communities

Noting the key concerns highlighted above in relation to communication, transparency and consistency in approach for stop and search, the Commission makes a two-part recommendation:

a) First, that the College of Policing, working alongside the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC), and National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), develop a minimum standard framework for community 'Safeguarding Trust' groups that will not only have a function to scrutinise and problem-solve alongside policing, but also to ensure there is a minimum level of engagement with communities in every police service area.

The framework for the minimum standard should include, but not be limited to:

a requirement for stop and search data to be made more granular and publicly available for groups to scrutinise

a requirement for groups to be independently chaired and representative of their communities

a duty for Safeguarding Trust group minutes to be published

an ability for groups to scrutinise and hold police services to account on policing activity and disparities in stop and search, use of force, workforce mix and internal misconduct

an ability for groups to review stop and search authorisations made under Section 60 (S.60) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, where police will be required to provide the Safeguarding Trust group with a rationale as to why a S.60 was authorised

Once a year, Safeguarding Trust groups should write to, and receive a response from the Chief Constable and Police and Crime Commissioner to update on progress. Police services should also be required to demonstrate how they have responded and implemented changes as a result of scrutiny or challenge by the community.

Throughout the framework development phase, there should be engagement with independent experts in community engagement and scrutiny external to policing. Consideration should be given to how members of Safeguarding Trust groups are adequately enabled to undertake their roles.

Where required, the Home Office should also provide support in identifying those areas where trustworthiness is low and set targets to close the confidence gap, with Mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners to publish delivery plans to achieve that improvement. Progress against these delivery plans should be presented and discussed at the Safeguarding Trust group meetings.

There is a strong will and commitment from police services to create these groups and work alongside communities. Through these Safeguarding Trust groups, communities will have greater agency and involvement in the policing of their local areas. But this cannot be achieved without commitment from the citizens themselves. The Commission therefore encourages citizens of all race and ethnic groups within these communities to come forward, get involved and support these police services.

b) The Commission recommends that Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) inspect each police service area against the minimum standard framework, reviewing police services on their efficacy, relationship building and a requirement for services to demonstrate the actions they are taking to build positive relationships with all communities within their police service area.

The Commission is of the view that community scrutiny needs to drive accountability and drive change in policing. The aim of these groups is to bring transparency for communities to understand what is happening in their local areas, the drivers behind the policing activity, and provide scrutiny and challenge to policing to drive action where appropriate.

However, the Commission also notes that communities themselves - particularly the citizens who reside in them - will need to exercise their own agency, individually and collectively, to play their part in making this successful. There needs to be a will on both sides to bridge current divides, and to work collaboratively to achieve better outcomes for all.

There is already a commitment among some police forces to strengthen community involvement in and scrutiny of policing tactics, with Greater Manchester Police and West Midlands Police being supportive of the Commission's recommendation.

Superintendent Marie O'Loughlin, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, Greater Manchester Police:

Greater Manchester Police is absolutely committed to delivering equality of service to our communities right across Greater Manchester. We know that the police have a unique role in society, in that we can be required to use powers over our fellow citizens. It is absolutely right that because of these unique powers the Police Service faces unique levels of scrutiny and accountability. Greater Manchester Police is committed to working with the College of Policing and NPCC in the development of a minimum standard for community 'Safeguarding Trust' groups that have a function to scrutinise and problem-solve alongside policing.

Chief Superintendent Phil Dolby, Force Lead, Diversity and Inclusion Team, West Midlands Police:

At West Midlands Police we are big believers in accountability and public scrutiny. We are a police service, not a 'force', and policing needs to work hard to earn the public's trust through demonstrating legitimacy and building confidence with our communities. West Midlands Police is supportive of the proposal to develop a minimum standard for groups that will enable communities to scrutinise and problem-solve alongside policing.

Other perspectives on preventing youth crime

In addition to community leadership, the Commission considers that there are not enough countervailing mechanisms for young people who want to extricate themselves from criminal activity before it is too late.

The Commission heard the view that often, young people participating in criminal activity do not see themselves at risk. Instead, they feel like they are having a good time, being part of a surrogate family, being treated as adults by those they consider their peers.

There is an existing initiative for young people, called 'Is This Ok?', that was piloted for 7 months in Bradford and the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The evaluation of the initial pilot that took place in September 2019, demonstrated that it had some success in dealing with exploitation and abuse.

The pilot was funded by BBC Children in Need and delivered in partnership by Missing People and NSPCC and Childline.[footnote 162]

Case study: 'Is This Ok?'

Is This Ok? is a service for 13 to 18 year olds that provides a digital gateway to those that are at risk of, or experiencing, exploitation and or abuse. It was developed as an action in response to young people being at risk of exploitation and being groomed into gangs, drug crime and violence.

The service uses chatbot technology to direct, navigate and connect users to:

information about services and organisations that young people can access for further information and support for a range of topic areas relating to exploitation and abuse

a live chat function where the user can anonymously discuss their concerns and worries with a trained call handler

During the delivery period (September 2019 to March 2020) of the pilot, the chatbot was accessed 1,746 times, with 11% of these interactions being repeat users.

In addition to the chatbot there is an option to speak to a call handler through a live chat function. Of the chat transcripts, there were a number of encouraging responses from young people, with many stating that they now 'know there is somewhere or someone I can go to if I'm worried something is not OK'.

The service is intended to provide support to young people who are vulnerable to criminal or sexual exploitation,who would not otherwise access any other forms of support. The feedback from call handlers suggests the pilot successfully reached and engaged young people with low level concerns. Further work is required to understand why the pilot was not as successful in reaching those with higher level concerns and at the greatest risk of exploitation.[footnote 163]

There are also other initiatives that use digital technology as part of their work to divert and signpost young people away from damaging behaviours that may lead to the criminal justice system, including Project Axis at Hillingdon Youth Justice Service.

Case study: Hillingdon Youth Justice Service - Project Axis

Project Axis is an award-winning programme endorsed by the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) that supports the early identification of young people at risk of criminal exploitation. By centrally collating, analysing and sharing data across agencies, it informs the wider local authority and partnership response. Project Axis disrupts county line activity and coordinated drug operations. It enables Hillingdon to work closely with the police on Child Sexual Exploitation operations, allows triangulation of data, and delivers targeted intervention and diversion exactly where it is needed.[footnote 164]

An example of what has been achieved through Project Axis is outlined below:

Intelligence was shared by the allocated Metropolitan Police Schools Officer regarding a 14 year old student (A) who had recently moved to the school and had become involved with a group of known criminal peers. On receiving the information, Project Axis triangulated the information across systems and databases to establish if 'A' was known to other services. Due to a recent move into the area, 'A' did not appear on partners' systems however using the Axis database 'A' was identified as being at risk based on associates.

Contact was made with 'A' through the school and parent, and 'A' undertook a comprehensive Early Help Assessment followed by the implementation of a targeted action plan.

Following a period of 12 weeks engaging on Project Axis, 'A':

engaged with counselling delivered by the school counsellor

increased their school attendance and required no further periods in alternative education

changed peer group within school

along with their parent, developed a greater awareness of the risks associated with peer coercion and exploitation

Building on the 'Is This Ok?' chatbot and Project Axis models, the Commission has heard further views from the children's charity Coram that there is a need for a technology strategy to disrupt youth crime pathways and enable early intervention at scale.

The charity has newly formed a National Innovation Incubator for Children's Social Care which is already taking this concept forward as part of a wider programme of innovation, partnering with local authorities including: Stoke City Council, North Yorkshire County Council, Hertfordshire County Council, Southend Borough Council, London Borough of Newham, London Borough of Redbridge, London Borough of Havering, and London Borough of Bromley.

The Commission therefore believes that a new, 'disruptive' solution that helps to create agency and opportunities for individuals to gain control of their lives, and also stops or prevents the exploitation of young people and children into crime is required.

Recommendation 18: Create agency - Improve safety and support for children at risk

The Commission recommends that the Youth Justice Board (YJB), working with partners across government with expertise in child criminal exploitation, develops a digital solution that can be accessed and used by children and young people before or at the point of crisis.

The government will be required to secure and deploy additional resourcing to the YJB to ensure that the YJB is appropriately resourced to deliver and implement this recommendation.

The digital solution, which for example may take the form of a mobile application, text line or chatbot will act as an entry point to signpost and refer those at risk of, or already experiencing criminal exploitation, to appropriate local organisations who can support them. The services will be driven and implemented at a local level, for example, through youth offending teams.

This recommendation will help empower young people with the agency and ability to escape criminal behaviours and exploitation without the need to go to the police. The solution, based on existing technology innovations, will need to reach young people at critical points in their journey, intervening at an early stage for those at risk of criminal exploitation and preventing those already in the criminal justice system from being drawn deeper into criminality.

Reducing the harm caused by low level drug crime

One of the themes from the Lammy Review which the Commission has aimed to build on includes the diversion of low-level drug offences outside of the criminal justice system.

For England and Wales, in 2019 to 2020, 63% of 'reasonable ground' stop and searches were conducted to find drugs.[footnote 165]

In 2019, possession of cannabis was the most common drug offence for Black people and the second most common for all other ethnic groups. Class B drug offences accounted for nearly half of prosecutions for almost all ethnic groups: 49% of White defendants and 48% of defendants from Black, Asian and Mixed ethnic groups.[footnote 166]

In the youth justice estate, in the year ending March 2020, 16% of Black and Asian children, 13% of children in Mixed and Other ethnic groups, and 8% of White children in youth custody had committed drug offences.[footnote 167]

The Commission found gaps in research and understanding of the overall prevalence of illegal drug use by ethnicity. However in England, for pupils aged 11 to 15 years in 2018, 17% said they had taken drugs in the last year. When looking at ethnicity, Asian pupils were less likely than any other ethnic groups to have taken drugs in the last year at 13%, compared with 23% of Mixed ethnicity pupils, 18% of Black pupils and 17% of White pupils. Of the drugs taken, cannabis is the drug that pupils were most likely to have taken in the last year, with 8% saying that they had done so. The statistics also show that of those pupils who had taken drugs, 42% said that their early experience of drug use involved cannabis.[footnote 168]

The Commission believes that there is a double disadvantage for young people living in more deprived areas, where greater police presence leads to them being stopped, searched and consequently prosecuted for possession of Class B drugs. Once they have entered the criminal justice system, these young people, and specifically young ethnic minority men are more likely to then re-enter the criminal justice system than their White counterparts. This then has a disproportionate impact on their ability to progress in life, and can often be the gateway into a cycle of re-entry into the criminal justice system, hampering education and employment prospects.[footnote 180]

The question to be posed here is: what is the best response to drug possession that will achieve society's objectives to punish, rehabilitate and correct behaviours? Drug possession, regardless of whether Class A or Class B, is a crime and anyone who chooses to engage with illegal drugs must contend with the repercussions of their decisions. However, we question the extent to which these repercussions must fall within the criminal justice system.

The Commission believes there is a case for treating low-level Class B drug possession for personal use only through alternative pathways outside of the criminal justice system. This would enable the police to direct greater efforts and resources towards hard drugs and the violent crime with which it is associated, whilst also preventing harm through adopting public health interventions.

By focusing on possession of Class B drugs for personal use, the Commission believes it is making practical and achievable proposals that could help staunch the flow of young people into more serious crime.

The use of Class B drugs is widespread across the population of the UK, but the majority of those who use them are aged under 30; and there is some evidence that young people with heavy cannabis use have been pulled into county lines operations to pay off debts.[footnote 181]

The Commission welcomes the government's recent announcement of a £148m investment into tackling the issue of drugs, which will provide additional resources for law enforcement to tackle the supply of drugs and dismantle organised gangs. It will also deliver more money to drug treatment and recovery to help cut drug related crime and disrupt the cycle of misuse and reoffending.

Part of this investment includes the introduction of the pilot Project ADDER (Addiction, Diversion, Disruption, Enforcement and Recovery). This new, intensive approach to tackling drug misuse, combines targeted and tougher policing with enhanced treatment and recovery services.[footnote 182] The pilot will run in 5 areas across the UK with some of the highest rates of drug misuse: Blackpool, Hastings, Middlesbrough, Norwich and Swansea Bay.

We note that the ethnic minority populations of the identified locations are small, particularly in Blackpool and Swansea[footnote 183], and that the project will presumably tackle all classes of drugs. But there is another troubling area that it may not address.

But health-oriented Out of Court Disposals (OOCDs) can potentially address substance abuse before it becomes addictive, and may prevent criminal offenders from drifting into more serious criminal behaviours. They can also spare young people a criminal record, and the resulting blight on future opportunities for education or employment, for what could be a one-time indiscretion or phase in the thralls of youth.

Case study: Thames Valley Police Drug Diversion Programme

Thames Valley Police (TVP) implemented a pilot study on the West Berkshire Local Policing Area (LPA) which utilised a 'diversion to drug service provider' scheme used in lieu of traditional criminal justice pathways. The pilot utilised a community resolution outcome for those found in possession of illegal drugs. This involved a non-enforceable referral to a drug service provider. The intervention involved an assessment followed by 3 face-to-face intervention sessions with a member of the drug service provider.

A paper outlining the impact of the West Berkshire drugs diversion pilot between 10 December 2017 and 13 January 2019 found that 62% of the referrals came as a result of an officer initiated stop check, and contact was made with all of those referred. The majority of referrals (76%) were for possession of cannabis.

The evaluation found that 84% of those who were sent for treatment would have received a sanction that would not have addressed the reasons for their drug use, had they not been referred to the programme. There was a proven re-offending rate of 8.7% for adults in the pilot cohort when compared with a national proven re-offending rate of 25.7%.

I did the drug diversion sessions when I was stopped by the police in the wrong place at the wrong time with a joint of cannabis on me.... But I actually found the sessions to be really useful and I learnt a lot from them... I think it's really important that Thames Valley Police offer this so that we don't just get a criminal record.

(Male, 17, completed the drug diversion programme in Oct/Nov 2020.)

Five police services have implemented specific drug diversion schemes in the UK: Durham Police, Avon and Somerset, North Wales, Thames Valley Police, and West Midlands Police - whose particular approach is exemplified below.[footnote 195]

Case study: West Midlands Police pre-arrest drug diversion

Announced in October 2020, the process for pre-arrest drug diversion in West Midlands Police involves applying a community resolution. This is a non-statutory, out of court disposal (OOCD) for officers to utilise. Community resolutions do not lead to a criminal record. This diversion is for 'simple' possession of controlled drug offences only, and 'any possession with intent to supply' offences are excluded from this scheme.

The annual cost of drug misuse to the West Midlands Police force area is around £1.4bn. 1 in 5 crimes reported to West Midlands Police are believed to be drug related, with around 50% of burglaries, theft, shoplifting and robbery committed by Class A drug users. The purpose of this pilot is to adopt a Public Health approach to the use of controlled drugs.

Monitoring and evaluation of the project is ongoing, however, in the first 3 months of the PCC commissioned scheme, West Midlands Police made 527 referrals onto the scheme, with 270 of those being assessed, and 127 people attending the intervention so far. The vast majority of these referrals are for people under the age of 30, and almost 90% of individuals stated cannabis as their drug of choice. 34% of people (with known ethnicity) assessed for the programme so far are White British, 23% are Pakistani (the 2 largest groups).

Currently, to be eligible for an OOCD, the offender must admit guilt and agree to the 'disposal'. The Commission has heard views that people from ethnic minorities, and specifically Black men are less likely to receive a diversionary option, such as an OOCD, as the requirement to admit guilt acts as a potential barrier to be diverted. This is reflected in the youth justice estate; between 2017 and 2019, Black, Asian and Mixed ethnicity children were substantially less likely than White children to receive an out of court disposal.[footnote 196] The Lammy Review also points to this barrier in the context of custodial sentences, where ethnic minority defendants were consistently more likely than White defendants to plead not guilty in court. At the heart of this remains the question of trust, and we urge police services, criminal justice agencies, and ethnic minority communities to work together to understand and address this reluctance to admit guilt.

For example, a multi-agency National Youth Justice Board project was launched in 2020 seeking to understand the disproportionality in the OOCD system, specifically in relation to Community Resolutions. The Commission considers that the findings from this work will help to inform the approach for a diversion route that mitigates against the risks of disproportionality in the uptake of diversionary routes.

We consider examples such as the Thames Valley and West Midlands Police drug diversion pilot models as effective and proportionate means through which young people may be appropriately diverted from addiction and crime, whilst also trying to address the root cause of their personal drug use. It's about implementing fair practices in policing that will provide improved outcomes for those young people, and their wider communities.

The Commission therefore recommends a multi-agency approach bringing together the College of Policing (CoP), National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC), Home Office (HO) and Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to develop an evidence-based pilot to divert offences of low-level Class B drug possession into public health services.

It is suggested that the pilot is trialled in 4 of the 6 police force areas where almost half (48%) of all arrests for drug offences took place in the year ending March 2020; the Metropolitan Police, Merseyside, West Yorkshire, and Humberside (noting that Thames Valley and West Midlands are already undertaking police drug diversion pilots). The aim is that following evaluation of the pilot by the College of Policing, a consistent approach is adopted nationally.

Under this diversion scheme, individuals committing the offence of 'possession of a Class B drug' will automatically be considered for a drugs referral in lieu of traditional criminal justice routes. In accordance with current OOCD guidance, individuals committing the offence must admit guilt to be eligible for this referral mechanism. The Commission also notes that information about those referred into this programme should not be disclosed to potential employers, education providers or voluntary sector organisations, in order to preserve opportunities for young people - once they have completed their course - to pursue further or higher education or employment without being held back by a criminal record.

