 Mae'r rhan o'i amser yn ymddangos, a rydw i'n gweithio i gwasanaeth a'r awdd yma'r gweithio ar gyfer y prosiectau cyfrifiadau cyfwyr yma ydy'r argyffredigau. Rydyn ni'n gweithio o'r bleifft o'r prysyn o'r ddod o'r ddod yn ddim yn y cyfrifiadau. Ie gweithio wasiad hynny daf na'r perddig o'r disgusio cyfnoddau sy'n gweithio drwy'r ein sefydlu o hyd o'r busmau a'r prydeg, ac ond ei wedi'u hynny leoli bod hwn yn gyflwyno ar unrhyw bwysigol yn gyd-doedd o safonau bwysigol yma i'r jôl yn Gwyll Ffeithydd. Mae'r ydyn nhw wedi rywun o'r cyflwno ar gyflwyno ar gyflwyno a'r sy'n stori'n gwirio ar y fanfarn, ond yn y ddiwedd yn ddysgu'n dod o'r prynsydd, y cyfan, yw'r rhaglen yma, a'r ddiwedd y ddweud y Lloedd, yna yw'r ysgurthau, yr Unedig. ac mae'r ffordd yn ysgolio'r bobl yn seithio, dyma'r pobab hwn o'r dda, mae'r sgolio'r ddau'r unigfynig yn mynd i chi i'w ddweud. A'r oed yn ddweud o'r cilio, ac mae'n dweud fydd yn deulu, gwybwyl yn aspraw ydyn nhw o mwynhau, neu mae'r ffordd yn ymgyrch yn y ffordd, ac mae'r rhai piolaeth y ysgolio'r dda, a mae yna'r eich bod at di oedd yn i'w gweithio'r pwy codes ar-rein, mae'n ddweud y gallu ddweud y Llyfrgell yn y Unedig, yw'r unig o'r cyfnod i'w ddweud y Llyfrgell yn Acre, Aesia, Yn Yrwyng. Mae'n ddweud y gallu'n ddweud y project, ac mae'n ddweud y llwyth i chi'n ddweud y cwmnexio yng Nghymru, ynghylch â Gwylol, ynghylch, a'r Sleidwyr, ac mae'n ddweud ynghylch â'r cyfnodol, ond y Gwylol ynghylch yn cael ei ddweud, what it means to rebuild transcontinental solidarity to distance. I'm delighted to be joined by four one of speakers today, Shailt Sashama, who is a visiting lecturer at Westervoll School and a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, and also editor of the Tension Solidarity. A lawyer by train, Ainshawth's academic research provides the intersection of gender and women's rights, leap of the social movements and contemporary Indian politics. Sami Adadu is a doctoral student at the Middle Eastern, South Asian and different studies at Columbia University, and co-founder of the Tension Solidarity Network. Her research combines cultural studies, gender and sexuality, particularly in the context of South Asia. Rheonidwala is a human rights advocate, influencer and community organiser, focused primarily on issues of pretty justice, humanity and community advancement. A prominent figure during men's styles protest, she's currently the executive project director of that Connect Hub NG, a platform that campaigns against date bars and police brutality in Nigeria. And finally, we've got the Andrew Mininari, who's a criminologist working at Stocking University in Sweden. In 2020, he defended his decision, race and order, critical perspectives on crime in Sweden, where he, among the things, explores matters of racial proofing, unlining problems that are policing and under protection among racialized communities in the North Realm, advances and anti-racist research agenda to diagnose problems of state-sanctioned violence. As each speaker will speak for about 20 minutes before opening up to questions, I'm going to try and be a strip chair, so if you see my ears popping up, that's a awkward way of saying, maybe wrap up in a few minutes. And I'm going to invite Chote and Salmi up to speak first, and I'm going to try and share my stream as they do. So let me know if that works. All right, I think we can get started. Thank you so much, Oliver, for organising this and really excited to be in conversation with all of you. I think we would like to first begin by acknowledging that for a lot of people who are familiar with the context of India are likely to know some of what we're raising, and we are really indebted to their work to be able to make a narrative like this about what policing in India looks like, so just wanted to acknowledge that to start. And we are hoping through this presentation to raise some of the cases and points that can give us a broad overview of the kinds of violence and discrimination and harassment that make up the everyday of policing practices in India and give us a specific insight into the overall mechanisms and logics of policing. Shelza, do you want to go for the talk with the next part? Sure. So we'll begin our presentation by centering cases and points that give us a broad overview of the kinds of violence and discrimination and harassment that make up everyday policing practices in India. In the next section, we will move on to focus on the farmers protest that took place in 2020 in North India and the primarily taking place in North India and the research efforts that we had mentioned solidarity undertook at that point that was purged to support the movement. And we'll end by thinking with you on why it is not only important but essential and constructive to look into the global south when building power against the carceral state. Oliver, thank you. So we'll start with setting the context with colonial policing. The modern law and order apparatus that developed under British colonial rule relied heavily on their orientalist knowledge of the subcontinent. And this is very much reflected and co-constituted with policing practices in the region. So the idea that the subcontinent could be understood through caste and religion served to solidify pre-existing practices. For instance, the forms of dominant caste control and punitive practices that already existed in communities used by dominant caste against oppressed caste groups. While the British saw them as things that needed to change and for the native population to be civilized, a lot of these practices were also adopted in different forms and made part of the policing practices that were instituted. And one important development in this period was the use of force through lati charge, lati meaning baton, and