 Hello, I'm here with Dr Adam Elliott Cooper from Kings College London, researcher at Kings College London. That's correct, yeah that's me. I'll upgrade you to lecturer when I feel that you deserve it. Much appreciated. And we're here to talk about policing the criminal justice system, racism and much more besides because last week figures were released showing that in England and Wales, knife crime has gone up by 21% which to me seems like an awful lot. So are we really witnessing a new epidemic of violent crime? I think the figures don't often paint that kind of total picture of moral panic and crisis that we often see in like new studios and the police and politicians speeches. What we often see is violent crime fluctuating throughout the year. We generally see more violent crime in the summer, less violent crime in the winter for the simple reason that more people are out in the summer. And we sometimes see fluctuations relating to different types of things whether it be cuts to social services or whether it be instances of civil unrest or whether it be other kind of social factors but I wouldn't say that there's an epidemic that needs the kind of quite I think over-the-top reporting that we've seen more recently. I mean if you'd believe some of the, particularly the Conservative back benches were sharing these memes of like you know a dripping knife against a you know London sky which is stained red you would think that we were living in some Mad Max Fury Road dystopia. You would, you would but I think that's what kind of helps over a lot of this political point scoring right. So you've got this idea that the Conservative party are there the law and order party so obviously if there's a moral panic around knife crime, if there's a moral panic around terrorism or anything else that requires a stiff law and order approach according to the Conservatives they're going to jump on top of it quite quickly and I think we can see that quite a lot. Not only with the Conservative party but also in the ways in which certain parts of the Labour Party are also capitulating to this kind of law and order kind of governance. I mean let's talk more about that. So Sadiq Khan has vowed to step up stop and searches in the capital after having run on a platform of reducing stop and searches and Jeremy Corbyn in the summer just gone had called for Theresa May to resign over police and cuts and has pledged 10,000 extra police officers. So is this and should it be the left-wing political response to a rise in violent crime to try and claw back some terrain from that traditional Tory ground of law and order? I guess there's kind of two ways we can look at this right there's a kind of liberal way we can look at it which is the fact that almost all the evidence suggests that the police don't really prevent crime. Their role is more to apparently to solve crimes than to prevent crimes and they're not too good at that but even when it comes to preventing crime there's very little evidence they prevent crime. The last time we saw a massive influx in stop and search was between 2009 and 2011 and it was an initiative called Operation Blunt 2 which sounds like an action movie it's just an initiative from the Metropolitan Police where they increased stop and search massively in some inner-city boroughs and increased them a little bit in some other inner-city boroughs and not at all in others and what they found was that in the boroughs where they increased stop and search loads had no effect whatsoever in comparison to the boroughs where they didn't increase stop and search at all. In fact violent knife crime went up in some boroughs where they increased stop and search which of course doesn't mean more stop and search leads to more knife crimes but it does mean there's no correlation whatsoever with increasing powers like stop and search and reducing levels of knife crime and I think the second important thing to note about that is that of course this operation took place between 2009 and 2011 it finished in May 2011 and in the August of that year we saw massive civil unrest and I think that whilst the killing of Mark Duggan probably sparks that unrest I think that three years of intense stop and search by London's Metropolitan Police probably exacerbated the likelihood that we were going to see an explosion like that so that's a liberal approach right? Are you a liberal Adam? Not if I can help it and so we've also got a radical approach as well right and the radical approach is slightly different and it says that not only is the role of the police not really something that reduces crime it also reproduces dominant power structures right? So what do we mean by that? We mean that if you're suspected of handling a gun in Tottenham you'll probably be arrested in fact if you're Mark Duggan you're executed on the spot without anyone asking any questions but if you sell F-16 Saudi Arabia or Israel you'll probably get an OBE right? This is the role of the police if you're suspected of smoking a spliff on Bricks and High Street you can expect to be stopped by the police but if you sell highly addictive antidepressants through the pharmaceutical markets you're a pillar of British industry right? There are mothers who were given custodial sentences for handling stolen goods which were appropriated during the unrest of 2011 but if you invade Iraq, council or oil contracts write new oil contracts of your multinational oil companies and kill million odd people you know you'll be made Middle East peace envoy right? So