The responsibility for developing operational guidance for the new drug diversion approach should sit with the CoP, working alongside the NPCC, Home Office and MoJ, and drawing from the evidence of what has worked from models such as the Thames Valley Police pilot approach.

The implementation of this recommendation will go further to ensure fairness in treatment of all those in possession of illegal substances across all communities and prevent the mass criminalisation of young people found in possession of small quantities of Class B drugs. The Crown Prosecution Service has indicated support for such an approach:

The Crown Prosecution Service recognises the importance of using a range of interventions to tackle the disproportionate impact the criminal justice system can have on young people, and we are very interested in the outcomes of this project.

(Gerry Wareham, National Youth Justice Lead, Crown Prosecution Service)

How to achieve a more diverse police service

A key element in building trust with communities is fostering the belief among all groups that policing is a respected career, that the police service is theirs and over time can come to look more like the communities it is policing. Respondents to the Commission's call for evidence echoed this sentiment; many said that by having a more diverse workforce, police services would be able to build better relationships and trust with the communities they work with. Some progress has been made in recent years, as we registered above, but relative to the big strides that minorities have made into the professions elsewhere, noted in the employment chapter, policing remains a cold spot, especially at higher levels.

Figure 16: Percentage of police officers from ethnic minorities, and percentage of the overall population from ethnic minorities (at 2011 Census), by police force area (England and Wales, 31 March 2020)

Note: based on full-time equivalent police officers

In England and Wales as a whole:

3.1% of police officers were Asian, compared with 6.8% of the population

1.3% of police officers were Black, compared with 3.3% of the population

92.7% of officers were White, compared with 86.0% of the population

the Mixed ethnic group was representative, making up 2.2% of police officers and 2.2% of the population[footnote 200]

Based on this data, and noting the omission of the Metropolitan Police, it showed that only White officers were promoted to the highest rank of Chief Officer (which includes Assistant Chief Constables, Deputy Chief Constables and Chief Constables). A total of 25 promotions to this rank were made. At a Chief Superintendent rank, there were 58 promotions in total, of which there was one promotion of an officer in each of the Mixed, Asian and Other ethnic groups and no promotions of Black officers (where ethnicity was known).

The Commission recognises that this can be explained by the lack of diverse candidates in the pipeline for senior positions. But creating that pipeline is an operational imperative. It makes it easier to gather intelligence and evidence from those who might be unwilling to come forward otherwise, to bring people to court, to protect people, and to be able to respond to incidents with more sensitivity and understanding.[footnote 203] We do not believe that a White police officer is unable to police areas with large ethnic minority communities, or show empathy and understanding with people from minority groups, but a more diverse police service overall could help to rebuild trust with communities at the local level.

Understanding barriers to recruitment: culture of policing

The challenge of community perceptions

The Commission heard evidence that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are often put off joining the police by the doubts, criticism, and fears of friends or family, with some even having a sense that they are betraying their community and joining the 'other side'.[footnote 204]

On closer inspection of this evidence, what was also revealed was the shocking racial abuse that ethnic minority police officers can be subjected to by other ethnic minority citizens in the communities they serve. Social media platforms highlighted disturbing comments which will not be repeated here. Printable examples, already publicly commented on, include the following from one such citizen:

And the following from political and race relations activist, Lee Jasper:

A Black, female police officer described how she actively avoided working at the BLM protests last year:

It is notable that little is said in public discourse about this particular barrier to diverse recruitment. Yet in the Commission's view it is a pertinent and contributing factor towards the reluctance of ethnic minorities - particularly of Caribbean or African heritage - to apply to join the police service. It also sits at odds with the claims that are made by representatives of ethnic minority communities, including public figures who demand greater representation in the workforce and at senior levels. Under-represented communities cannot reasonably expect to call for change, but then fail to call out those from within who treat individuals taking that crucial step forward in this appalling way.

The Commission encourages communities to support and promote the aspirations of those from diverse backgrounds who wish to join the police service. To not do so is a retrograde step and will limit the pace of change that we all wish to see.

The risks of doing the job

The rise in assaults has, unsurprisingly, had a great impact on police officers, both physically and mentally. This in turn has led to a loss of policing days as those affected need time off to recuperate. But perhaps most disturbingly, these assaults have led to a new trend by perpetrators - who are shown to be from all race and ethnic backgrounds - to film the attacks and then post them online. Invariably this indicates that assaults are not happening on a one to one basis, rather it suggests that groups of perpetrators are involved. Commenting on media reports highlighting the issue last year Ken Marsh, Chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, stated that police officers had become 'society's punching bag'.[footnote 213]

This is wholly unacceptable, and has rightly been condemned on all sides. That said, this troubling issue appears to remain live - and also has a chilling effect on those individuals who are considering a career in the police service. Again, members of communities need to reflect on the role they play in affecting the change in policing that they would wish to see.

The need to maintain progress on organisational change

While the Commission has found no available data on charges of racism in the police workforce, views shared during engagement with frontline officers highlighted a need for 'cultural change' within the police service:

(Anonymous, Frontline Police Officer)

The National Sikh Police Association submitted evidence to the Commission from a survey carried out in August 2020 on 'racial disparities in the UK police force' which found that of the people who participated, almost half (47%) had considered leaving their career due to their treatment. The majority (62%) of people reported suffering some form of racism at work, and 59% felt they had been overlooked for opportunities some or most of the time due to racism or unconscious bias.[footnote 215]

However, as outlined earlier in the chapter, the Commission has also heard overwhelming views that there has been a dynamic shift in police attitudes on race over the last few decades. Issues of cultural change and commitment to fostering a fair police service were emphasised by all senior officers that the Commission engaged with.

Yet, how the police are perceived can be shaped by a small minority whose prejudiced behaviour attracts media attention. The Commission notes that while senior officers may appropriately sanction or act on such behaviour, these examples not only impact public perception of the police but also the likelihood individuals would choose to pursue a career within policing.

Internal police misconduct procedures

Another aspect of the internal culture of policing relates to complaints and misconduct. As outlined in the Employment chapter, this is an issue that appears to be pertinent across different sectors. In 2019, the NPCC conducted its own research[footnote 216] into disproportionality in police complaints and misconduct cases against ethnic minority officers and staff. It found that there were significant differences between White and ethnic minority officers in the amount of internal conduct allegations received and the severity assessments made by professional standards departments (PSDs).

Findings in the NPCC report reveal that:

The NPCC research[footnote 218] found that PSDs do not have a consistent approach to misconduct cases and that a lack of supervision and leadership within police forces contributed to creating disparities in misconduct cases and outcomes. It noted that the journey of ethnic minority officers when facing conduct allegations often involves being referred to the Professional Standards Department (PSD) by their supervisor for low level allegations, which would ordinarily be dealt with by that supervisor and at an earlier opportunity.

The Commission supports ongoing work by the NPCC to further address the existing disparities, including: work to enhance diversity in the PSD workforce representation, the implementation of reforms that compel PSD decision makers to discharge matters of low level conduct to local line managers, and the bar being raised for both the investigation of a disciplinary investigation in order to focus the system on the most serious of cases.

Achieving meaningful and sustainable diversity in policing

A diverse workforce that is equipped with the necessary skills to work effectively with the communities it serves is dependent on a welcoming, inclusive culture where all of its members are comfortable and confident. Culture changes require a sustained effort and increasing representation alone is not enough to achieve this, although they are linked. The focus in this area needs to be rooted in fairness, openness and respect for all groups.

The Commission believes that evidence based initiatives that encourage personal development are key; from mentorship and support for junior members of staff, to improved complaint mechanisms. Every police officer should be comfortable to be themselves and given the same opportunities to succeed as their peers.

There is merit in utilising former police officers and current police staff associations or networks to support and encourage both personal development within the force, and recruitment efforts to reach underrepresented communities. Though, as outlined in the Employment and Enterprise chapter, it cannot be assumed that someone's ethnic background will necessarily change a culture. A concerted effort is also required to ensure that management can be involved in both championing the development of ethnic minority officers within the force and harnessing a culture of fairness across the police service.

The College of Policing, NPCC and APCC recognise that reaching the milestone of a workforce that mirrors the local community they serve may not always be a meaningful measure. For many local services, achieving meaningful diversity, which includes addressing the skills gap, will require going beyond just being representative of the ethnic minority population of the area.[footnote 220]

The Commission heard evidence from a number of key organisations in the policing community who were keen to see section 159 of the Equality Act 2010, preventing positive discrimination in recruitment, suspended to enable Police Forces to recruit specifically to improve ethnic diversity in the workforce. The idea of the law being used as a means of 'ensuring' such diversity is a compelling one - however it is not without significant consequences to wider society.

Following the Patten Report, the Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) became perhaps one of the most well-known examples of how legislation has been used as a means of addressing a similar (faith-based) challenge to achieve proportionate representation. As such the Commission undertook a deep-dive with them to learn about how they were able to do this. PSNI implemented a 50:50 recruitment policy to make the police service representative of the predominant faiths in their communities. Following the implementation of the policy, and increase in numbers of Catholic officers in the service, levels of confidence in the local police were similar between both Protestant and Catholic communities in 2017/18.[footnote 221]

However, the Commission also heard evidence from police officers and citizens that, although the legislation had positive outcomes for Catholic and Protestant communities, as their wider communities became more diverse over time this same success was not replicated for minority groups.

This suggests that legislation may not be the best way to address the issue. Indeed, the Commission found strong evidence of where and how effective work has already been undertaken by some police services and the partners they work with across the country[footnote 222], to dispel negative perceptions, promote fairness and improve equality - even in the most challenging of circumstances.

The Commission commends Nottinghamshire Police as a model which has recruited a higher proportion of officers from ethnic minority backgrounds than any other force in England and Wales. They achieved this through a campaign of engagement with different parts of the community, not just those of different faiths and ethnicities, but also across the local public sector, to raise awareness of the opportunity to apply.

Case study: Nottinghamshire Police - Recruitment Approach[footnote 223]

In 2012, Nottinghamshire's PCC set a long term ambition to improve ethnic minority experiences of policing and the recruitment, retention and progression of both ethnic minority officers and staff. This is also a strategic priority for the Chief Constable.

Nottinghamshire's recruitment approach includes: Citizens in Policing, dealing with youth engagement including mini police, cadets, youth outreach, schools intervention officers, force careers advisor, the HR force positive action strategy, and learning and development that includes core and crime student training.

Even during the COVID-19 crisis, Nottinghamshire Police continued to engage potential applicants through a webinar series, allowing future officers to record fitness tests on video from home during lockdown, and social distancing officers in school classrooms to ensure education can go ahead.

Prior to Operation Uplift, Nottinghamshire Police had an ethnic minority officer representational figure of 3.8%. As of December 2020, this figure stood at 7.0%, representing huge organisational change, and the most representative force within the country, of any area with a significant ethnic minority population of over 10%.

In Nottinghamshire Police, each new cohort is averaging 25% ethnic minority recruits and 45% female (average cohort 24 officers). The Force moved from under 4% ethnic minority to 7.01% within 16 months (total officer workforce), and retention remains high with uplift years 1 and 2 already achieved.

Nottinghamshire is 63% representative of the diverse communities it serves, and has an ambition to achieve 11.18% as per the Census.

Police Now, an independent social enterprise, is an example of a successful national scheme that is helping to improve diversity and retention across several police services in England and Wales.

Case study: Police Now

Police Now runs 2-year graduate schemes that recruits and trains 'outstanding' graduates to be placed as neighbourhood police officers and trainee detectives across England and Wales.

Police Now has partnered with over 33 forces in England and Wales using their recruitment and training programmes to supply police forces with graduates. The programme includes a residential training academy, 2 years of in-force training, and continuous professional and personal development with an assigned Police Now Leadership Development Officer.

Police Now focus on attracting individuals who have not previously considered a policing career. To attract these individuals, the marketing focuses on community transformation and the leadership skills a policing career can provide. In 2020, Police Now attracted over 18,374 applications, and to date, Police Now has recruited over 1,800 police officers across England and Wales.[footnote 224]

Police Now also uses positive action initiatives in order to target and support underrepresented groups within policing.

Police Now's recruitment trends suggest that the graduate market has the potential to help address the under-representation of officers who are women and those from an ethnic minority group. In 2020, 17% of participants on the National Graduate Leadership Programme identified as from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, 54% identified as women, and 7% identified as women from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, with 35 unique languages spoken across the cohort. Of those who started the National Detective Programme in 2021, 24% identify as from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, 66% identify as women, and 16% identify as women from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background, with 29 unique languages spoken across the cohort.[footnote 225]

Analysis indicates that there has been an increase in young people's confidence in the police, in the communities where Police Now participants have been deployed.

Independently peer-reviewed analysis suggests that the targeted problem-solving work of Police Now participants alongside their colleagues is translating into 'green shoots' of impact in relation to anti-social behaviour. This analysis shows an 11.7% reduction in anti-social behaviour in the communities where Police Now participants were posted, and a 7.2% reduction in communities without a Police Now participant.[footnote 226]

The work of Police Now participants and their colleagues aligns closely with the traditional aims of neighbourhood policing, namely for the police to work in partnership with the local community to solve problems and prevent crime.

At the time the Metropolitan Police described how a 'high rate of interest has also been matched by a high quality of candidates' with 40% of those expressing interest at the time having a first degree or higher qualification, for example.

Despite these encouraging examples progress remains frustratingly slow. The Commission's view is that the gap in achieving the right workforce mix has been driven by a lack of consistent political and policing leadership focus on these issues over the last 40 years. Strong measures are required to maintain a consistent focus on the workforce mix, and make a significant change quickly. Operation Uplift, which will see the unprecedented push to recruit 20,000 additional police officers across England and Wales over a 3-year period, provides a unique opportunity to drive that change.

We also consider that a focus solely on achieving a higher ethnic minority presence in Police Services will not solve the problem in a sustainable way if the new recruits do not have the competence and life skills needed to appropriately work and engage with the community they serve.

The Commission emphasises a need for a recruitment approach that includes recognition of the life skills that candidates can offer, such as a working knowledge of local issues, familiarity with the community languages in the areas covered, and an understanding of different religious and cultural sensitivities.

As such, the Commission makes 2 recommendations to achieve a more diverse police workforce and promote genuine, positive integration between communities and the police.

Recommendation 21: Achieve inclusivity - Create police workforces that represent the communities they serve

First, introduce a local residency requirement for recruitment to each police force area The Metropolitan Police recently returned to the 'residency requirement', outlined previously in this chapter, to help them to achieve their target of 40% ethnic minority representation in the workforce. The Commission recommends that this policy to recruit locally is upscaled across all police force areas in England and Wales, with the College of Policing developing guidance for police services on the implementation of the residency requirement.

The Commission notes that the residency requirement will likely drive more significant change in specific services where both the workforces and the populations are larger. For example, in September 2020 the Metropolitan Police employed around 25% of all police officers (full time equivalent) in England and Wales, and around 15% of the population reside there (based on the 2011 Census). This compares to police service areas such as Warwickshire or Dyfed-Powys, who employed less than 1% of all police officers and have around 1% of the population of England and Wales living there.

Therefore, the guidance produced by the College will need to take into consideration the different nuances of each police service area, including circumstances where the prospective local candidates eligible to apply for a role in policing is reduced - for example, due to the age demographic of the area's population.

The Commission also suggests that police services address the pipeline of candidates applying for policing through extensive engagement and outreach with communities, for example through cadet programmes. Due consideration should also be given to incentivise new recruits to remain with their police service for a minimum period of time, to establish their careers.

The progress and efficacy of the residency requirements should be monitored and evaluated at a national level by the Home Office, working in partnership with the CoP, APCC and NPCC. There is also a need for reporting mechanisms to be incorporated within this process, with HMICFRS inspecting services on their progress in regular periods.

Recommendation 22: Achieve inclusivity - Equip the police service with skills to serve the needs of their communities

Second, the Commission recommends that the College of Policing (CoP) work with police services to design and evaluate recruitment pilots that match candidates' life skills with the needs of the communities they serve in their local areas.

By September 2021, the CoP working alongside services should identify a lead for the project, and outline timelines for the progression of these pilots. Following the evaluation of the pilot, the CoP should then introduce evidence-based guidance for police services about how to include questions about life skills and local understanding into the post-assessment centre recruitment process. This guidance should include the introduction of questions into the bank of post-assessment centre questions for each police force to adapt to local circumstances.

In an instance where, based on the evaluation results, the CoP is not able to progress with this recommendation, the College will be required to write to the Home Secretary and the Home Office to outline the reasons why the pilots cannot be upscaled.

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One of the biggest concerns about unfair treatment of minorities lies in crime and policing. The data consistently highlights the over-representation of ethnic minority groups - both as perpetrators and victims - when it comes to hate crime, violent crime and drug related offences. Police workforce diversity figures continue to remain low.

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The Commission's report into racial and ethnic disparities in the UK.

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The Commission's report sets out a new, positive agenda for change. It balances the needs of individuals, communities and society, maximising opportunities and ensuring fairness for all.

The Commission has considered detailed quantitative data and qualitative evidence to understand why disparities exist, what works and what does not. It has commissioned new research and invited submissions from across the UK.