the use of torture. These were justified particularly on the basis of the unique despotic context of the country. And then finally, policing centrally involved the suppression of the native population social organizing. And it framed any possibility of political emancipation as criminal at worst and suspect at best. So what you see in the slide is a little picture of a massacre that took place in April 1919, which is fairly well known and this is actually a picture of protesters pointing to bullet marks to remind us of exactly the kinds of harm that took place in the area. Next slide. So while some of the social movements like Jalyam al-Abagh and political leaders have become central to the nationalist narratives after independence, there are tactics of state repression that continue in independent India that look quite similar to the colonial setup, but many of them have also been strengthened and changed through their legal apparatus. So for instance, in the context of protests, we find the police indiscriminately used tear gas and the image you see here is from the farmer's protest, which we'll be discussing more later. Like I mentioned, the use of the lati or baton is very, very common in protests. The image here is from 1993. That's pretty consistent in Indian history. And there is also during protests a lot of targeting and arresting of specific protesters that takes place all across. Other than that, there's public knowledge that police across the country carry out extrajudicial killings, which are locally known as encounters. So people are rounded up and killed and it is later claimed that these targeted murders were done in self-defense. And this is fairly public knowledge that encounters are done very routinely. And similarly with torture and custodial killings, these are also open secret and open secret, and there are a high number of them that continue to take place. I've shared two pictures here first from the protest that took place against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens in 2019. Here, there was a lot of arbitrary arrest amongst the massive protests and the police were also involved in programs that took place against Muslims in various parts of Delhi in the aftermath. The anti-CIA protests, as they're commonly known, also saw community members being emboldened with weapons in a program called Police Mitra, or Police's Friends, where they basically served to snitch on people and were actively involved in violence and burning homes and vehicles. Since then, a lot of these everyday practices of policing through the pandemic, a lot of them were heightened and used against migrants and day laborers. The picture you see here is of Jairaj, a 59-year-old man and his son Benix, who is 31 years old, and they were arrested in Tamil Nadu on the basis of having their mobile accessory shop open after hours during the COVID lockdown, and the police sexually assaulted and tortured the two men to death, and this sparked a lot of outrage, bringing back recognition of the persistence of custodial violence and custodial death in the country. Next slide. I think that, so what we've shared so far are some of these common everyday policing practices, and I think that others from the global south, and I think from the global north as well, would share that experience of seeing the police carry out these kinds of brutalities using other names or whatever it is, but similarly carrying out very similar practices, but one of the things that is particular, I think in the subcontinent, is the punitive practices of caste that are taking place alongside and along with and within the policing system, and so these everyday policing practices for one are particularly felt by those from oppressed caste communities known as Dalits, tribal communities known as Adivasis, along with religious minorities, sex workers, beggars, and those in poverty who continue to be harassed and arrested and faced violence with a lot of impunity, and you can see here that this is kind of happening on the basis of very similar moral codes that motivated the British civilising mission, and then I think that the other part of policing in India that is essential to understand is the level and form of punitive violence that is very casteist at its core, and an example here that I was keen to share was of the Keralangi case. This was a case that happened in 2006 where a dominant caste mob dragged out a woman and her two children who had made a police complaint for their land rights, and the mob paraded them naked, raped and lynched them to death, and then the local police shielded the alleged perpetrators in the investigation, and ultimately while some people were charged, there was no recognition of caste violence and the fact that this was very directly a form of violence that is marked with casteism, so you can see that justice looks very different for people from oppressed caste communities, and the police not only aides and abets this violence, but also has its own techniques to preserve those caste hierarchies. Anti-cast activists have long looked to the constitution of India which created provisions against caste atrocities, but we find that consistently the police fail to record complaints and maintain caste hierarchies in the investigation and at the judicial stage. So the other example I was keen to share is from 2020, which is from the district of Hatras in Uttar Pradesh, where a 19-year-old Dalit girl was gangraped by upper caste men, and after hearing her, her mother took her to the police station, and the police did not file a complaint, they kept rejecting her claims and humiliated the people, and then the police finally registered a complaint and they were able to record a victim statement, and then she died from her injuries, and