there's this the role of the police isn't just a failure in terms of their capacity to reduce what we consider to be crime it's also the fact that they are there to police poorer people to police working class communities particularly communities of colour and reproduce the power of the state reproduce the power of capital. So let's go into this with a bit more depth because there are some viewers who will hear that and go well obviously under a conservative government the role of the police is to protect the interests of the rural and class but when Conray Jezza gets in obviously that all changes we will have a more just policing system so how do you respond to that what's useful to think about what historical moments is it useful to think about in terms of critiquing that vision of the police? Okay so there's two things as I already said there's this problem with the way in which crime is socially constructed right there's certain there are comparable types of crime which are criminalised and which aren't criminalised that's the first thing but secondly even if we think about the history of policing and the history of crime they're intrinsically bound up with class and race so let's take stop and search example we've already discussed a little bit we first see stop and search emerge I think around 1829 with the what's called the vagrancy act where the legislated identified what they called perpetual criminals among Britain's working classes and this was debated in parliament and it was thrown out because they said we can't have this vagrancy act you know we can't say there are perpetual criminals that can be stopped and searched just because they have this intrinsic capacity for crime this goes against British civil liberties and the British rule of law and all that kind of stuff so they threw it out but what Britain did was and a lot of people often forget this was that Britain the island of Britain wasn't the only place being policed by Britain at this time it had many colonies and its colonies it continued using variations of the vagrancy act whether it be the criminal tribes acts in India or whether it be the ways in which anti-terror legislation was used in the colony in Kenya or whether it be the ways in which legislation relating to riot civil unrest and trade union organising was used in the Caribbean we can see that things relating to not requiring reasonable suspicion or a laying suspicion on the hands at the hands of the police is an integral part of policing and that kind of policing is always it was explicitly focused on the working class the perpetual criminals or colonised communities in Britain's colonies and now we see that reproduced here in Britain without those kind of explicit classist and racist labels and but still basically doing the same thing so there's something very intrinsic I think when it comes to racism and capitalism and the police that I think we have to recognise when we try to reform these kinds of institutions because I think that there's sometimes a problem with how we frame anti-racist discourse which is we characterize racism as just a numbers game so when we talk about uneven implementation of stop and search the implicit assumption there is that well it would be better if it just more accurately reflected the ethnic makeup of the population so 14 percent of stop and search appears POC the rest are white whereas you're talking much more about you know the raison d'etre of the police force in the first place and in terms of meeting that structural critique in the United States you do have a very strong prison abolitionist tradition it might not be hegemonic politically but it's certainly exists and there is a strong cultural memory of that in this country it seems to me that we've got anti-racist movements many of which have been forgotten we've got a anti-racism of institutions which I think was very successfully co-opted an institutionalised post scarman report really and you have an abolitionist tradition but these three things don't normally link up so what is Britain's abolitionist tradition does it have one and if so can we bring it back I think what's one of the benefits for the left in Britain that I think is often forgotten is that Britain's leftist tradition doesn't simply reside within the British mainland right Britain has a strong leftist tradition which emerged in its colonies which were part of Britain in many many ways and these colonies have a very strong very interesting abolitionist history to give one example the history of Trinidad when in its anti-clonial struggles which are of course against the the British states and the British imperial states the legacies of this in the 1970s in its black power movement emerged through a distinctly abolitionist guys you've got organisations like the NUFF the national united freedom front which were explicitly anti-police and explicitly anti-prison and they understood that despite the fact that Trinidad formally had its independence from Britain there was still a neoclonial relationship between Britain and its former colonies which was rooted in racism and was imposed through the penal system through the justice system through the policing the courts and the prisons etc and so I think the fact that so many prominent black British or British leftist activists against policing when we think about Darker Tower when we think about others like that we realise that there is a strong anti anti-police and anti-prison tradition in Britain if we are to look beyond the Britain's