Its work and recommendations will improve the quality of data and evidence about the types of barriers faced by people from different backgrounds. This will help to inform actions and drive effective and lasting change.

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The report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities

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Panning through images with dialogue on top

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moving document shot at  (14:17)

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Oprah and Lance Armstrong  The Worldwide Exclusive   Part 1

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Look here for more information about our joint campaign with Glasgow Prisoner Solidarity (GPS) to highlight the presence of Campus Officers (COs) in schools around Scotland, and gather stories of those who learn and teach alongside them. You can contribute towards the GPS fundraiser .

You will find a series of blog posts that set out our understanding of how COs have, for many, come to be a normalised part of school life, how patterns of policing and criminalisation are intimately tied up with the realities of structural racism, and ultimately will include a call for people in schools to share any experiences of being schools with COs.

Evidence from other education systems across the world highlight the fraught relationship between systems of teaching and policing: how do the two often end up coming together? Our joint campaign is a call to better understand how this set-up is being experienced in Scotland, to then lay a path towards an education system free from careceral logics that are often at odds with goals of equity of educational outcomes, and teaching towards racial justice.

Debunking the myths around Police in Schools

As part of our campaign to spread awareness of COs in Scottish schools, we want to highlight the knowledge of people with first-hand experience of working and learning alongside them. This is key to any success that the campaign may have.

We are particularly keen to hear the perspectives of learners.

If you are one of these people, we invite you to contribute below and be a part of our campaign. In our third and final blog post, we intend to highlight a selection of experiences and give them the prominence needed to create as full a picture as possible. This is part of a longer aim of sharing the development of the campaign with you and those you teach and learn beside.

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Look here for more information about our joint campaign with Glasgow Prisoner Solidarity (GPS) to highlight the presence of Campus Officers (COs) in schools around Scotland, and gather stories of those who learn and teach alongside them. You can contribute towards the GPS fundraiser .

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No Police in Schools is a community campaign united by our shared concerns over the increasing presence of police in schools in Greater Manchester and beyond.

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Paradise Papers: Tax haven secrets of ultra-rich exposed - BBC News

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West Midlands Police demonstrate new Taser

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The Expandable Baton is Not a Self Defense Tool | Police Should Not Carry Batons

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The reporting in this video inspired the role of the 'reporter' in Bad Egg

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Police Federation of England and Wales HQ

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Above and Beyond: New X2 Taser and Axon connected ecosystem

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British Police Siren - MET (Wail, Yelp) (128 kbps)

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EMPOWERED COMMUNITY Prevent has been described as toxic, racist, Islamaphobic and creating a them-and-us culture within society. The Government has attempted to give Prevent a veneer of legitimacy by expressing it in the language of 'safeguarding'. We believe that Prevent has failed not only as a strategy but also

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Navine G. Khan-Dossos: There Is No Alternative | Tools for Conviviality Workshops

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Together with Navine G. Khan-Dossos and Mark Hurrell - who will be advising on design methods and visual communication - participants will discuss and respond to the research material that surrounds There Is No Alternative.

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There Is No Alternative was a performative, durational installation combining live painting, a research archive, and a series of workshops, talks, and events. The Showroom became a site of production, organisation and exchange, taking the visual narratives surrounding the government's Prevent strategy as the point of departure through which to reconsider this contested policy and the role it plays in society.

This discursive programme was shaped in relation to a growing research archive gathered by Navine in dialogue with The Showroom team and a network of new and long-term peers and collaborators, including those who are affected by and developing critical responses to Prevent nationwide.
--
Especially for Fortnightly Highlights #4, Navine selected one article from the research archive bibliography to be available to download from The Library. Read We Are Completely Independent, a key report about Prevent published by independent grass roots advocacy organisation CAGE.

Documents in the archive range from The Preventing Prevent Handbook by Hareem Ghani, Zamzam Ibrahim and Illyas Nagdee to Born Radicals? Prevent, Positivism, and 'Race-Thinking' by Katy Sian. Digital copies are all available upon request.

Books in the There Is No Alternative reading list include Island by Aldous Huxley, Orientalism by Edward Said, and Shy Radicals: Anti-systemic Politics of the Militant Introvert by Hamja Ahsan (published by Book Works, 2017 / Third Edition, 2019). Download the full Book List from The Library.
-- WATCH

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Fortnightly Highlight 4: There Is No Alternative

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There Is No Alternative was a performative, durational installation combining live painting, a research archive, and a series of workshops, talks, and events. The Showroom became a site of production, organisation and exchange, taking the visual narratives surrounding the government's Prevent strategy as the point of departure through which to reconsider this contested policy and the role it plays in society.

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Q. How does Prevent Work?

A. Prevent works by identifying individuals who may be at risk of being exploited by violent extremist narratives and drawn into terrorism; assessing the nature and the extent of their vulnerability, and, where necessary, providing an appropriate support package tailored to their needs. A concerted effort has been made to ensure that the preventative, rights based approach taken in Scotland is balanced, proportionate and aligned to existing safeguarding procedures.

Q. What happens when someone is referred to Prevent?

A. No matter the ideology or idea which sits behind vulnerability (if indeed this is clear), the collective focus is always the early identification of risk to an individual in order to safeguard their wellbeing. In certain cases a referral initially considered to be Prevent related might more appropriately be dealt with by partner agencies using existing internal safeguarding processes and procedures. On receipt of a Prevent referral, Police Scotland's Prevent Delivery Units undertake an initial assessment of vulnerability before agreeing the appropriate response with partners. Where a vulnerable individual has been identified, multi-agency partners will usually come together as part of the Prevent Multi Agency Panel (PMAP). A PMAP case conference is convened allowing partners to consider the circumstances surrounding an individual and work together to safeguard the individual and identify and provide appropriate support.

Q. Who makes Prevent referrals?

A. Anyone can make a referral. Referrals can come from a wide range of sources which could include: social services; health; education; police; and members of the public.

The Referrals:

Q. Why have you not included a breakdown of ethnicity and religion?

A. Individuals are not referred to Prevent because of their ethnicity or religion. Referrals are made where there is a concern that an individual may be vulnerable to being drawn in to terrorism regardless of ethnicity, religion or other factors.

Q. Why have you not included a breakdown by local authority or police force Police Division?

A. Data has been provided to give an idea of the scale and nature of Prevent referrals across Scotland, without making it possible to identify any individuals. The number of people referred in any given local area will be small and could lead to the identification of those referred to the programme. Individuals who are referred to Prevent and who receive support do so with assurances about the confidentiality of the process. There should be no concerns that the release of data will lead to the identification of an individual. This would undermine the approach and reduce the number of people willing to engage with the process.

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Q. How does Prevent Work? A. Prevent works by identifying individuals who may be at risk of being exploited by violent extremist narratives and drawn into terrorism; assessing the nature and the extent of their vulnerability, and, where necessary, providing an appropriate support package tailored to their needs.

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"For this reason, campaigning for a world without police cannot focus merely on the form of policing – that is to say, just focusing on the figure of the police officer or force. It must also focus on policing as a set of relations that are designed to uphold capitalist notions of law and order, to defend private property and subordinate the exploited masses of people."

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Tatlin's Whisper #5 is a performance work by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. During the performance, two mounted policemen in uniform (one on a white horse and one on a black horse) are brought into the museum or exhibition space. They patrol the space, guiding and controlling the audience by using a minimum of six crowd control techniques. These include actions such as closing off the gallery entrance or entrances, pushing the audience forward with lateral movements of the horses, manipulating the audience into a single group and encircling it to tighten the group, frontal confrontation with the horse, and breaking up the audience into two distinct groups.

The techniques used by the mounted police are common at major public events. However, the artist is keenly aware that the experience of such forms of control changes radically according to the context in which they are encountered; a sporting event staged in a Western liberal democracy, for instance, is quite different from an unauthorised political demonstration under a more authoritarian regime. In the context of its performance at Tate Modern, the action has revealed certain particular characteristics, including the use of jocular humour by the British police as an additional method of keeping the crowd and situation under control. This was interspersed with more direct commands, with the crowd playing along or becoming more wary accordingly. Examining choreographed performance and experiences embedded within reality, the work reflects on the complex relationship between agents of authority and the people they aim to control.

Bruguera was born in Cuba in 1968 and lives and works in Chicago, Paris and Havana. She makes performances and installations that use silence and self-censorship as a means both to impose and resist power, addressing the relationship between art, politics and everyday life. Bruguera uses performance to create direct experiences of, and commentaries on, political structures, appropriating the tools used by systems of power themselves. She does not simply represent political situations but creates them by putting into motion some of the same strategies used by political authority. Her work frequently addresses Cuba's social, political and economic history and expresses the resulting experiences of alienation and disorientation through the body in action.

Tatlin's Whisper #5 is part of a series of works in which images familiar from the news 'become real life experiences ... by [their] placement inside a museum or a centre intended for art exhibitions' (Tania Bruguera, 'Certificate of Authenticity and Ownership Conditions', Tatlin's Whisper #5, 2008, Tate Acquisition File, Tania Bruguera). The series references the Soviet modernist artist Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1919-20), which was conceived as the working monument for the Communist International but never built. Bruguera's project produces unconventional monuments through the experience of live events, using memory as the means through which the monument survives.

Further reading
Roberto Pinto (ed.), Tania Bruguera: Esercizio di resistenza, exhibition catalogue, Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin 2004.
Stephanie Schwartz, 'Tania Bruguera: Between Histories', Oxford Art Journal, vol.35, no.2, June 2012, pp.215-32.
Jonathan Wallis and Tania Bruguera, 'Interview with Tania Bruguera', Art & the Public Sphere, vol.4, nos.1-2, December 2015, pp.31-8.

Tanya Barson
June 2008
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Tatlin's Whisper #5', Tania Bruguera, 2008 | Tate

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Tatlin's Whisper #5 is a performance work by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. During the performance, two mounted policemen in uniform (one on a white horse and one on a black horse) are brought into the museum or exhibition space. They patrol the space, guiding and controlling the audience by using a minimum of six crowd control techniques.

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The Black Lives Matter movement has sown seeds of hope worldwide for the abolition of police. But policing goes far beyond the bodies of armed men in uniform. Abolitionist struggle must resist all forms of policing, from immigration control to Prevent.
From mounted charges on protestors, brutal encounters caught on film, and the mass stop & search of black men under lockdown - it seems nobody has done more this summer to shatter the illusion of Britain's police being 'different' than Britain's police themselves.

While much of the analysis and news coverage on campaigns against prisons and policing has been focused on the US context, policing in the UK has its very own history of struggle to be contended with. There have been 1758 known deaths in custody in the UK since 1990 to date, and yet no one has been held accountable for these murders. It is activists who have grappled with the sharp edge of British policing who have been pushing for police and prison abolition here.

But in talking about Britain's own history with the police, it's also important to reframe how we understand police and policing itself. Significantly, much of Britain's policing has historically been exported elsewhere. 'British policing' meant policing the Empire, through social control in the colonies, before importing the tactics practised there right back here to bear on the British working classes. This boomerang continued even after the British empire was broken up - Britain's gift to much of the world has been policing and violence.

Along with this context, any conversation on policing, and abolition, in Britain is incomplete without understanding the three pillars of policing today - 'ordinary' police forces, immigration control and 'counter-terror' policing - as well as the particular contexts they arose in here, and the many forms that these take.

Three pillars of modern policing

It is all too easy to fragment conversations about policing, evaluating each sphere of surveillance and enforcement as a separate 'issue', but the way that 'counter-terrorism' and immigration control are implemented gives us a chilling look into the future of policing in Britain.

Through innovations in these areas, policing is simultaneously tightened up and made more diffuse - the growth of 'counter-terrorism', for example, has ushered in a historically unprecedented apparatus of surveillance, while simultaneously deputising the work of countering terrorism to ordinary citizens through programmes like Prevent, which oblige workers in many fields to monitor supposed signs of 'radicalisation' in those they provide services to or have contact with. So too in the case of immigration control: our borders have become more militarised, while Hostile Environment policies have spread the work of policing migrants across society. This feeds into every area of our lives, from the process of being selected for a job or a house (required to showcase our passports for a mini-immigration check), to doctors, cleaners, social workers and teachers being asked (through Prevent) to decide if the people they provide their services to are inclined to commit an act of terrorism. Policing is ingrained as a general duty. In turn, our society goes from one where we trust and support each other to one where we are tracking and monitoring each other.

In time, these systems bleed into a policing of society and of political activity more broadly. In recent years for example, the targets of Prevent have widened: alongside Muslim communities and far-right activists there have been increasing moves to target environmental justice groups like Extinction Rebellion and sections of the left - particularly the anti-war left. Decades of anti-migrant policies have ratcheted up the risk of organising for those with insecure, undocumented or dual citizenship, placing them at the mercy of the deportation regime. A very clear case of this arose in 2009, when SOAS workers campaigning for the London living wage were detained by immigration enforcement and later deported.

Whether it be the 'Hostile Environment' anti-migrant policies such as those that make it difficult to access housing, or the mass political policing enabled by 'counter-terrorism', or 'ordinary' law-and-order policing, these forces collectively amount to a system that works to keep us in line, that makes life for certain segments of the population more insecure, and draws other segments into the work of policing one another. It is vital that the British left engage with and embrace campaigns towards the abolition and defunding of all of Britain's various police apparatuses - which are, in the final instance, an obstacle to any left project.

For this reason, campaigning for a world without police cannot focus merely on the form of policing - that is to say, just focusing on the figure of the police officer or force. It must also focus on policing as a set of relations that are designed to uphold capitalist notions of law and order, to defend private property and subordinate the exploited masses of people.

But even beyond a theoretical position on it, the issue of policing is already a very visceral reality for many people in Britain - especially young black, brown and working-class people. For many young people here, their first encounter with the police is being intimidated by them during a stop-and-search. In my case, it was witnessing this happen, and the deep feeling of helplessness and anger that accompanied it, that made me initially start to distrust the police. My estate in East London has had a long history of the police not turning up when you need them, and turning up in massive numbers when you don't. It is these seeds of discontent and distrust of authority that the left must nurture into a structural analysis of power, and develop into campaigns for broad social change.

Abolitionist praxis

Defunding the police is about reducing the scope of the police. Abolition aims towards a society that does not need the police or prisons. To put it simply, defund is the tactic, abolition is the horizon - it's important that we articulate a very social and political vision for the type of society we want through abolition, rather than just operating on a budgetary logic.

We can bring the abolitionist horizon into many aspects of our regular social and political praxis. Everyday examples of this could include providing food and direct material support for the local homeless community rather than reporting them for begging; being an active bystander when you see abuse taking place - if you feel able to do so - rather than relying on police; and intervening in stop-and-searches to challenge officers' abuses of power. The last few months have also seen the rise of mutual aid and a strengthening of local communities, which can also be a means through which we can take responsibility for each other without relying on punitive responses by the state to the consequences of poverty and poor healthcare. In this way, abolitionist organising can provide a coherent framework and 'glue' to bind together campaigns against inequality, while injecting a solid politics within them.

Alongside these everyday approaches that help to circumvent and rein in the logic of policing, it is vital that we undertake very direct abolitionist work to reduce the police state. For instance, this can mean getting involved with, or initiating, a relevant campaign to get rid of police officers in your local secondary school or college, or carrying out anti-Prevent workshops and ' know your rights' training. Campaigns are ongoing to stop the construction of prisons, close down current prisons, and stop the use of tasers.

While abolition should be a very logical progression for leftists politically, we find ourselves pushing back against deeply-rooted 'common sense' notions of the value and necessity of policing. Crime is often seen as caused fundamentally by bad people rather than being understood as the product of a broken society. Policing and punishment takes the place of meaningful attempts at rebuilding society, maintains the system of inequality and creates a vicious cycle of dependency on police to solve our issues - rather than allowing us to formulate wide-ranging, collective solutions to society's problems.

Along with our history of policing, we have our own tradition of resistance to draw upon. 2020 marks 50 years since the arrest of the Mangrove 9 - nine Black activists harassed by the police as part of their escalating war against Britain's then-growing Black Power movement. It was the conclusion of their trial which saw the very first acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police, nearly three decades before the Lawrence Inquiry's seminal verdict of 'institutional racism'. Then there are our very own uprisings sparked by police violence, including the historic flashpoints in 1981, 1985 and 2011. And that's without mentioning the long history of defence and justice campaigns against police brutality and negligence - from the Hillsborough Justice Campaign to the United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC).

Abolition politics in the UK, therefore, need not be seen as a 'foreign import' - but rather as rooted in a long history of struggle here that we can learn from and build upon.

More information:

The spread of the police and their powers is wide reaching. There are many campaigns doing vital work at a local level. Activists recently produced UK-relevant resources to consider some demands we should have to move towards an abolitionist world.

Please attend UFFC's annual rally taking place online on 31st October.

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What does abolition mean in modern Britain?

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The Black Lives Matter movement has sown seeds of hope worldwide for the abolition of police. But policing goes far beyond the bodies of armed men in uniform. Abolitionist struggle must resist all forms of policing, from immigration control to Prevent.

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Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

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The property occupies a prominent corner position fronting the south side of Argyle Street and the east side of Finnieston Street, with Houldsworth Lane running to the rear. The subjects are located immediately opposite its junction with Claremont Street on Argyle Street, within the bustling Finnieston area of Glasgowswest end.