afterwards there was a forced cremation that took place where the police did not allow the family members to even be there. So this kind of complicates the picture of this kind of shows and kind of complicates the picture of what justice looks like in the Indian context where you can see that the police are very much involved in its obstruction and in access for specific communities. The points I just want to make here are that the other specificity of policing in India is also the kinds of policing that happens in certain regions across the country where there is, which are considered like the regions of armed conflict, and here you see there being a range of different kinds of a spectrum of forces that are in place. So there's police, but there's also paramilitary forces, there's a police controlled by the central government and the military, and a lot of them operate with impunity and the Armed Special Forces Act is the symbol of that impunity that has allowed for there to be mass killings of people in the regions. A lot of people being arrested on the premise that they are insurgent or separatist, and it's important to note that a lot of these regions are of Indigenous persons or Adivasi persons as they are known, like Chatizgar and Jharkand, as well as Northeast, Kashmir, and religious minorities like Sikhs. So the police tend to collude with a lot of the local organizations and that has led to a lot more of the similar kinds of everyday policing that you see quite heightened in these regions. Next slide. Here I just wanted to point to some of the newer techniques of policing that we're seeing. So there is a move towards modernizing and, as always, a persistent effort towards development, which has involved digitizing, and digitizing has brought with it a heightened form of surveillance in the country. So for example, what you see on the left side is the records of some folks who are labeled history sheeters. So they're listed down as people who have a criminal history. A lot of those records are now being digitized and that actually kind of makes them more permanent sources of knowledge that allow for the continued harassment of certain populations. And in protest time also, what you can see on the right is the way in which a lot of the imagery here in this image, it's for the same anti Citizenship Amendment Act protests. Those images are actively used to kind of target specific protesters and go after them. So these are some of the new forms. Next slide. And the other thing that we've been seeing particularly this year is the use of evictions and bulldozers. The police have been involved in evicting people in Assam in September last year. We saw that Bengali Muslims homes were burned down. There was again similar kinds of use of tear gas and use of open bullets. There were casualties. And more recently this year, a lot of Muslim homes have been demolished by the police on the premise that they were illegal. And a lot of the people whose homes have been demolished have also been activists who are actively involved in making clear the amount of harm that Muslims in the country are currently facing. So these are some of the newer forms of policing that we are seeing in India. So I think that the point of my overview, this very fast overview of the kind of key cases of policing that we're seeing is to key cases of police violence and brutality is to point out that there are likely to be a lot of similarities with the forms of policing that one might see across the world. And that at the same time there are certain unique histories of caste and religion that require some reckoning and also tell us something more about how policing globally functions. Okay, so I'm just going to continue from where Somya left and I can go into some of the data that we kind of collected when the farmers' struggle happened and started in 2020. So just to give an overview, just one slide before. Yeah, so primarily centered in North India in the states of Punjab and Haryana, farmers' unions gathered to protest in this mid-2020 July onwards to kind of protest three laws that were passed, draft laws that were passed by this government. They aimed to, I think it's not relevant for us to actually go into what the laws were trying to do, but primarily they're the major critique of the laws by these farmers and farm unions was that they were detrimental to agriculture and they were unconstitutional in their promulgation and they allowed unregulated entry of monopoly or big corporations. So this was a huge protest and for more than 15 to 16 months and how it looked was that at the beginning of the protest there was, next slide please, there was mobilisation within the local and state regions of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh. You see some of the maps marking those states in orange at the top there and from June on, June, July onwards this kind of moved and escalated when without hearing the farm unions and farmers, the law, the ordinance was made into law in September 20th, September 2020 and this led to kind of escalation of the resistance to various methods by unions which was the and these are also very usual methods of large scale mobilisation and protests that are common to kind of the subcontinent I would say. So they were stopping of the rail to affect government services. There was all India shut down called by trade unions and farmer unions, nationwide roadblocks which are planned and announced in advance and other kinds of spontaneous protests in different regions supported all over India. So I mean to then further negotiate, start a negotiation with the government, a coalition of farmer unions also was formed in November, some of the talks started in October, they failed and the farmers decided to kind of shift their protest