borders and within its empire which I think is has played a pivotal role in developing British culture generally including its anti-establishment traditions so what alternatives to a carceral model of criminal justice are out there what do abolitionist reforms look like so again there's kind of two approaches right you've kind of got this liberal approach and a more radical one and the liberal approaches is one that I think I guess people have been pushing for is Jeremy Corbyn right because you know we can't abolish prisons tomorrow we need to do a lot more transforming and this looks like what we might call preventative or early intervention services so things like youth services right we've seen over 600 youth clubs close you've seen over three and a half thousand youth workers lose their jobs hundreds of thousands of young people no longer be able to access the kind of services that they benefit from so that's one thing or social work where you where you have intervention into families and family feuds and victims and survivors of domestic violence and so on and so forth as well as mental health services why it's it's not a any secret that a huge proportion of the people inside our prison system are suffering with mental health issues and so the these kinds of already existing welfareist institutions can be a really important way of reducing crime making the country a safer place for everyone and not importantly reducing prison numbers reducing people in custody reducing people who are being policed in a more violent way and you can see these kinds of models in you know the lovely utopian places of northern europe which often people on the left can refer to as well but there's a more kind of liberatory politics as well which identifies the fact that policing and the prison system is fundamental to capitalism it's fundamental to the protection of properties it's fundamental for the bourgeoisie to control the means of production and so if we think about the fact that capital cannot exist without the states and capital cannot exist without the police and prisons in order to number one legitimize its very existence and it and it's a it's a the property which which it owns but secondly to protect it when people try to disrupt or appropriate the means of that production we understand that the police are and prisons are fundamentally opposed to the will of ordinary people they're fundamentally opposed to any anti-capitalist struggle and therefore it is incumbent upon us on on the left to understand that if we want to abolish things like private property we want to abolish wage labor all of these things seem to be the bread and butter of the left we also have to abolish police and prisons as well i mean and it seems to me that there is a populist phrasing which is just kind of emerged naturally from how you phrase that normally we think the populist demand is just uh you know more canadianism for institutional racism whereas actually the language that you're using of ordinary people of people against profit that does lend itself to abolitionism i think is underexplored but i've got one last question for you so a snap election is called tomorrow and everyone's like shit we've got to write another manifesto and you get called upon to suggest one policing related policy in that labor manifesto oh dear what would it be oh dear it's a very difficult question isn't it it's a very difficult question that's why i put you on the spot because my immediate response i guess my immediate response through the kind of activist work that i've been involved in in relation to um deaths in police custody and police engagement and racial violence the kind of demands that you see there are always demands of greater transparency for greater accountability right so having a genuinely independent body that can scrutinize senior officers not your bodies on the beat for making specific decisions about specific policies and practices which lead to deaths which lead to an increased arrest rates and other forms of violence so that is the thing that kind of jumps out at me because this this is a demand that's often perpetuated often reproduced i guess for a lot the anti-racist organizing that i'm familiar with but it's difficult to say how much for change that's really going to bring about and i guess what i feel more inclined to suggest would be for the police to reframe the way in which crime is prioritized right so they have certain priority crimes and certain crimes are not considered to be priorities so priority crimes are raiding people who are supposed to be setting class a drugs like ecstasy and cocaine which you know of course are so evil priority crimes are supposed to be you know the street level gang crimes that are supposed to be priority crimes but i think maybe we should instead prioritize corporate crimes maybe we should prioritize the fact that we have massive corruption in in relation to things like privatization and the dodging of tax and the selling of weapons to despotic regimes and the funding of the funding of war all of these things i think should and can be considered crimes and they should be priority crimes and maybe the police should switch their priority crimes to these corporate and state crimes rather than the apparent crimes for ordinary people so it's more go for carillion leave don call ione alone one hannah cool i thank you so much for joining us hopefully that's been useful and instructive for our viewers and we can't wait to get you on again thanks so much having me cheers