The subjects comprise a part two storey and part single storey former police station generally of brick and block construction surmounted by flat roof sections which we assume to be of concrete slab overlaid in bitumen. External elevations are generally of facing brick, whilst the north and south elevations within thetwo storey section incorporate aluminium framed double glazed window units. Part of the external claddingcomprises of rendered panels. The subjects have an approximate site area of 0.43 acres ( 0.172 Ha)

Location

The property occupies a prominent corner position fronting the south side of Argyle Street and the east side of Finnieston Street, with Houldsworth Lane running to the rear. The subjects are located immediately opposite its junction with Claremont Street on Argyle Street, within the bustling Finnieston area of Glasgow's west end.

Accommodation

1137.40 m2 (12,243 ft2)

Terms

SALE PRICE: Offers over £800,000 invited.

VAT: VAT will not be applicable to any transaction.

EPC: A copy of the energy performance certificate can be provided to interested parties upon request.

COSTS: Each party will bear their own legal costs. The purchaser will be liable for any LBTT, Registration Dues and VAT thereon.

Specification

* SUITABLE FOR ALTERNATIVE USE, SUBJECT TO PLANNING
* DESIRABLE WEST END LOCATION
* ON-SITE CAR PARKING
* CLOSE TO JUNCTION OF M8 MOTORWAY
* RARE SALE OPPORTUNITY

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commercial other glasgow strathclyde united kingdom

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Former Police Station For Sale, 945 Argyle Street, Glasgow, G3 8JG

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The property occupies a prominent corner position fronting the south side of Argyle Street and the east side of Finnieston Street, with Houldsworth Lane running to the rear. The subjects are located immediately opposite its junction with Claremont Street on Argyle Street, within the bustling Finnieston area of Glasgowswest end.

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The claim by the Chair of the Police Federation, Steve White, that policing in England and Wales was 'on its knees' and could not face further cuts are overstated, I argued in a piece I wrote yesterday.

I also took Mr White to task for his threat that cuts would force the police to adopt more violent tactics: 'a police service almost paramilitary in style', to use his words.

The dramatic growth in police numbers between 2000 and 2010 had been a disaster for public policy, I argued, crowding out more holistic and inclusive approaches to the problems society faced.

Further cuts to police numbers might pose a threat to the Police Federation and its members. It also presented an opportunity to rebalance public policy and rebuild much needed social institutions.

A reduction of 15,000 officers by 2020 - the figure mooted by some police forces - would take us back to the numbers of police in the early 1980s. A reduction of half that amount - some 7,500 officers - would take us back to the position in 2000, before the Labour government increased the police budget to boost numbers.

This is illustrated by the blue line in the figure below. The dashed blue line shows what would happen if we had 7,500 fewer police officers by 2020. The dotted blue line shows what would happen if 15,000 officers went by 2020.

Since 2003 we have also had Police Community Support Officers (PCSO). While they are civilian staff, they wear a police-style uniform. They have also been a key part of the neighbourhood policing model that Steve White claims is now under threat.

The number of PCSOs grew from around 1,000 in 2003 to over 16,000 by 2010. Since then their numbers have fallen, to just under 13,000 by September 2014.

The orange line below illustrates the combined police officer and PCSO numbers between 2003 and 2014. They grew to nearly 160,000 by 2010, falling back to around 142,000 by 2010.

Looking ahead we see two further scenarios for combined police officer and PCSO numbers.

The dashed orange line shows what will happen if police officer numbers decline by 7,500 and PCSO numbers decline at their current rate. This would result in combined police officer and PCSO numbers equivalent to the number of police officers in late 2002.

The dotted orange line shows what will happen if police officer numbers fall by 15,000 and PCSO numbers decline at their current rate. Under this scenario, combined police officer and PCSO numbers would be equivalent to the number of police officers in the year 2000.

The Police Federation will argue that such comparisons are bogus. Police officers and PCSOs are not the same thing. While this is true, PCSOs have become a key part of the neighbourhood policing approach the Federation claims is now under threat. They are, in other words, part of the visible policing presence and should be counted as such.

Even with further cuts, the visible police presence will remain at a historically high level. The police will remain a very well-funded public service. Talk of crisis is misplaced.

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The claim by the Chair of the Police Federation, Steve White, that policing in England and Wales was 'on its knees' and could not face further cuts are overstated, I argued in a piece I wrote yesterday.

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Max Siedentopf (1991) is a Namibian-German artist, photographer, director and publisher. Max grew up in Windhoek, Namibia and continued to work in Berlin, Los Angeles and Amsterdam. He is currently based in London.

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Cops and clobber! Bavarian police force repurpose their old uniforms

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Dear Sirs,

In answer to your freedom of information request please find the following
information:

Cost of equipment:

1a Handcuffs £16.95 each
1b Body Armour £410.30 each
1c Baton £64.50 each
1d CS spray £10.58 each
1e "Does an officer share equipment?" - No, kit is normally issued to the
individual officers
1f "Does a special constable have to pay for their uniforms?" - No, the
uniform is provided by the Police Authority.

2 "How much does it cost for a police officer to receive their uniform?" -
Not entirely sure what you are looking for here. If this is intended to
find out how much it costs to initially kit out an officer then the
figures would be, £1027.87 for a female PC and £1036.63 for a male PC.
Once kit is issued replacement will be on condemnation and as such there
is no standard cost for the replacement.

COMPLAINT RIGHTS

Are you unhappy with how your request has been handled or do you think the
decision is incorrect? You have the right to require Staffordshire Police
to review their decision.

Prior to lodging a formal complaint, you are welcome and encouraged to
discuss the decision with the officer who dealt with your request.

Ask to have the decision looked at again -
The quickest and easiest way to have the decision looked at again is to
telephone the officer that is nominated at the end of your decision
letter.

That person will be able to discuss the decision, explain any issues and
assist with any problems.

APPEALS PROCEDURE

Should you be dissatisfied with the outcome of your information request,
you do have the right of complaint under section 17(7) of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000. If you wish to appeal this decision, please inform
me in writing. Your application and the decision will be reviewed by a
Senior Decision Maker who was not involved in the original decision.

This decision maker will review your case and they will either, uphold,
amend or overrule my decision. Should this not resolve the matter to your
satisfaction, you will then have the right to appeal to the Information
Commissioner, who regulates compliance with the Freedom of Information Act
2000.

In all possible circumstances, Staffordshire Police will aim to respond to
your complaint within 3 months.

For information on how to make application to the Information
Commissioner, please visit their website at
[1]www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk. Alternatively, phone or write to:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone: 01625 545 700

Kind regards
Steve Allt
Purchasing Officer
Tel. 01785 232312
Fax 01785 232313

References

Visible links
1. http://www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk/

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Equiqment/Uniform Cost - a Freedom of Information request to Staffordshire Police

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I would like to know under freedom of information act please. how much does it cost to equip a police officer . 1a Handcuffs? 1b Body Armour? 1c Baton? 1d CS Spray? 1e Does an Police officer have share equiqment ie? (Body Armour .

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to kit out an officer

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Designers are taking over communication systems and promoting what they see as urgent political messages, walking a legal tightrope in the process. But who are they and why do they do it?

The joint history of graphic design and protest is an extensive and varied one. From the Suffragettes' "Votes for Women" signs of the early 1900s, to the striking Memphis sanitation workers' "I AM A MAN" posters of 1968, all the way up to today's open-source climate change graphics databases, graphic design has long been part of political spaces.

"The servant of the protest"

But protest posters are just one outlet - some graphic designers go beyond the humble placard. Instead, they use their craft to perform pointed acts of political sedition, fighting against issues as far-ranging as consumerism and global warming, sexism, inadequate politicians, and sometimes all at once.

"Graphic design has always been there as a servant of the protest," says Jonathan Barnbrook, graphic designer and activist. "It has a very strong role to play in putting out messages and changing things."

Barnbrook's own practice has been shaped by his activism. Feelings of powerlessness over the growing tensions of the Gulf War pushed him into making his first political posters in the 1990s. "I started making posters about it and posting them up in central London," says Barnbrook. "Of course, I had no idea if I was going to change anything or have any effect.

"But the question isn't: 'Has anything changed because of a piece of work I've done?' It doesn't work like that, you have to say your message and hope it gets through and change some points of view."

As his career unfolded, Barnbrook became involved with a number of rebellious design groups, including the anti-corporate design collective, Adbusters. He art directed for the organisation and got involved in various methods of graphic protest, of which the most well-known was subvertising.

"Using the same tools as advertisers"

The process of subvertising, also known as - and associated with - ad-hacking or culture-jamming, concerns the deliberate subversion of advertisement messaging in public spaces. Typically, "hacked" ads are found on tube and bus stop poster spaces. The practice itself is diverse and can include anything from irreverent messages scrawled in black paint, all the way up to sophisticated, convincing and damning dupes of real company or political party ads.

"The reason I worked with AdBusters is that they were one of the first in the mainstream to subvertise," says Barnbrook. "The tools and methods we used were the same that advertising people use to encourage people to endlessly consume."

Using the public stage to graphically critique politics and order is particularly important to the practice. Firstly, it allows for a wider audience than any given exhibition or gallery; secondly, it mimics the messages the audience are used to seeing already in that space; and lastly, it has the potential to simplify complicated issues.

"In public space, the billboards and corporate advertisement spaces don't appear in their hundreds and thousands by accident," says Bill Posters, graphic artist, activist and researcher. "You're just tapping into that legacy - essentially by being a parasite onto that commercial work that's already been done."

"Making difficult issues accessible"

As the co-founder of Brandalism, another protest design collective, Posters has used his craft to critique the likes of fast fashion, the impending climate catastrophe and advertising culture itself. "It's really about trying, in a systemic way, to look at and explore how art and design can be used to make these quite difficult-to-grasp issues accessible," he says.

Using easily understandable visual cues and pictures, Posters says designers are able to cut through any potentially confusing rhetoric used by politicians or brands. "The form of storytelling that is created in these public spaces is so full of myths and narratives," says Posters. "So Brandalism was really trying to undercut that."

A similar mission has been adopted by Led By Donkeys, the anti-Brexit campaign just recently shortlisted as one of the Design Museum's Beazley Designs of the Year. The team has made headlines using billboard space to expose the lies of prominent Brexit politicians, and are currently fundraising for an "Honest No Deal Brexit ad campaign" to fight against the one being rolled out by the UK government.

"We just wanted to get conversations started about Brexit, where the terms of the debate weren't clouded by lies," says Ben Stewart, one of the four behind the campaign. By exposing deliberate untruths, Stewart says people can engage more informed and honest dialogues about it, and not get caught up in spin.

Stewart adds that the design work Led By Donkeys does means things aren't forgotten by the public. "This stuff circulates on twitter but never really lands," he says. "So we're trying to manifest that stuff in the real world. And then we photograph and film it in an arresting way and reinsert it into the digital world."

"Tension between creatives"

One of the tensions involved in protest graphic design, however, is the reality of the work you're subverting. With countless creative studios, designers and artists taking up work from controversial companies, politically motivated design often involves creatives attacking work from one of their own.

Back in 2016, Posters' Brandalism ran a campaign suggesting creatives "switch sides", encouraging them to take their talent elsewhere. "We were inundated by responses," says Posters.

"We had about 300 of these incredibly deep and quite emotional letters from people who had found themselves trapped in the sector and they were really uncomfortable about the way in which their creativity was being appropriated from these consumer products."

Posters suggests there's a very real tension between creatives and protesting. He says: "Unfortunately we all need to make some huge changes toour relationships with this."

This is echoed by Barnbrook, who says ultimately: "You can't compartmentalise your job".

"You are responsible in whatever you do, the idea that graphic design isn't political is so wrong. Everything about it is political, consenting to work within the framework of a consumerist society is political, consenting not to necessarily follow your absolute beliefs is political. It's all political."

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Protest by design: the creatives performing acts of political sedition | Design Week

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Designers are taking over communication systems and promoting what they see as urgent political messages, walking a legal tightrope in the process. But who are they and why do they do it? The joint history of graphic design and protest is an extensive and varied one.

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violence exists internally (within ourselves), interpersonally (between people) and institutionally (between institutions and individuals).

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"However, part of the reason police appear overstretched is that they are being called upon to respond to incidents and issues – such as rough-sleeping, mental health crises, drug and alcohol-related problems, domestic violence, issues relating to Covid-19 – that could be far more effectively and humanely addressed by well-funded, community-based emergency support teams, crisis intervention and violence de-escalation workers."

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'Defund the police' has emerged as a central demand amid a spectacular eruption of collective action against lethal police violence in the United States. As UK Black Lives Matter activists take inspiration, questions are being asked about how this demand - forged in the long history of the US prison abolition movement - can gain purchase in Britain.
It is easy to point to differences between US and UK policing. Police departments on alternate sides of the Atlantic vary in their financial autonomy, in the scale of their militarisation, and in the particularities of their involvement in colonial domination.

However, it is important to understand that the core function of the police is the same in both countries: to maintain a disciplinary, capitalist and racially stratified society. Important, too, is to dispel the illusion, common in white middle-class society, that the British police are largely unarmed and govern by consent.

The challenges facing those who seek radical social transformation are also similar: how can we make demands of the police and prison systems without becoming entangled in drawn-out, tried and failed reform strategies that ultimately restabilise the carceral system's appearance of legitimacy?

With the current protests spreading, there is an opportunity now to formulate demands that don't just mechanically transplant principles from the US context. We must draw on the inspiring traditions of resistance here in the UK to address the specificities of our history, institutions, and public consciousness.

What might 'defund the police' look like in the UK?

There are many possible abolitionist demands. A key task of the current moment is for people to come together, agree upon our priorities and mobilise our movement around them.

As the government threatens to fast-track legal action against Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, a call for no prosecutions for protesters would connect popular support for BLM with attention to the police's role in suppressing emancipatory social movements.

As public anger about austerity has risen, the police have sought to present themselves as a public service suffering from budget cuts . However, part of the reason police appear overstretched is that they are being called upon to respond to incidents and issues - such as rough-sleeping, mental health crises, drug and alcohol-related problems, domestic violence, issues relating to Covid-19 - that could be far more effectively and humanely addressed by well-funded, community-based emergency support teams, crisis intervention and violence de-escalation workers.

At the same time, demands to strip police of their most oppressive units, functions and powers can highlight the harmful uses to which they put most of the resources they do have.

To this end, 'defund the police' might have its most direct translation in calls to stop the planned expansion of police budgets and recruitment of police officers, to disarm police of their guns and tasers, to remove stop and search and strip search powers and to abolish units such as the Territorial Support Group, which exist only to quell social unrest.

Refocusing on the demands to decriminalise drugs, sex work, migration, poverty, and protest would take away the police's cover for their targeted harassment of oppressed groups. This might look like putting an end to drugs policing and repealing the public order legislation routinely used to suppress dissent, hostile environment legislation, and laws that criminalise homelessness and protect corporate property.

Responding to the UK government's ongoing prison building programme, we need to unify around a moratorium on all prison building. And given the particularly gross manifestations of racism in the UK's institutions of juvenile discipline (schools, care, prisons) there is an urgent need to rally support for an end to juvenile prisons, police in schools, and school exclusions .

Increasing public awareness of undercover policing, as a result of the ongoing spycops inquiry , and of big data, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, provides an opportunity to push back against mass surveillance and wrest control of data from corporations and the state.

We could start with demands to firewall data held by health, education and other public services from police counter-terrorism and immigration enforcement, to end individual and place-based risk profiling (such as the domestic extremism database and the notoriously racist gangs matrix, predictive algorithms used by police and credit scoring) and to ban the use of facial and gait recognition technology.

Responding to a spate of policies that enforce the collusion of public and private organisations in the work of policing, we should mobilise a campaign of disentanglement, urging institutions to examine and extricate themselves from their involvement in policing. A demand like this might connect resistance to covert policing under the rubric of 'care', such as duties, with , cops off campus , and anti-hostile-environment campaigns.

Building on the current reckoning with Britain's colonial identity, we need to address Britain's leading role in global policing. We should demand an end to the export of arms and policing technologies and 'expertise', to the use of development aid to fund policing and border enforcement overseas, and to cooperation with, for example, Hong Kong, Bahraini, and US regimes.

Given that we are witnessing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people, the demands for Covid Justice need to be connected to long-standing calls for justice for those who have suffered and died at the hands of the state or through state abandonment, in 'custody', at Grenfell and in the Windrush Scandal. Abolitionist movements could support demands for meaningful processes of state accountability and reparation organised under the direction of those affected.

Crucial to these accountability campaigns is the ability for people to be supported while fighting through the courts. Without propagating the myth of justice by the 'rule of law', we need to mobilise against the ways in which the destruction of legal aid in 2010 has strengthened the state's immunity from challenge. This means that demands for fully accessible and properly funded legal aid for judicial reviews, actions against the police, and criminal cases are as urgent as ever.

Finally, abolitionist politics might gain traction with popular anti-austerity movements by mobilising around demands for investment in proven community-led public health responses to violence, drug-related harm, and mental health and other social crises, as has been seen in Minneapolis and to some extent in . In doing so, we need to remain vigilant about the ways that notions of 'public', 'health' and 'community' can so often be reabsorbed and rerouted into new forms of social control.

Abolitionists in the UK are not starting from scratch.

While the politics of police abolition are capturing the attention and imagination of many UK activists for the first time, we are not starting from scratch.