location to the national capital in Delhi and surround the national capital on various borders to actually tell the government that they're not going to relent unless their demands are met. Next slide please. So this was somewhere in November 2020, they started from their various locations in two major states of Iran and Punjab and faced about four to five days of extreme repression. As you can see on the left, you'll see the kind of borders, like the kind of mechanisms that the police use. So it's like copper barricades, chains, cemented roads with nails, which were actually propped up right before to stop the farmers from even entering the national capital region. And at each of these, they were manned in such ways that there were huge highway trucks also blocking the roads when farmers were trying to actually reach the capital. And obviously there was violence, lucky charge, water cannon, tear gas, which have now become a common kind of repressive tactic within social movement or protest gathering in India I think and across the world. So yeah, so this is some of the image representation of that. Yeah, so next slide please. So we had detention solidarity along with some of the journalists and lawyers, activists kind of gathered data particularly around how the police acted during the span of 15 to 16 months for and the reasons that we kind of among activists kind of decided that this was important was to kind of, we understand that within social movements there is already the state is systematically collecting data, monitoring activists and obviously surveilling and they have sophisticated tools to keep doing that and actually, you know, keep doing that until the activists are tired. So in order to kind of preserve public memory of states atrocities, excesses and the routine violence it was important for us to actually mark those events where we know that, you know, state and state apparatus including the police have acted in particularly brutal ways. So the other kind of administrative purpose of doing this was to form and aid in, you know, formation of legal aid committees and, you know, provide legal defence. Other important thing was to obviously cross verify any information that the government is kind of releasing in terms of how many cases they have lodged, what kind of brutality has happened, what action the police has taken. The other was forming pressure groups and countering state and media propaganda because at the end of the day, even within India, the media houses that were talking and discussing about the farmers protests are owned by big corporations and so they were kind of, you know, so holding them accountable and also countering their propaganda was an important aspect of doing this exercise. And finally, I think it was also important for us to understand how state authorities actually interact with social movements, what kind of fear tactics are created and are used. Yeah, and also, I mean, one among the biggest among them through social media, through media houses and through state propaganda was actually how easy it is for state and we saw with, I think, BLM protests as well as the mischaracterisation of protest groups and labelling them as, you know, extremists or refuting even allegations of inciting violence. So, I mean, in the Indian context, although I do want to see that this exercise is actually not new, it is within the civil and democratic sites or, you know, tradition and history of civil liberties movement in India that many organisations have actually carried the burden of archiving some of this information at different points in different social movements for many decades. But I think what is different for us now is that since 2014, since coming off the, you know, BJP fascists, whatever government in power, a brown-manical Hindutva kind of fascism, it is important for us to acknowledge that such organisations and, you know, democratic rights organisations have faced relentless repression and silencing, which has actually made it difficult for them to operate within this kind of fear and atmosphere of fear. Next slide, please. So, our method, briefly going to the method, I think we used news and media reports, legal documents, testimonies and social media aggregation to kind of look at all of this data because importantly because most of the data on repression, how much injury, etc., is not usually reported in the newspapers, it is through Twitter and social media accounts that we were able to collect actual videos and testimonies of people as well in terms of how much injury was caused through these very public acts of violence. I think over 16 months of data has shown us that there were 70 separate incidents which took place, took place where, you know, the police interacted with the general public. And next slide, please. And they used one or a combination of these methods that are listed in the table here, which have now become like a common kind of, and there are, of course, differences in, this data has been also helpful in this kind of work in progress and it will, I think, be also helpful to kind of compare it with other social movements in the past. So some of these tactics, like forcible removal of people from protest site, preventive detention, huge number of false FIRs and even by, you know, government's own claim, there are some 130 FIRs being complaints registered in the police station, first information reports to which legal cases are then taken up. So as many as 136 FIRs have been lodged in one state where more than 12,000 people have been named or have been kind of implicated in cases, and most of these cases, as we are going along, looking at these data, are false, exaggerated FIRs with overcharging of criminal and penal provisions to ensure that, you know, people are bound