UK abolitionists are already working to limit the expansion and power of the criminal punishment system by organising communities around the UK to stop the building of into women-focused community resources and affordable housing. They are working in new prisons , to close detention centres , end Joint Enterprise and , and transform carceral infrastructure prisoner solidarity groups and abolitionist consciousness-raisingprojects.

The United Friends and Families campaign and have been fighting for decades to hold officials and institutions accountable for state-inflicted deaths. The Hillsborough , Orgreave Truth & Justice , and Police Spies Out of Lives campaigns work to expose and remedy historic injustices, while organisations like , , Northern Police Monitoring Project, Account Hackney challenge these abuses in the present, laying bare the police's role in enforcing unjust hierarchies of race and class. Green and Black Cross, and

Resistance to the current system is also manifest through direct confrontations with the police, such as in the widespread anti-police in August 2011 as well as more recent , the prison riots solidarity with Travellers burning down of a police firearms training building in Bristol in 2013, on-the-ground (one of the most heavily policed social groups in the UK) resisting violent evictions, direct actions against deportations , and local residents spontaneously uniting to block immigration raids .

Underlying these flashpoints of dissent are everyday cultures of non-compliance with unjust authorities, like when teenagers being stopped and searched talk back to cops, film the confrontation and share it on the internet. Artists like and give visceral and popular expression to these feelings and experiences.

Yesterday, my parents were stopped and questioned in their own driveway for "driving a motor vehicle on the road", and "because they can".
It's suspicious to walk from your car to your house, while black. The UK is not innocent. pic.twitter.com/Ym4DrN0hLT

- maja (@maobxby) June 10, 2020

Mainstream campaigns for comprehensive legal aid can have an abolitionist edge insofar as they make a material difference to the ability of people to challenge police violence, resist criminalisation, and push back against repressive legislation.

So too can campaigns, which challenge discrimination against people with criminal records in employment, education, and housing. Projects like Blue Bag Life , Our Empty Chair , and Detained Voices similarly work to undo the stigma of slur terms like 'criminal' and 'illegal' that uphold carceral systems by preventing those most affected by them from being listened to.

From defunding the police to abolishing the carceral state of things.

As abolitionist demands are mobilised against the state, it is important to resist reliance on NGO forms to carry a movement whose power lies in popular mobilisation and the leadership of Black, queer, working-class and youth activism.

We must recognise and support everyday resistance to police governance - on street corners, in schools, in cells - as part of our collective political action and be clear that bystander silence is a part of police violence.

Of course, reducing the power of police is but one part of the abolitionist project. That project is equally about building institutions and practices and transforming society to prevent and address the harms that police are said to be necessary to deal with, but in fact further entrench .

Dismantling policing is not an optional extra when it comes to overcoming the injustices of the present. Abolition needs to be taken up by all our social movements - from anti-sexual-harassment campaigns to housing justice, migrant rights, and environmentalist projects - by rejecting criminalisation as a means of social change and committing to build a social infrastructure in which no one is disposable.

Koshka Duff is a lecturer in political philosophy at Nottingham University who campaigns against police strip search abuse. Tom Kemp organises with Abolitionist Futures and is a lecturer at Nottingham Law School.

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Would 'Defund the Police' Work in the UK? | Novara Media

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'Defund the police' has become a central demand of Black Lives Matter protesters in the United States. UK activists should seize the moment to formulate their own demands, drawing on the long-standing abolitionist campaigns and traditions of resistance that already exist in Britain, write Koshka Duff and Tom Kemp.

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“Our goal is not ending violence. It is liberation.” -Beth Richie Creative Interventions provides vision, tools and resources to help anyone and everyone create community-based…

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The death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and other high-profile cases in America has instigated a fervour to defund the police and in turn abolish them.

Abolitionism is the campaign to disband, disempower, and disarm the police in answer to numerous cases of police brutality in the US.

It's not a far-sighted dream, considering that - as a result of sustained global protests - the Minneapolis City Council aims to disband the city's highly-criticised police force.

Abolitionists believe that the policing system is inherently flawed and that even reforms will do little to address the institutional bias that places extra scrutiny and violence on Black and people of colour.

The concept of abolition might seem pretty drastic but the goal is simply getting to a place where the police aren't needed.

Defunding the police isn't about firing police departments en masse but strategically redistributing resources, funding, and power away from the police and into community-based models of safety and prevention.

Because at the moment, many feel that the current criminal justice system isn't working for everyone.

In addition to quelling stop and search powers, disarming officers of guns and tasers, the aim of abolition is to also decriminalise drugs, sex work, migration, poverty,

But much of the discussion on abolition has been US-focused where an average of three people are killed by police every day - with 99% of the police killings resulting in no conviction.

Racial campaigners have pointed out that the UK also has its own problems relating to the police especially given the deaths of Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Sheku Bayoh, Simeon Francis and others who have died in police custody.

So what would abolition in the UK actually look like - and what would it mean for public safety?

The obvious questions around abolishing police powers are what happens to murderers, rapists, stalkers, and generally violent people?

The abolitionist alternative seeks for qualified individuals only to deal with victims - detectives who will tread sensitively in cases of rape, mental health first aiders who will have the victim's interests at the forefront, counsellor support, de-escalation experts where necessary.

For example, if you're experiencing domestic violence, you would be able to call a crisis prevention specialist who is able to meet you in a safe place or take you to one.

The move involves trained urgent responders that are unarmed, mental health specialists, trauma-informed crisis prevention teams, community activists and more.

Abolitionists argue that the current system isn't stopping crimes anyway.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBDOcyHFgeF/

Hajera Begum, who works with Abolitionist Futures, a collective feminist abolitionist movement, says the police system was created to control, not protect.

She explains: 'If the police were keeping us safe, we'd see crime numbers falling.

'Institutional structures come with all the biases and injustices we see in the world in terms of race, gender, religion, all of that is embedded in police structures which makes things worse.

'The policing state, counter-extremism strategies like Prevent aren't good for anyone who's dissented but it's worse for people who are Muslim. It targets Black and brown people first and for the worst.

Hajera adds: 'As a woman, rape is a real fear, however, rape still goes on despite having a police structure in place.

'The conviction rate is so low for rapists anyway (3%) and that's only in cases where people report it. And the current system is unlikely to do anything for historic rapes.

'It doesn't make sense, the sentences rapists get, the low numbers of conviction. We need to move money away from police and give it to people who specailise in sensitively handling rape cases, and people who can put victims at the centre.

'In domestic violence cases, our instinct is to call police but will that keep the victim safe? We're so reliant because we have no alternative. But we need someone to make that person safe, for a place for them to go, in a sustainable way. We need to give money to the right people to handle the situation, deescalate where necessary, provide refuge for the victim.'

Hajera also adds that it's important to not think of abolition as unattainable but something we need to start making changes towards now.

'The fact that we're even discussing it and trying to enact it is really positive.'

While a lot of the discussion centres on the US, people who have felt the effects of Britain's institutional problem want others to know how insidious the problem is here.

One such person is Ajibola Lewis, whose son Olaseni was killed in 2010 after 11 officers restrained him in hospital, where he admitted himself for mental health treatment.

His brain was starved of oxygen and he died four days later.

Ajibola explains to Metro.co.uk: 'The idea that this is an American issue is simply not true. It is very real here. In America they have guns, but here in the UK, the police kill people up close and personal, choking the life out of them in some of the most brutal ways imaginable.

'Seni admitted himself to hospital voluntarily, what he needed and had asked for was help and care. There was no need for the police to be involved and they added nothing to the situation. Had they not been present Seni would still be alive today.'

Because of cases like these, abolitionists want to move away from police and instead work on empowering qualified mental health first aiders and de-escalation experts in times of personal crisis.

"Abolition is about one thing, which is everything" - Ruth Wilson Gilmore

- Abolition Is A Presence (@jaybeware) June 15, 2020

Advocates of the cause stress that abolition is a gradual, long-term goal and if we defunded police right now, we would still have crime due to growing inequalities.

An abolitionist future fights to not only understand why crimes happen - which usually occur when a person's basic needs aren't met - but also prioritise the victim and make sure they're able to survive and live a happy, fulfilling life.

The movement has also been backed by anti-racism campaigner and ex-Met police staffer Adam Pugh.

Adam believes that the cause isn't really about abolishing the police, but rather abolishing the social conditions and inequalities that exist.

He tells us: 'Abolition is about getting to the root of the problem rather than simply responding or reacting to this problem.

'When you ask people to close their eyes and imagine the safest place on earth, whether it be real or made up, nobody ever imagines the presence of a police officer.

'So we don't actually require the police to make us feel safe and for many the presence of the police actually makes them feel unsafe. It isn't simply about defunding and reducing the police and that is it. It's about using that money and those resources to invest in other areas that make our communities safer.

'Policing does not keep our communities safe and fails to get to the root cause of the issue. As such, I believe that abolition is the only credible way forward.'

Of course, if we're talking about funds then we have to mention that Britain has been affected by austerity measures, leaving police departments with budget cuts over the years.

But part of the reason why the police appear to be overstretched is because of answering calls to incidents - which involve homelessness, mental heath crises, substance abuse - that may be better solved with well-funded, community-based health experts.

i cant wait for abolition. i cant for empty police precincts to turn into community gardens and free housing for anyone in our community who needs it. i cant wait for police cars to be repurposed and given to moms taking the bus from one job to another. i cant wait for abolition

- Noname (@noname) June 14, 2020

The premise of abolition is based on contesting the very concept of authority.

Professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California Dylan Rodriguez has written about and studied abolition extensively. He thinks the problem - which he believes is global - lies within giving power to individuals.

He says: 'To execute fatal violence in on the basis of your own judgment is an inhuman practice, to inhabit that power is inhuman.'

And there's precedent for the misuse of power: people will administer violence if they think the authority calls it. In a Yale study by psychologist Stanly Milgram, results showed that subjects will enforce violence (no matter their personal conscience) if they feel they are required to 'do their job'.

Abolitionists argue that the police system is set up in a way that gives them unmitigated power to do as they wish (something that may be related to the higher rates of domestic abuse cases among police officers).

Have you ever seen a copâ€™s uniform? The whole thing, including every accessory, zipper, and badge, is designed to intimidate and easily inflict violence. Itâ€™s like they canâ€™t help themselves. Their uniform makes it so easy for them to consider a violent solution.

3/x

- Gabrielle Blair (@designmom) June 8, 2020

The fight isn't just to contest white-on-black crime but to also challenge police brutality as a global struggle. The misuse of extra powers given to the institution is also felt in Nigeria and Kenya where a man was recently beaten to death by an officer for breaking curfew.

The move to abolition may seem idealistic to many but Professor Rodriguez is certain it's possible in our lifetimes.

He tells Metro.co.uk: 'It is not only possible, it is clearly necessary.

'To think of police abolition right now, not only in this lifetime, but in this breath, is to plan for other ways of protecting ourselves, loved ones, community, and place. We could begin, perhaps, by redistributing resources away from militarised domestic warfare (policing) and toward housing, feeding, educating, and nourishing the most vulnerable and disfranchised people in our midst.'

In response to the race row police departments find embattled themselves in, some say that reformation is better than abolition.

However, many abolitionists argue that reforms have been tried and tested but the problems still endured. Notably, the Minneapolis police attempted to reform in the past by implementing training on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, crisis intervention, and diversity. And yet the George Floyd killing happened a few years later.

Professor Rodriquez says that to go toward the destination of abolition means a complete overhaul on how things operate and an active effort to dismantle capitalist, racist and classist systems that deny the humanity of the most vulnerable i.e low-earning Black, Asian, Latinx, queer, trans, disabled, homeless people.

Some member-led organisations have already begun the work to look out for their communities while holding the powerful to account.

Some of these include the United Friends and Families campaign, 4Front, and Account Hackney.

Account Hackney initially began to investigate the number of stops and searches - which disproportionately affect Black and Asian youths - in the borough and expanded to encomass a range of issues faced by the youth.

A spokesperson tells Metro.co.uk: 'If young people have been mistreated by police, they don't have avenues to represent themselves or have a voice.

'Young people have low trust in the complaints system. Policing systems aren't seen as trustworthy

'The people being over-policed lack political power i.e travellers, vagrancy laws, poor working-class people, young Black men.'

The youth network is also about allowing these communities to begin the process of healing from generational trauma.

'Part of that healing is an acknowledgment of the history and their injustice. There needs to be a space where they can lead to change. Abolitionism needs to involve the people most affected by these issues.'

There's certainly power in community - we've seen the impact of people-led efforts to not only curb the spread of coronavirus but to keep ourselves sane during the pandemic.

Abolitionists want to show that punishment is not the natural response to crime, in the way that a chair is not the opposite of a table (the opposite would be something without legs),

Rather, policing and punishment is an unsustainable solution that takes away the opportunity to weed out the problem at the root.

And, they argue, spaces where people are not over-policed and able to enjoy their lives with appropriate funds, have been enjoyed by white suburban communities.

Now, abolitionists want the money saved to be used towards youth centres, mental health provisions, community spaces, support for young mums, relief for people impacted by violence, affordable health care.

We reached out to the Metropolitan Police regarding the Olaseni Lewis case.

Here is their statement in full: 'The death of Olaseni Lewis was a tragedy which raised a number of important issues, and resulted in lessons being learnt and improvements to policies and training in this area.

'The officers were sent that day into a very difficult and challenging set of circumstances. Over the ten years that have passed since Mr. Lewis died, the way in which the Met would respond to someone in mental health crisis in a medical institution has fundamentally changed.

'Mr. Lewis' family has helped us bring about further improvements; working closely with both the MPS and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust to ensure that compassionate and high-quality care is at the heart of everything we do.'

In regards to the comments about Prevent, we've reached out to the Home Office for comment.

A Home Office spokesperson said: 'It is wrong to suggest that Prevent is focused on any one community or leads to anyone being criminalised.

'Prevent protects vulnerable people from all kinds of terrorist recruiters and almost half of those it supported last year were referred for concerns around far-right extremism - more than those referred for Islamist-related extremism.'

We've also reached out to The Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chiefs' Council for comment and will update the article once they respond.
Do you have a story? Email metrolifestyle@metro.co.uk to tell us more.
MORE: When was slavery abolished and how many statues of slave traders are there in the UK?

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What would abolishing police powers in the UK look like?

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The death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and other high-profile cases in America has instigated a fervour to defund the police and in turn abolish them. Abolitionism is the campaign to disband, disempower, and disarm the police in answer to numerous cases of police brutality in the US.

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n Silver Spring, Maryland, fireworks can still be heard months after they first began and well past the Fourth of July holiday. "When it comes to the theory of cops being involved, I wouldn't put it past them," says Ira, who participates in protests and activism there. Ira, who prefers to use only a first name because of fear of police reprisal, is referring to a theory that became especially popular on Twitter which posited police were supplying or abetting the recent onslaught of fireworks in major cities in an effort to exhaust and agitate protesters during the peak of the response to George Floyd's murder.

The use of sound as a form of control is in the spotlight due to potentially harmful military-grade weapons such as flash-bangs and long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) being utilized with accelerating regularity at protests across the United States. Luna, an activist who is only using her first name out of fear of doxxing, has been on the frontlines of direct actions against police brutality in Portland, Oregon, for nearly two months. She says the Portland police's use of flash-bangs, which can produce sounds as loud as 170 decibels - a jet taking off is 150 decibels, for comparison - has left her with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"If I'm in public and I hear a loud bang, I'll stop and duck and look around," she says. Luna says the fireworks set off in Portland trigger the same response for her and the other protesters who rally each night. "It's very exhausting, not just physically but mentally."

Sound studies experts say that while LRADs and flash-bangs are worrisome tactical escalations that can permanently injure people by rupturing eardrums, they are rooted in the long, uncontested tradition of the state utilizing sound as a means of social, cultural and political control.

Even sounds heard since childhood can be used to send signals in certain communities. Briana Thompson, who has been participating in protests in Phoenix, Arizona, says, "As a Black person in America, I always have a heightened and triggered response to police sirens."

Originally from Brazil, the sound researcher Pedro Oliveira has studied the Brazilian military police's use of sound bombs, or stun grenades, against communities of color in São Paulo as a "material articulation of racialized sonic violence". He says a police siren in a white neighborhood can mean protection and in a non-white neighborhood can mean threat. "Sirens and whistles function more as devices for crowd control and establishing social order," says Oliveira. "[LRAD] performs similar functions, like organization and control, but the step ahead is that it is meant to hurt."

Demonstrators cover their ears as they expect police to deploy a long-range acoustic device on 3 July 2020, in Aurora, Colorado. Photograph: Philip B Poston/AP

This "step ahead" troubles Marisa Ewing-Moody, an audio engineer based in Washington DC. After seeing the LRAD deployed at protests, she detailed its history and specs on Twitter. She especially takes issue with its designation as a non-violent form of crowd control. "You can cause permanent damage to people that are exposed to this," she tells me. "I wouldn't say that's non-violent."

Ewing-Moody tells me that Genasys, the company that creates LRADs, brags about the LRAD reaching 30 decibels higher than typical vehicle PA systems. "The context of 30 dB being the difference between those two points is astronomically huge," she says. A typical concert, she explains, sits in the range of 85 to 88 decibels. LRADs are capable of almost doubling that. Besides the implied hearing damage, Ewing-Moody notes that our ears mediate other bodily functions such as balance. "If you're in a scenario where your ears are being damaged, that can cause dizziness and nausea because your body is getting confused by the way your inner ear is moving," she says.

Besides these ramifications, Oliveira says sound is useful as a tool of social control because it isn't just perceived by the ears, but by the whole body. "It's difficult to describe in physical terms what sound can do," he says. A siren's warble, for example, is not intrinsically connected to fear, but given its use over time as a sound that often precedes violence, it causes a fear reaction.

You can cause permanent damage to people that are exposed to this ... I wouldn't say that's non-violent

Marisa Ewing-Moody

Thompson gives another example: the roar of police helicopters flying overhead. She and others chose to observe eight minutes of silence while lying in the street in downtown Phoenix, a solemn tribute to the length of time during which Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd.

"It was a beautiful sight, but that silence wasn't actually silent," she says. Police helicopters overhead filled their ears, while police in riot gear marshalled nearby. "We [were] outside in the middle of our city, but it was claustrophobic and terrifying lying there listening to police hover above us and close in around us."

James Parker, a senior lecturer at Melbourne Law School, says examples like Thompson's show that the weaponization of sound is problematic beyond just the possible physical harm to our ears. He says these sounds are understood as effective or necessary because they are predicated on constructions of criminality and deviance which must be policed. "[It's] a context in which we understand a protester as the aggressor who needs to be managed en masse," he says, despite the fact that "time and time and time again, we see that it's police action which produces the violence [or] antagonism that they claim to be policing.

"I think the LRAD gets an undue amount of attention in some ways," says Parker. "The thing about the LRAD is that it asserts a physical force over you. You're literally compelled to run away. That's a very new, strange thing in some ways, but it's much more continuous with a siren or a whistle than it is with a gun."

Parker explains that the LRAD, which emits sounds in the mid- to high-frequency range, is designed to target the most vulnerable parts of the human ear. "That's fairly similar to a siren," he says. "The only reason a siren doesn't inflict pain is because you're not close enough to it."

Sound is used, according to Parker, to compete over control of public space. But it's also deeper than that. "It competes for control over what you do, how you think of yourself," he says, "whether you feel included or excluded when you move through the world."

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Sound of the police: how US law enforcement uses noise as a weapon

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n Silver Spring, Maryland, fireworks can still be heard months after they first began and well past the Fourth of July holiday. "When it comes to the theory of cops being involved, I wouldn't put it past them," says Ira, who participates in protests and activism there.

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In the U.S., several surveillance technologies have been researched, proposed, and even implemented. Police departments across the country have turned to drones to enforce social distancing measures. DJI Enterprise, a drone company based in China, announced in April that it had already provided drones to 43 police, fire, and public safety organizations from 22 states. Aerial surveillance has been coupled with calls for contact tracing apps, which use technologies such as GPS and Bluetooth to collect data on the movements of people who have contracted the virus.

Clearview AI, which faced controversy for taking billions of photos off of social media to develop a facial recognition system, has announced that it is in discussions with government agencies to develop contact tracing apps, NBC News reported. Similarly, Apple and Google announced that they were developing contact tracing software to allow iPhone and Android users to voluntarily report if they had become infected.

As noted by Reuters, a significant concern about the apps is that they will "log an overwhelming number of erroneous contacts" and that "privacy worries could limit uptake of the apps."

Differing levels of trust, combined with demographic differences in smartphone ownership, pose a challenge to effective implementation of the apps. A recent Pew Research study revealed that only 52% of Americans believe it is at least somewhat acceptable for the government to use people's cell phones to track the location of those who have tested positive for the virus, while 48% believe it is very or somewhat unacceptable.

As the country's surveillance infrastructure will likely be expanded in response to COVID-19, the privacy concerns of minority communities should not be left out. The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority communities has been well documented. Across the U.S., Black, Latino, and low-income communities have had disproportionate numbers of cases and COVID-19-related deaths. Surveillance measures aimed at stopping the spread of the virus will not only center on these communities, but will be harder to remove after they're implemented.

Black communities and communities of color have already had to grapple with race-based surveillance as well. Surveillance technologies are not immune to manipulation, misuse, and bias, and have been used to keep existing racial and economic inequities in place. Whether it's predictive policing programs or social media monitoring of activists, surveillance has been used to further racial profiling, and skewed theories of criminalization, mass incarceration, and marginalization of the homeless, poor, and undocumented.

Nationwide protests against police brutality and the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of law enforcement officers have renewed conversations about the threat surveillance poses to protest and dissent. The city of Minneapolis, in particular, has been at the center of these conversations.

On May 29, Vox reported that a Predator surveillance drone operated by United States Customs and Border Patrol flew over protests "to provide situational awareness" and help police. According to Buzzfeed News, the Minneapolis Police Department already has an array of surveillance technologies at its hands, including "controversial facial recognition software Clearview AI, license plate readers, body cameras, and video analysis tools." On Saturday, Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington announced that the city of Minneapolis has begun analyzing the data and associations of arrested protesters, using the term "contact tracing" to describe these police investigations.

Increasing the country's surveillance infrastructure without regard to current and historic realities places an additional burden on communities that have already been devastated by the onslaught of the virus.

If history has taught us anything, it is that there is no guarantee that the normalization of mass surveillance to stop the spread of the virus will be reversed after the pandemic subsides. The surveillance infrastructures of the war on drugs and the war on terror were both in place for years, and set a precedent for how far privacy can be invaded in the name of crisis, even if that also means disenfranchising communities of color.

Our focus should be on constructing a response to COVID-19 that not only safeguards the privacy of each individual, but also redistributes resources into the communities who have been hit hardest by the horrors of this new disease.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Muslim Teens Love Surveillance Memes That Give Them a Subversive Way to Cope

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More Mass Surveillance Is Never the Answer

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In the U.S., several surveillance technologies have been researched, proposed, and even implemented. Police departments across the country have turned to drones to enforce social distancing measures. DJI Enterprise, a drone company based in China, announced in April that it had already provided drones to 43 police, fire, and public safety organizations from 22 states.

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COVID-19 Open Data by State

Data is often not collected about Black communities when it's needed the most. We have compiled all of the states that have shared data on COVID-19 infections and deaths by race and the states that have not, as well as the disparities among them. Please note that many of these states may have underreported COVID-19 deaths due to the fact that many Black communities have not had access to testing. We must also be mindful of the possibilities of over-reporting while interpreting these data.

We will be making demands of states to make COVID-19 race data public. In the meantime, data activists can combine existing data on the racial makeup of counties & census tracts with infection and death rates to better understand the impact on areas where Black people live. Some counties and cities have already included race as well as gender and age data even though these data are not being reported at the state level. We will be updating the list on this spreadsheet and disparities on this spreadsheet.

To fill in the gaps of this data, we are also sharing requests for community data needs. We are collecting data on the experiences of Black Healthcare Workers and amplifying efforts by Buzzfeed to collect stories of Black people who have been impacted. Need support with data collection and analysis? Please submit a request and we will amplify it.

Submit a call to action to be shared in our next newsletter and on this page by emailing [email protected]

An Open Letter to Facebook from the Data for Black Lives Movement

Give Black researchers, data scientists and Black communities access to our data. We urge Facebook to join with Data for Black Lives and commit to the following:

Commit anonymized Facebook data to a Public Data Trust.

Work with technologists, advocates, and ethicists to establish a Data Code of Ethics.

Hire Black data scientists and research scientists.

Read the full letter here
AI Now Shadow Report

AI Now Shadow Report on Automated Decision Making Systems in New York We're proud to join over 50 organizations in endorsing #confrontingblackboxes, which provides a nuanced look at NYC's use of automated decision making, who is impacted, and how the city could do better. Read here.

#NONEWJAILS

On October 17, the New York City Council will be voting on an $11 billion jail expansion plan to build 12 new jails in New York City. Because one of the largest proposed jails is slated to be built in City Councilman Stephen Levin's ('2003) District 33, Levin wields immense power over City Council's decision about whether to approve this proposed jail expansion plan.

Tell Stephen Levin: Vote NO to building more jails in NYC.

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Data is often not collected about Black communities when it's needed the most. We have compiled all of the states that have shared data on COVID-19 infections and deaths by race and the states that have not, as well as the disparities among them.

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Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

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Lack of transparency and biased training data mean these tools are not fit for purpose. If we can’t fix them, we should ditch them.

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The glossy 2002 film Minority Report is based on a 1956 novel by Philip K Dick, in which three humans with mutant powers, or precognitives - "precogs" - can foresee crimes before they happen. Spotting an opportunity, the PreCrime police department uses the precogs to virtually eliminate crime by identifying people before they break the law. Every so often, though, one of the precogs generates a "minority report" at odds with the predictions of their counterparts. This inconvenient detail is kept a secret. Revealing it would damage the credibility of the machine.

Though intended as a grimly speculative account of the problems of relying on imperfect predictions, the premise of Minority Report is increasingly being used by police in the UK as a blueprint for new technology. Last month, the Home Office pledged £5m in funding to West Midlands Police to develop a system that will identify individuals at risk of committing future crimes. Elsewhere, Durham police have developed an algorithm for use in custody decisions; Avon and Somerset Police, meanwhile, use predictive technology to map where violent crime might occur.

The West Midlands system, which police are currently developing with the help of private sector consultancy giant Accenture, will use artificial intelligence, statistics and police data to identify future criminals and victims of crime, and pinpoint those who might become an influential "hub" within a wider network of offenders involved in modern slavery. Though still in beta, the system will eventually "help the force... reduce cost across its operations", "improve effectiveness and increase efficiency" and "reduce future demand for services", according to Accenture's website.

It's unclear what will happen when the system identifies individuals as "at risk"; Superintendent Nick Dale, police lead on the West Midlands project, says the details are still being ironed out. But the pilot is a glimpse of the Home Office's far-reaching plan to implement a National Data Analytics Solution across England and Wales, using artificial intelligence to predict which individuals are likely to commit knife and gun crime in the future.

The development of machine-learning algorithms, allied with cuts to police budgets, is propelling a version of the future long feared by privacy advocates and revered by technology companies. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will dramatically change policing, but how - and for whose benefit.

*****

In the age of austerity, government departments under pressure to do "more with less" have increasingly turned towards technology to solve systemic problems. Though the current prime minister has promised funding for 20,000 new officers, the overall trend is one of decline: since the Conservatives took office, the number of police officers has plummeted by 18 per cent, and 6 per cent of officers leave the service each year.

As the former police lead of the West Midlands project Iain Donnellly told the New Scientist in 2018, cuts have left forces searching for a system that can prioritise individuals already known to officers. To do this, the pilot pools data from the last decade on people's criminal histories, the number of times they've been in custody, and instances when they've been stopped and searched - including, says Dale, occasions where police didn't find criminal objects.

Predictive power aside, the practice of zeroing-in on known offenders can create a dangerous circle that compounds biases towards particular groups. In the UK, black people are 40 times more likely to have been stopped and searched than their white counterparts. An independent ethics report on the West Midlands project published in April pointed out that, although ethnicity had been excluded from the algorithm, other data sources can become proxies for the same characteristics - for example, stop and search records. In a follow-up report answering some of these concerns, the West Midlands Police clarified that none of the features of the model could be used to directly identify ethnicities, but conceded that "any process of risk assessment... will have the potential to lead to biases of some form".

As Frederike Kaltheuner, a researcher from advocacy group Privacy International, says: "Predictive policing determines who you are, with implications for your future, based on data from your past."

The mathematician Cathy O'Neil emphasises that unjust decisions can be reinforced when programmed into computer systems that are presented as objective. In her book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, O'Neil discusses the example of PredPol, the predictive policing software first used in Los Angeles that has since been trialled by police in Kent. PredPol advertises that data is geographic rather than demographic - meaning individualised information isn't fed into the system. (The West Midlands Police pilot, on the other hand, uses data on specific individuals.) The problem is that, because certain geographic areas are already over-policed, data used by PredPol's algorithm is already skewed towards areas where the most policing takes place. "Policing spawns new data - that in turn justifies more policing," O'Neill writes.

Were policing merely about objectively detecting crime, stop and search might also be practiced on dog-walkers in Holland Park; police might force wealthy citizens up against the wall outside Harrods and frisk their trousers, or send SWAT teams to descend on bankers in Canary Wharf. But the expectation of finding crime in particular areas or among specific groups influences where police go looking for crime - and what they end up finding. Building computer-generated models from current policing patterns creates what O'Neill calls a "pernicious feedback loop" - where data justifies the biased assumptions that a model has been fed in the first place. In other words, the technology can effectively make real the world it predicts.

Hannah Couchman, an advocacy and policy officer at civil liberties group Liberty, contends that feeding police information about an individuals' prior search records can encourage more zealous surveillance of groups that are already disproportionately policed. Though the West Midlands model aims to prevent people falling into crime rather than preemptively criminalising them, early intervention still increases the amount of contact an individual or community has with the police.

"Black people are more likely to be stopped and searched, so being subject to repeated stops is not an accurate indicator of risk," Couchman says. "It's more likely an indicator of deeply embedded and discriminatory policing practices. For biased data like this to prompt increased police contact is outrageous."

*****

In the eyes of the law, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. But in the US, where police forces were early adopters of predictive technology, how you experience the criminal justice system depends, in part, on the colour of your skin. Predictive policing subtly distorts a presumption of innocence that is meant to be universal.

Andrew Ferguson, a professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia, fears UK police will make the same mistakes as forces across the Atlantic - where automated predictions about who will become a criminal reflect existing racial and class stereotypes.

Take Chicago, where a "heat list" is used to rank individuals according to their alleged propensity to become criminals. The algorithm remains a police secret, but the factors it draws upon reportedly include criminal and arrest history, and whether the target has been identified as belonging to a gang. The system scores individuals on a scale of one to 500 according to how "hot" they might be. Using the heat list, police then knock on the doors of those they consider most at risk, normally with a social worker or church pastor in tow.

In reality, Ferguson writes in his book The Rise of Big Data Policing, the heat list becomes more like a "most wanted" list, where predictions of risk are a proxy for areas that are already heavily policed, home to poorer citizens and people of colour. "There's a lot of crime that doesn't get arrested... individuals doing things inside their homes, behind their hedges, in places where nobody sees. But arrests tend to correlate to where you put your police," Ferguson says over the phone from Washington D.C. "Chicago has a history of being racially discriminatory. Using arrests as part of your [data] produces outputs that are biased."

"The problem with predictive policing is the policing part," he adds. The aim of helping someone at risk of falling into crime is noble, but it also subtly shifts the remit of policing towards proactive crime prevention. In an ethics report submitted to the West Midlands Police by the Alan Turing Institute in July 2017, authors voiced concerns that the pilot is "moving law enforcement away from its traditional crime-related role and into wider and deeper aspects of social and public policy" - a move that requires "explanation, justification and legitimation". Increasing an individual's contact with the police isn't necessarily the right remedy for complex social issues.

One of the most troubling elements of Chicago's heat list is how an individuals' risk score can also be influenced by data collected about their friends, relatives and acquaintances. An independent ethics committee voiced concerns in April about data from the West Midlands system "wrongly implicating people simply by association with other people known to offend". The police have since countered that the use of such data "depends on the nature of that relationship, rather than because there is one at all... having a brother does not mean that both brothers are criminals, but it may be relevant in the short term".

In the US, such associations have been used as evidence of criminal conspiracy, with life-changing consequences for those involved. As Ferguson puts it: "Your friend, your cousin, the guy you grew up with... are you guilty by proximity to their guilt because you're in a video with them, or because you hang out with them?"

When automated risk scores are presented as neutral science, some people become less innocent than others simply by virtue of their friendship groups or where they grew up. Predictive policing distorts the universal presumption of innocence, and gives rise to the idea that some people are "pre-criminals", who should be subject to increased surveillance.

"It's not just guilt by association," warns Frederike Kalthauser from Privacy International. "It's almost the reversal of the presumption of innocence. You're not innocent until proven guilty - you're innocent until found suspicious."

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The police know what you'll do next summer

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The glossy 2002 film Minority Report is based on a 1956 novel by Philip K Dick, in which three humans with mutant powers, or precognitives - "precogs" - can foresee crimes before they happen. Spotting an opportunity, the PreCrime police department uses the precogs to virtually eliminate crime by identifying people before they break the law.

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The Los Angeles Police Department's air-support division is called in to assist with a possible robbery in progress in the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

Feature

Inside the city's pioneering air-support division.

The Los Angeles Police Department's air-support division is called in to assist with a possible robbery in progress in the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

The air-support division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city's downtown, near the Los Angeles River. A looming mass of utilitarian architecture tucked beside the 101 Freeway, the complex appears to have no real public face; here the view from the street matters little. Instead, like much of the city around it, the air-support division makes more sense when seen from above.

On the first of several flights I would take with the division over the course of the last three years, our helicopter lifted off into the haze of a July afternoon. The true bulk of the structure below us finally revealed itself. The building's landing deck alone seemed nearly the size of an aircraft carrier's, and from this new, elevated perspective, the headquarters indeed resembled a landlocked warship in the heart of the city; a half-dozen other helicopters were waiting there on the tarmac. The division began with a single helicopter in 1956, and it now has 19 in all, augmented by a King Air fixed-wing plane. The aircrews operate in a state of constant readiness, with at least two helicopters in flight at any given time for 21 hours of every day. A ground crew is suited up and on call for the remaining three, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. On weekends, considered peak hours, the number of airborne helicopters goes up to three, although in a crisis the division might send as many as four or five "ships" up at once.