to appear in court are, you know, a huge burden of legal causes implied on them. So I think some of these things that are also important to remember because, as I was saying, in terms of significance, the moment, you know, social media, media and kind of people's attention moves away from social movements, it becomes difficult for the repression that the state has the mechanism to continue to actually kind of take an accountability check for. So this kind of exercise which shows us, these are the moments when the police acted in particularly violent ways, it is on ground important for lawyers to actually have that information and say counter that I know actually it is, there was no cases of injury against the police officers on ground. So I mean, as I said, this is kind of a work in progress for us, but this is some of the things that we have been able to kind of consolidate in terms of police violence and police action in the in the protests in the farmers movement. So, yeah, I think I will close that part of this and quickly just say a line about what we tried to discuss today. I think what we're not trying to condemn is that what is happening in India is somehow unique. And when it comes to everyday policing, but certainly there are ways and strategies which are kind of implicated in longer histories of the subcontinent and its people's contention with state and power. So if you have to grapple with the wider analysis of how policing works in non US context, we have to make space for movements and analysis that can find solidarities beyond the binaries of global north and global south. And some of the intuitive aspects of movements and movement actors in each of these communities have to be the starting point of these efforts, we think. And the particularities of policing in India or elsewhere and the history in which these practices are taking place can kind of help us better understand the character of global policing and strengthen our efforts to resist it as well. So, yeah, I hope I've not gone over time. We've not gone over time, but we're listening to us and taking part in listening to you so much. Thank you so much to both of you. That was really, really good. I feel that the accumulation of protest is so crucial to the understanding of the relationship in policing and the forms of racial capitalism. And I do think that it's something that goes under the radar a lot. Government narratives are kind of like police funds. I'm a bit about it, not just seeing a unique India. I think it's been a very important creation in the UK with the PC bill and the increasing promotion of protests about what it enabled. I think anyone who has any questions please do raise their hand and I will get you. For now, I thought I'd ask one question. You spoke about the commit to characterisation of protesters and that can draw into public hostility. What is it if you have thoughts on the characterisation of the armour themselves? Because I know that in the UK, at least, the farm or the full farms have a very particular level of identity or a particular stereotype is rich landowners that vote possessive have fast followed over rural land. And I wonder if there's a key distinction here between farmers and far workers and whether that distinction applies in this context as well. And maybe I've brought a question about political identity by being sitting in the Netherlands with a farmer's press and I was kind of picked up by the wind media as something to celebrate, which is quite odd, right? Why are we out there supporting this? And it kind of is distortion that anti-farm change agenda kind of co-opted this movement. I just want to work as any kind of bearing on how political identities are to this and are there limits to our solidarity or a matter of kind of re-diagnosing the breadth and breadth of that? What do you see as a stand for our system of living? I think I'd like to answer that also. I mean, extend that further actually in the sense that even mainstream media within India was not able to capture I think the diversity of who the protest participant is. There is mischaracterisation and what the right wing media or the government propaganda will do of protests everywhere. But I invite everyone to reflect on this. It is actually very difficult for media to kind of, as the protest is going on, to consolidate what is happening. So I remember very particularly also reading the kind of reporting on women's participation within the farmers protest that happened. On the one hand, there was a major glorification of, oh look, there are women participating in the protest. That is amazing. That gives it some kind of a pristine or it makes it more sympathetic that that was the signal to the common person. But actually there was a full ignorance of the fact that there are entire protests that happen all year round of women workers in the capital city or they're very women. Being a part of the protest is actually very, very common. But using and extracting that identity to paint a picture of the movement, I think even mainstream media was guilty of doing that and completely ignoring, as you said, like farm labourers, their agenda, why they are not participating or why they refuse to up to a certain point to come to the protest as well. There was no kind of coverage at all. There was no kind of a deeper understanding of what historically the relationship between big land owners and farm labourers is within the rural countryside. So yeah, I think the problem starts right at the beginning with how the mainstream media covers it. And then of course there's going to be mischaracterisation and like this kind of, you know, there were headlines like, oh look, the farmers are eating pizza at the protest. And so that was like, as you said, like the mischaracterisation