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists. Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur - not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future.

Soon after we were airborne, a call came in for helicopter support, and we diverted north, flying nearly to the mountains that separate Los Angeles from the deserts beyond. A woman had reportedly barricaded herself inside a house with a loaded 9-millimeter handgun. Why she had done this was not at all clear - and it would remain unexplained to us - but the police needed to set up a perimeter. They needed someone looking down from above.

A standard two-person helicopter crew consists of a pilot and a tactical flight officer, or T.F.O. The pilot steers, but the course is set by the T.F.O., who monitors as many as six simultaneous radio frequencies, including emergency calls from the ground, as well as chatter from other police helicopters and even passenger aircraft landing at Los Angeles International Airport. The constant buzz of layered voices, police codes and call signs was indecipherable to me, but the T.F.O. can decide in an instant if a given call is worth responding to. The pilot can change speed and direction significantly, accelerating up to 170 miles an hour, turning so sharply that the crew will sometimes arrive above a crime scene flying sideways, their bodies parallel to the ground. If none of the calls are worth answering, however, the crew might wander. Some T.F.O.s have a working knowledge of Los Angeles arcana to match that of the most veteran Hollywood tour guide, from the address of Charlie Chaplin's old mansion to the location of the house used for exterior shots in "The Brady Bunch."

Image

A tactical flight officer surveying the scene in South Los Angeles following a robbery-in-progress call. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

My T.F.O. that day was Renée Muro, now 49, a 14-year veteran of the air-support division who had a "Got Altitude?" sticker on the back of her flight helmet. As we circled the location, she set about identifying, assessing and describing the streets, including a quick scan of nearby properties where, if the barricaded woman were to flee, she would most likely end up. For 45 minutes, Muro suggested placements for officers such that they could prevent any possible escape route, naming specific corners and clarifying locations, even occasionally directing police officers to neighbors who were milling about so they could warn them to head back inside.

This seemed like a particularly difficult case, however, because the street grid here was "out of sync," Muro explained, with the rest of the city: The normally orderly numbering system didn't apply, perhaps because the neighborhood was punctuated by strange L-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. This presented a unique narrative challenge for her in relaying which bend in a particular street she wanted a patrol car to head toward.

Muro persevered, flying in an endless gyre over parking lots, freeway on-ramps and a confused tangle of empty streets, and I watched as a growing armada of patrol cars circled below. She patiently arranged them like chess pieces, forming a tactical geometry that locked down the entire neighborhood. It was real-time urban planning, as implemented by the police. Before we could learn the fate of the barricaded woman, however, we had moved on.

With the title of a book published 500 years ago, Thomas More coined a term we still use today for describing the ideal society. More's "Utopia" is equal parts political theory and moral treatise, its arguments built atop a foundation of aspirational city planning. His panoramic survey of governance, public safety and crime, with its vigilant, top-down views of a megacity divided into districts with clearly defined canals, streets and squares, reads at times like a literary helicopter shot, as if we are passing over the roofs of an idyllic metropolis. We see forests and rivers, busy markets and residential neighborhoods - a well-ordered geography that More imagined would be governed by a nearly omnipotent political will, all in the name of the greater good. Before writing "Utopia," More held a unique judicial position with broad responsibilities for governmental administration and municipal law enforcement: He was undersheriff of the City of London. For the last half-millennium, when we refer to the ideal city, we have been invoking an urban blueprint as imagined by a cop.

Crime shapes cities - even Paris, the "City of Light," takes its nickname, according to one story, from streetlights first instituted as part of a 17th-century police operation - but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. This logic extends even down to their bedrock: Tunnel jobs are almost unimaginable in granite-based Manhattan, for example, but the soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles - a former seabed - make it more susceptible to subterranean crime. Infrastructure also plays a major role in permitting or preventing entire classes of criminal activity. The construction of the city's freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters - but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a "stop-and-rob."

Looking west over Exposition Boulevard while flying above the University of Southern California. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

The built environment may inadvertently catalyze new forms of illegal activity, but this also means that the Los Angeles Police Department is constantly responding to criminal innovation with new forms of police work, often before the rest of the world even knows they might be necessary. With its campaign of ubiquitous aerial surveillance, Los Angeles is a kind of real-time R.&D. site for the world's sprawling megacities, as they, too, try to manage the extralegal consequences of their newfound expansion.

After my first flight, Cole Burdette, the chief tactical flight officer, who supervises the training of all the other T.F.O.s, walked me through a quick tour of the headquarters, a dense warren of small corridors and stairways. Our final destination was a classroomlike space lined with whiteboards, where we sat down to talk about crime and the city. With his olive-green flight suit and a military-style haircut, Burdette, 50, could have passed for an Air Force officer. He was observant and detailed-oriented; he would frequently restart entire paragraphs of explanation until he arrived at the correct narrative sequence, and only then would he move on to his next point or answer. Those answers were also astonishingly precise in their geographic reference points. He would bring up exact intersections and even business addresses somewhere out there in the greater maze of Los Angeles, never once relying on a map. Each location would then serve a specific role in Burdette's ensuing narrative - sometimes even five or 10 minutes later - as he tried to make clear why a certain crime or event had unfolded in one way and not another.

Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place from New York or Chicago, he explained, with their skyscrapers and deep, canyonlike streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, not to mention potentially dangerous. In L.A., by contrast, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. Limiting yourself to roads is not going to work. The aerial perspective is crucial: You have to think in a distinctly volumetric way about how neighborhoods are actually linked and what the most efficient routes might be between them. After all, this is how criminals think, Burdette said, and this is how they pioneer new ways to escape from you.

Even the region's flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city. The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.

Burdette's own spatial understanding of Los Angeles easily rivals that of any urban historian, city planner or local architect. His knowledge of the terrain is the product of thousands of hours of flight time, during which he has had to constantly reconcile the moving map of the city displayed on his helicopter's monitor with the actual streets below. But of course, Burdette has also had the help of advanced technology.

The air-support division spots Los Angeles Fire Department activity over South Los Angeles, presumed by the pilot and the T.F.O. to be a car accident connected to a nearby house party. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

Over several more flights, each with a different combination of pilot and tactical flight officer, I was able to see this array of technical devices firsthand. Each helicopter, for example, contains a unit that picks up signals from LoJack tracking systems, which are used commercially as a tool for recovering stolen vehicles. During a slow spell one night, we drifted above a stretch of the 101 Freeway linking the streets of Hollywood with the San Fernando Valley, looking for stolen cars in transit. The T.F.O. intently watched the craft's dashboard display, fishing for signals in the darkness. (To his apparent disappointment, we found none.)

Later, we tracked a possible stolen sedan, one not equipped with LoJack, using the next best technological assist: the helicopter's spotlight, a blinding, 50-million-candlepower inferno justifiably known as the Nightsun. It has the effect of a colossal stage-lighting rig, implying high drama with its focused glow. "He's going into the buildings!" the T.F.O. exclaimed. This meant the car was heading downtown, where the city's dense core of skyscrapers would prevent us from following it. The driver wasn't nearly as savvy as the pilot and T.F.O. thought, however. He soon exited the freeway - to drive straight home, we saw, followed by two squad cars and six motorcycle units that we had been directing all along. The driver was arrested in the street. After we flew away, we learned from radio chatter that it was simply a D.U.I.

On another flight, I was shown the FLIR, or forward-looking infrared camera. To demonstrate how it operated, my T.F.O. that night instructed his pilot to head for the beaches of Santa Monica. Almost at once, the FLIR monitor mounted in the cockpit lit up with the strangely beautiful thermal flare of human life: white-glowing forms walking along the beach or lying on dark blankets next to one another. We flew quite low to the water now as the T.F.O. explained some basics of infrared visualization, and I watched as apparently sleeping forms, white-hot, came into sharp focus, curled up beneath lifeguard structures. There was nowhere to hide, I saw; you could be concealed behind the trunk of a tree, yet an eerie aura would still surround you, shining like a halo. Looking out the helicopter window, I saw nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, up and down the beach in both directions. But when I peered back at the monitor, lights were moving everywhere, like fireflies.

Those who want to stay hidden from FLIRs are developing countermeasures, of course. Back on the ground, I asked Burdette about some of their preferred techniques. "People are definitely catching on," he said. "They'll rub mud all over themselves, like that movie 'Predator,' or they'll wrap themselves up in pool covers to mask their heat signature."

I laughed. "Does that work?"

I was expecting him to laugh along with me, but after a slight hesitation, he said: "It does work - except a little bit of light starts to shine out of each end. Once they've been in there for a while, the temperature builds up, like it starts to cook a little. That's how we find them."

A tactical flight officer at Hooper Heliport observing two men setting up drones on the other side of the Los Angeles River. Credit... Kevin Cooley for The New York Times

In "City of Quartz," his apocalyptic portrait of Los Angeles circa 1990, Mike Davis described the air-support division as an invasive "space police," a darkly futuristic force of winged overlords scanning the metropolis from above and buzz-bombing whole neighborhoods at a time. One of the most memorable moments in his book is when he describes how police pilots navigate the city: "To facilitate ground-air synchronization," he writes, "thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid." With this incredible image, Davis implies that the police have stealthily redesigned urban space to suit their own needs, even painting our addresses onto our roofs without us noticing, all so that we can be more easily corralled. For Davis, the city itself is a police tool, an instrument of authority we can no longer fully see - and thus cannot effectively critique or oppose.

Davis is right, of course, that aerial command is an instrument of control, and a potentially sinister one at that. But he was wrong about the degree to which the Los Angeles police have been able to mold the landscape. In reality, those police-branded rooftop numbers are all but nonexistent, at least for now; when I asked Burdette what he would change if he could redesign the city from the perspective of a tactical flight officer, he mentioned exactly that idea: painting large identifying numbers on the roofs of building complexes like schools and hospitals. If those sorts of facilities could be numbered in a clockwise direction, starting with the entry building, he explained, directing officers to a structure deep within the sprawl would be far easier. Thus far, however, such an ambitious project has been beyond the police department's institutional reach. Throughout the history of aerial surveillance in Los Angeles, the urban landscape has largely been an inheritance, beyond the control of any single authority; the air-support division's real ingenuity has been in how it responds to a world that it did not, in fact, design.

Precisely as a way of making up for the absence of rooftop numbering, for instance, the air-support division has deployed something Burdette called "the rules of four." As guidelines, they fall somewhere between a rule of thumb and an algorithm, and they allow for nearly instantaneous yet accurate aerial navigation. "The way the parcels work in the city of Los Angeles," he began, "is that Main Street and First Street are the hub of the city." The street numbers radiate outward - by quadrant, east, west, north, south - with blocks advancing by hundreds (the 3800 block below 38th Street) and building numbers advancing by fours (3804, 3808, 3812, etc.). The rest is arithmetic.

"If it's the fourth house south of the corner on the west side of the street," Burdette explained, "then the address is going to be an odd number. The rules of four mean that I can do four times four - it's the fourth house, times four - which is 16. But, because the numbers on that side of the street are odd, we know we're going to be looking at either 15 or 17. So, if the address is south of 38th Street and it's the fourth house on the west side of the street, then it's going to be 3815 or 3817. It is going to be that address."

With the rules of four, an otherwise intimidating and uncontrollable knot of streets takes on newfound clarity. It is no coincidence that the Los Angeles Police Department built its main headquarters at the center of it all, at the intersection of First and Main. It placed the department at the numerological heart of the metropolis, the zero point from which everything else emanates.

As Thomas More proposed, a well-ordered metropolis is a fundamental prerequisite for any visionary act of urban governance. The air-support division has simply extended that observation into its understanding of the existing order, in this case of the city's numbered houses and streets. But if the promise of aerial policing is to make the city more legible - to help officers read events more clearly - the obvious temptation is to somehow turn the page, to anticipate future events as well.

And here we confront a final dimension - time - and another police technique, called predictive policing. Pioneered by the U.C.L.A. anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, predictive policing relies upon an interpretive combination of machine-learning algorithms and deep pools of police data to estimate where certain types of crime, like car thefts or burglaries, are most likely to happen next. Brantingham has compared the technique to a Netflix recommendation algorithm, in that it makes suggestions about the future based on what has occurred in the recent past. Predictive policing does not try to predict specific events, but it can help the police identify surprisingly precise areas of high crime and then direct officers to those areas, casting what they hope will be a pre-emptive shadow.

With predictive policing, cops will no longer be describing and reacting to the landscape but writing it, in real time - and with a far greater impact on individual neighborhoods than the simple arrangement of police cars on a stakeout, or even numbers on a roof. In their quest to establish an all-seeing utopian gaze looking down upon the rooftops of an unsuspecting metropolis, the police may have stumbled upon their most powerful, and perhaps most worrying, means of reshaping the city - one that comes not from seeing, but from being seen.

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How Aerial Surveillance Has Changed Policing - and Crime - in Los Angeles (Published 2016)

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Feature Inside the city's pioneering air-support division. The Los Angeles Police Department's air-support division is called in to assist with a possible robbery in progress in the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley. Credit...

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si·ren

1. a device that makes a loud prolonged sound as a signal or warning.

synonyms: alarm, alarm bell, warning bell, danger signal, whistle, horn, hooter, tocsin

2. each of a number of women or winged creatures whose singing lured unwary sailors on to rocks.

3. an eel-like American amphibian with tiny forelimbs, no hind limbs, small eyes, and external gills, typically living in muddy pools.

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. si·ren a device that makes a loud prolonged sound as a signal or warning. synonyms: alarm, alarm bell, warning bell, danger signal, whistle, horn, hooter, tocsin each of a number of women or winged creatures whose singing lured unwary sailors on to rocks.

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Theatre NEMO's work is based on four principal aims:- To improve and promote good mental health and wellbeing - To improve the support available for carers, friends and families of those affected by mental ill-health - To advance society's understanding of mental ill-health and challenge misconceptions. - To make a significant and tangible contribution to create a more cohesive, integrated and inclusive community.
Why the community needs us
We have 15 years experience of developing and delivering a programme of very successful creative arts workshops, led by professional facilitators and supported by volunteers.Through this, we promote good mental health by using the creative arts to engage and support vulnerable individuals in the community, in hospitals and in the criminal justice system.
Our impact on the community
Our adult workshops help members develop key social skills to improve their integration into the local and wider community. Social and support networks develop and help to diminish feelings of isolation. Workshops also act as a stepping stone to access other mainline services.More information on our workshops can be found at www.theatrenemo.org

To support creative workshops

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Theatre NEMO's work is based on four principal aims:- To improve and promote good mental health and wellbeing - To improve the support available for carers, friends and families of those affected by mental ill-health - To advance society's understanding of mental ill-health and challenge misconceptions.

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To assist the Glasgow Community Planning Partnership's Area Partnerships in their role they are each allocated an area budget. These budgets are mainly used to provide grants to local community and voluntary organisations to provide services that will help to achieve the Area Partnership's local priorities and Glasgow City Council's objectives. Area Partnerships can also provide financial support to Council services and partner organisations but only if the application demonstrates a fit with local priorities; the involvement of local communities and additionality to core remits.

Funding Applications

Applications for funding should be developed locally to meet identified needs and they should demonstrate how they will benefit an area/community within the Partnership's boundary. The application should clearly link to one of more of the Area Partnerships' Investment Priorities ( link). If it doesn't, the application will need to provide evidence that there is "strong case for consideration" (paragraph C1, link). Area budget funding can be available for 'citywide' applications but only where the application meets the eligibility criteria for each of the Area Partnerships across the city.

You are advised to read the relevant guidance note ( link) before requesting and/or submitting your application to ensure that the application is eligible, as there are other eligibility criteria relating to area budget funding (e.g. what the area budget can't fund; minimum and maximum levels of funding). If you are still unclear as to the application's eligibility or have any other questions relating to the application process, please contact the relevant Partnership and Development Team Office. The contact details are provided in the guidance notes.

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To assist the Glasgow Community Planning Partnership's Area Partnerships in their role they are each allocated an area budget. These budgets are mainly used to provide grants to local community and voluntary organisations to provide services that will help to achieve the Area Partnership's local priorities and Glasgow City Council's objectives.

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Anyone experiencing violence, including coercive and controlling behaviours, should not feel in anyway inhibited by the current Coronavirus outbreak to report a crime against them, or feel that they need to wait to receive vital support.

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In this Abolitionist Digest, we highlight actions and writing that centres on defunding the police in the UK

Memorial Billboards for those who have died from UK state & racist violence

Black Lives Matter UK, in collaboration with the United Friends and Families Campaign and others campaigning for state accountability, put up a billboard in memory of the 3000+ people who have died in police custody, prisons, immigration detention centres and racist attacks.

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In this Abolitionist Digest, we highlight actions and writing that centres on defunding the police in the UK Memorial Billboards for those who have died from UK state & racist violence Black Lives Matter UK, in collaboration with the United Friends and Families Campaign and others campaigning for state accountability, put up a billboard in memory of the 3000+ people who have died in police custody, prisons, immigration detention centres and racist attacks.

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Aims and objectives
The Standing Group on Human Rights, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Transformation aims at linking aspects of human rights, transitional justice, democratisation, political transition, politics of transformation and politics which are relevant for research.

We want to bring together a broad range of topics in the field of political science research that have so far been side issues or sub-disciplines in the different areas of political science research, such as development studies, regional studies, political theory, conflicts studies, etc. In doing so the Standing Group offers a forum to discuss political research on human rights, transitional justice and the politics of transformation from different angles and perspectives: empirical and theoretical, analytical and normative, historical and contemporary, local, regional and global.

The Standing Group focuses its cross-cutting research, publications, seminars and networking activities on topics such as human rights norms and standards in international relations; transitional justice and other post-conflict processes; global justice and peace movements; as well as on the politics of transformation. It harnesses the synergies of topics and issues that deal broadly with human rights in political science, including international relations, gender, law and politics. The interaction of duties and responsibilities of states and non-state actors and aspects of social movements and civic organisations, international organisations as well as normative changes in the wide field of human rights, peace and justice are highlighted in a variety of activities and events.

The initiative to set up this Standing Group was taken following the high attendance at the Section on Human Rights and Transitional Justice as well as its Panels during the 2011 ECPR General Conference in Reykjavik, which showed that there is a growing interest in discussing future methodological advances in this field. The Papers and contributions to the Panels critically examined how transitional justice can contribute to the promotion of human rights and transformation processes in post-conflict countries from the angle of international organizations and courts, NGOs, domestic political movements, transition processes, peace building, institution building, gender or democratisation.

Activities

Workshop at the ECPR Joint Sessions, Mainz 2013

Section with up to five panels at the ECPR 7th General Conference in Bordeaux, September 2013

The convenors of the Standing Group will hold the first election of a Standing Group Steering Committee at the 7th ECPR General Conference, from 4-7 September 2013 in Bordeaux

Joint ECPR Standing Group, ISA, IPSA and APSA Human Rights Section conference 'Human Rights and Change', Istanbul, Turkey 16 - 18 June 2014

Section with up to four panels at the ECPR 8th General Conference in Glasgow, September 2014

Joint ECPR Standing Group, ISA, IPSA and APSA Human Rights Section conference 'Human Rights and Justice', The Hague, Netherlands, 8 - 10 June 2015

Section with up to four panels at the ECPR 9th General Conference in Montreal, Canada, August 2015

Joint conference on 'Human Rights in an Age of Ambiguity' by the ISA Human Rights Section, APSA Human Rights Section, IPSA Human Rights Research Committee and the ECPR Standing Group on Transitional Justice and Human Rights, New York, 13 - 15 June 2016

Section with five panels at the ECPR 10th General Conference in Prague, September 2016

Section with seven panels at the ECPR 11th General Conference in Oslo, September 2017

Section with six panels at the ECPR General Conference in Hamburg, August 2018

Section with five panels at the ECPR General Conference in Wroclaw, September 2019

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Human Rights and Transitional Justice | ECPR Standing Group

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Aims and objectives The Standing Group on Human Rights, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Transformation aims at linking aspects of human rights, transitional justice, democratisation, political transition, politics of transformation and politics which are relevant for research.

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What If... We defunded the police? | What If

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On Sunday, lawmakers in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota announced that they had been listening. As a result of sustained local, national, and international protests - sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police - city council members told a community rally that they would seek to defund and abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.

The announcement is the most major in a cluster of measures being implemented across the US to take away funding from their police departments. Also on Sunday (the 7th of June), New York mayor Bill De Blasio pledged to divert funding from the NYPD and into social services, while last week, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti promised that $250 million would be taken from police budgets and funnelled into jobs, health and community initiatives. The mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, has also committed to reviewing the city's police budget.

As more cities interrogate the role of the police in the US, many in the UK now ask what police defunding and eventual abolition might look like at home. Is it possible? What sort of community-based initiatives could we establish instead of policing? Would we see youth workers, counsellors, mental health professionals and drug case workers becoming first responders? And what would be the results of these changes?

To find out, we asked experts Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, University of Greenwich sociologist Dr. Adam Elliott-Cooper, and anti-racism campaigner, abolitionist and former Metropolitan police officer Adam Pugh, to take us through the hypothetical abolition of the London Metropolitan Police over the course of one, three and five years.

ONE YEAR: What would be the initial steps of defunding the Met?

First of all, it's important to provide some context against which police defunding in the UK would happen. "In the early noughties, the Labour government threw money at police and what we saw was a massive expansion in the number of officers everywhere, including in London," Garside explains. "After this, as part of the austerity measures, we saw a scaling back of these numbers. So, we're in a situation where people in this country believe that we don't have that many police - but we're not short on them at all. There are more police now than there were during the miner's strikes under Thatcher."

As far as what sort of defunding might happen in the period of one year, Dr. Elliott-Cooper explains that there are various areas within policing and the Met - the largest police force in the UK - which could be divested from and defunded immediately, many of which cause particular harm to Black and other minority ethnic communities.

"The first should be the end of drugs policing and drugs stop and search," he tells me. Stop and search allows officers to question members of the public at random, with BAME people four times more likely than a white person to be stopped. It is, Elliott-Cooper says, "a very police intensive exercise, does nothing in terms of improving public safety, and requires a huge amount of person power and human hours. The second one would be disbanding the Prevent agenda."

Prevent is a government counter-terror initiative which attempts to use schools, universities, workplaces, and other institutions to identify people who are at supposed risk of radicalisation, and which has been heavily criticised for its extreme use of surveillance, and, as Elliott-Cooper notes, "has been used to criminalise lots of communities," the very high majority of whom are non-white. It also, he tells me, "requires a huge amount of communications infrastructure, and it's made very little difference to public safety."

"Thirdly," he continues, "we should see an end to what David Cameron called the 'all-out war on gangs and gang culture'." This policy, instigated following the 2011 London riots (themselves caused by the police killing of a Black man, Mark Duggan), "uses a huge amount of surveillance, huge amounts of technology, IT and communications infrastructure, and it's been used to criminalise mainly Black communities. And the fourth area which should be defunded immediately would be the hostile environment policy - the way in which the police are raiding homes, workplaces, and institutions, just to try to find people who are undocumented - and immigration deportations and detentions. They make no improvement on public safety, and are very resource intensive."

In this one year period, Dr. Elliott-Cooper tells me, the funds from these policing areas should be quickly redirected instead into women's refuges, youth services and greater funding for mental health provision, particularly for young people.

THREE YEARS: Where would police funding be redirected to?

The real meat of defunding the police is in refunding the organisations and initiatives who should be doing work that is currently the part of the police's remit. Pugh, therefore, is keen to remind me that abolition "is not simply about defunding the police, meaning that stripping away their budgets in isolation somehow will magically reduce police violence or crime. Neither is abolition the idea that we simply get rid of the police and all of the problems are solved. This is about making sure that instead of investing in punitive measures like policing and prisons, we invest in addressing the social conditions and social inequality that has created the response of policing." He highlights areas such as the NHS, housing and unemployment as those which are in drastic need of money and attention.

Garside gives a real world example to show the practicalities of a redistribution of funds: "When Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London, he spent a lot of money on some fairly knackered water cannons from Germany. The Met didn't end up using them, of course, and when Sadiq Khan became Mayor, he committed to selling those cannons and investing the profits in youth services," he says. "I'm not sure whether that actually happened - I'm not sure who would have wanted to buy them - but it illustrates fairly well what divesting money from the police and into public services looks like." (The water cannons were ultimately sold for scrap at a loss.)

For Elliott-Cooper, this means new, well-funded resources like mental health first-responders. "We need to have properly trained mental health professionals that people can call if they see somebody having a mental health crisis. So that rather than the police being called, where the person's safety is put at risk, where the police aren't trained, and they're more likely to use violence towards that individual, particularly if they're Black, we can have better trained mental health services for people in our communities."

Similarly, drug workers and experts might play a similar role, he explains. These would be people "who are trained to work with people with addiction problems, and to help them to access clean needles, and the care they might need to stop using drugs in ways that mean that they or others can come to harm. That is far more effective than locking people up for taking drugs, which is basically our current policy."

Elliott-Cooper also suggests that we could see the reopening of youth centres over a three year period, as more funding would move from policing and into youth services. "In London alone, over 100 youth clubs have closed since 2011, and we need to reopen those youth clubs. These buildings haven't been demolished - many of them are still there. We'd also need to rehire the approximately 3,500 youth workers who've lost their job since austerity was introduced. They're far better trained than police officers at conflict mediation and identifying young people at risk of being affected by violence or problematic drug use, and bring far less harm to the community," he says.

FIVE YEARS: What would we see instead of police?

All of the experts I speak to remind me that police abolition is a very long term goal, which would necessitate other very structural changes. Elliott-Cooper notes that investment in council housing, public sector jobs and education, for example, is foundational to a society without policing.

Pugh agrees. He tells me, "There is no quick fix solution. There can only be a long term strategy with regards to abolition or defunding the police as a strategy. So on this basis, it is unlikely that within five years time the police would not still exist, but hopefully we would be well on our way to the goal of them not existing, and would have seen money reinvested elsewhere. We hear about spending upwards of £500 million a year on 20,000 additional police officers - not to mention a huge amount on things like tasers and body cams that we know do not and will not reduce crime or keep our communities safer."

Fundamentally, then, Pugh sees abolition as the only way forward. "The point is that policing isn't working, and will never work - I say that as somebody who has been a police officer. Reform hasn't been working for a long time," he tells me. "We now need to move beyond reform and begin to reimagine what our entire justice system might look like, taking steps towards the actualisation of that goal."

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What Would Happen If the Police Were Defunded or Abolished in the UK?

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On Sunday, lawmakers in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota announced that they had been listening. As a result of sustained local, national, and international protests - sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police - city council members told a community rally that they would seek to defund and abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.

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Movement for Justice protest against the incarceration of women at Yarl's Wood detention centre. Credit: Demotix/Guy Corbishley.
The UK police, courts, the prison system and the entire judicial apparatus transparently and resolutely fail to tackle rape culture. Prisons cannot solve sexual violence while also protecting it.

To call endemic sexual violence 'rape culture' is not just a statement of prevalence, though there are estimated to be up to 95,000 rapes annually. Instead, 'rape culture' is an analysis of how rape, sexual assault and harassment are procedural, and of how the state mechanisms that are supposed to prevent it instead reproduce and reinforce it.

But fears about completely dismantling this system are warranted if there is no transformative alternative to put in its place. What would 'transformative justice' for survivors look like - not simply in communities holding rapists to account, but also a wider redistribution of power that can start to disassemble the structures enabling rape culture?

The current apparatus offers very little in the way of accountability and allaying survivors' trauma, and nothing in the way of transformation. There is a default presumption that the state, and the police, can deal with rape by locking up individual rapists.

But a 2013 Home Office study suggested only between 1% and 6% of reported rapes are known by the Ministry of Justice to have resulted in the prosecution of the perpetrator. At least a quarter of these reported incidents are classed as 'no crimes'.

Conversely, as many as 109 women have been prosecuted in the last five years for 'false accusations' of rape. In 2005 the Home Office found the rate of 'false accusations' is dramatically overestimated by "a tendency to conflate false allegations with retractions and withdrawals"; arbitrary police department categorisations inflate 'false reports' from 3% of cases to 8% of cases. Judicial intermediaries' power to prosecute is itself a form of violence: it shifts the focus onto whether or not to 'believe' the survivor.

Carceral narratives - those suggesting incarceration can alleviate social problems - may be comforting when comprehending the scale of violence against women. Believing that the justice system means that rape results in a prison sentence gives us the illusion of power and autonomy. (Victoria Law has particularly criticised 'carceral feminism' for believing incarceration can eliminate violence against women).

But within a system of punitive logic, the achievement of any collective or transformative form of justice is impossible for the 99% of survivors who do not see their case result in a conviction. The state has little interest in the resources necessary to incarcerate all perpetrators.

The furore over whether British convicted rapist Ched Evans should be allowed to return to professional football, particularly the reaction to petitions against Oldham Athletic signing him, illustrates the limitations on what 'justice' can be wrung out of the judicial system. Evans is one of the small proportion of alleged rapists who was convicted of rape and sentenced to jail time (the Footy Law blog analyses his 2012 case in detail). The entire public debate, however, has been over whether he has been 'rehabilitated' or 'paid his debt'.

This completely abstracts the impact on the victim, who has been forced to move house five times due to repeated outings by his mob of vigilante supporters.

Prisons "both require and foster violence", criminology professor Sarah Lamble argues. The entire system of incarceration, from prisons and the police to immigration detention centres, are simply another one of rape culture's functions. In turn, rape and assault provides a perverse stability to the prison system. This further prevents the realisation of transformative justice for survivors.

Often upending the patriarchal violence ingrained within the prison system is considered more disruptive than the violence itself. As Michael Denzel Smith states: "The fact that we do little to enforce those laws is the tacit recognition that in order for the current system to remain intact, a degree of violence against women is necessary".

What's more, relocating rapists incubates rape culture. Statistics on UK prison rape are more vague than in the US, with Justice Secretary Christ Grayling blocking a Howard League investigation into the issue - the Ministry of Justice says questions about assault are 'intrusive'. Research suggests guards routinely sexually coerce women prisoners (a third of who are survivors of sexual abuse). There are also revelations of endemic sexual assault and harassment of women detainees at Yarl's Wood immigration detention centre, for example.

In the US, the response to prison rape is to move the victim to 'protective custody', or solitary confinement. But this is also a tool employed to silence women who report sexual assault by guards. Further, Solitary Watch estimate half of trans women in New York prisons have been sexually assaulted by guards while in solitary confinement.

But showing that prisons are sites of systemic sexual violence does not establish that immediate abolition would lead to quantitatively fewer rapes. The question is then if these carceral functions cannot provide the framework for eliminating rape and assault, what alternative structures can be established?

One option is 'restorative justice', involving facilitated meetings between the perpetrator and victim - to enable answers for any questions the victim has of the perpetrator, or acknowledgement of the harm caused. The New Zealand-based Project Restore is prominent in advocating this approach, which stems out of Maori accountability practices. In theory, this might provide some conciliation - equilibrium can be restored to the disrupted families, communities, and networks, if only by having the perpetrator acknowledge fault.

However, even Project Restore concedes the limits of such an approach. It does not, by itself, create conditions that enable safety and resistance to violence and oppression - or provide reparations to victims. Indeed, these projects gained traction within neoliberal approaches seeking cheaper alternatives to incarceration. Even the name, 'restorative' justice, reveals the limits of its intended effect. Rather than accountability for the victim and recognition of their needs, the peace of communities and families that failed to protect the victim from violence is intended - to restore things as they were.

Another alternative is 'transformative justice', which focuses on developing 'community accountability' structures to disrupt cycles of abuse and assault. This framework has been developed by women of colour-led US groups like INCITE!, Sista II Sista, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), who organise against interpersonal and state violence. The idea is that support groups from the community facilitate a process between the victim and the perpetrator, and a process of dialogue and admission of responsibility by the perpetrator then approximates the necessary steps to repair harm. The support groups then monitor whether these steps are maintained.

'Transformative justice' is centred in developing the community's autonomy in order to prevent violence. It sees retribution as reactive, and incarceration as unable and incapable of unpacking more difficult questions about state violence, or the complicity of communal networks that feel obligated to intervene to stop drink driving, for example, but not child abuse.

But a 'transformative' solution cannot simply involve a sentimentalised restorative justice system with a neoliberal renovation i.e. one that prioritises restoring unequal power relations for the sake of 'peace' or expense, or transferring arbitrary judicial functions to communities, assuming this accounts for all of the survivor's needs.

Generation Five, an organisation focusing on transformative justice in cases of child abuse, importantly state: "Without a just world, people cannot find healing and safety." The primary task in communities and organisations attempting to articulate a response to violence is providing care and support to survivors, including being led by survivors' needs and desires regarding their abusers.

But this has to be integrated with attempts to eradicate the inequities that allow patriarchal violence to occur.

'Transformative justice' is contingent on broader social and personal transformation. Just as prison abolition is only conceivable by shifting resources to healthcare and education systems and removing the violence of poverty, 'transformative justice' cannot simply depend on the community being inherently more accountable than the courts: it also has to identify the absence of reparations and accountability for the victims - and redistribute power to them.

While consent-based sex education is entrenched in discourse about how to tackle rape culture, and an important first step in beginning a shift towards transformative justice, there must also be a broader realisation of reproductive autonomy to redistribute power - for example abortion on demand, and trans-appropriate healthcare.

A transformative discourse about tackling rape culture would also consider the institutionalised violence of local authority care homes - which feed women and children into the violence of homelessness, addiction, and prisons.

Children's rights are also vital to conceiving social and personal transformation as a means of dismantling rape culture. Children need more than comprehensive sex and relationship education: they also need greater democratic power in schools, and in their lives.

Without the broader empowerment of those vulnerable to patriarchal and sexual violence, transformative justice mechanisms no more provide accountability and reparations for rape survivors than our current carceral apparatus. And community accountability is anemic without addressing the ways in which women, particularly women of colour, women with disabilities and trans women, are trapped by the violence of poverty, or state violence.

In moving beyond a model of incarceration that exacerbates rape culture, transformative justice has to take account of survivors' complex needs. It must ensure community accountability does not simply whitewash the systems that enable patriarchal violence.

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Rape culture: would prison abolition help women?

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Movement for Justice protest against the incarceration of women at Yarl's Wood detention centre. Credit: Demotix/Guy Corbishley. The UK police, courts, the prison system and the entire judicial apparatus transparently and resolutely fail to tackle rape culture. Prisons cannot solve sexual violence while also protecting it.