or whatever, the scandalising was to the extent that these are poor people. They don't know what, you know, pizzas are limited. I don't know what the intention was like pizzas are something that people, only in the cities and rich people can eat. So how is this like, they couldn't get their head around the fact that, oh, they are now eating pizza. So that is something to scandalise. Like so, I think, yeah, I think there's a, yeah, I think that I don't know if that helps answer your question. But yeah. If you want to come in. Yeah, I just wanted to make one small point and maybe Shelza, you can talk about it further if you'd like. I think that the point you were making Shelza earlier about the diversity of the protesters that also was inflected by the caste diversity that the protesters did have, but the people that, so there was a lot of artwork and there was a lot of photographs that were going up about the protest. And there was a very specific characterisation of who the farmer is that kind of negated and neglected there being some diversity even within the farmers and their own unions and organisations. So I think also saw that and that was also pretty consistent in alternative media, which was sympathetic towards the protest as well. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. And it's really good to say that we're just looking at the protest eating pizza. I think a broader of this testament to a broader thing is whenever you see people, I don't know, smiling or having fun or enjoying themselves collectively resisting, that's seen as like a delegitimisation of what they're doing as if coming together and actually resisting can be quite a rewarding thing to do, even if it's also demanding and demanding struggle as well. If anyone didn't have any other questions, then I'd like to thank both Chailton and Samuel for just a one presentation. It was really enlightening and maybe we can all come back together again if there's any more questions to kind of bring all together. Yeah, thank you very much and thanks for sharing the slides. It was great. Our next speaker is Rynu Oduwala. Rynu, you take you have a video to share before you start if it works. Yes, thank you. Okay, it works. I share screen. Thank you. I just wanted to share that so that we could get like a context of what the ENSAS movement was about for us in Nigeria. We did with a lot of things that Samuel and Chailton were saying regarding the police profession that is happening in India because it is like really similar to what is going on in Nigeria as well. For Stas, Stas was a police unit for us in Nigeria that was set up to combat issues of crime and kidnapping, but then over time they turned into the police oppressors themselves. They became the actual oppressors, they became the actual criminals, they became the actual kidnappers. They were cursing a lot of oppression that was happening in the country, extorting a lot of young Nigerians. There was a lot of torture, a lot of extradition killing for the video. There were a lot of names that were mentioned in the video and those names are just a fraction of young Nigerians that have died at the hands of police brutality. So that was how the ENSAS protest started in Nigeria to fight against what was happening to speak out to say that we are tired of dying at the end of police brutality, at the end of police harassment and this cannot go on again. And then the movement was shut down, which is why I related with what Shana was saying regarding how the government uses the police, the instrument of the state to also repress movement because then on the 20th of October 2020, police officers were sent to the protest ground to go and shoot at protesters and a lot of protesters actually died as a result of that. We may not actually even know the number of people that died because what then happened was that in collaboration with the military, police officers and the military shot a lot of people, injured a lot, made a lot of people, killed a lot of people and then cut their bodies away so that there would be no evidence of that crime. And then this also speaks to like I said, the repression where the people as united, they are strong, but then the strength of bullets is actually stronger and then repressions can actually shut down movement. And then looking at also the topic when we were talking about police repression beyond the United States, for us in Nigeria, the murder of George Floyd was one that resonated with us, you know, were no strangers to police brutality. The Hensas movement began far back as since 2016. And then sort of watching the West standard for George Floyd, meanwhile for Ross, it has always been about normalising police repression, normalising the fact that police can tell you that they would shoot you and nothing will happen and nothing will actually happen because the state would not prosecute those police officers, they would not be arrested, they would not be the other charge they called to send to prison. So it was a sort of fuel to the hangar that has been rising over the years. And I think that was a writer that said that if some of us in Nigeria didn't see how the Black Lives Matter protesters in America, you know, sort of forced some of their governments to defund the police department, we wouldn't have believed that it was possible for any action to be taken against the police because we have been used to crying out for so long into the MTA without response from the government. And so what we do, I mean, the platform I run now is sort of like an organisation, Scout Cornet Hub, it's a platform that has been set up to defend the rights of young people in Nigeria and also do a lot of documentation about the state's violence and the extra-judicial killings that are happening in Nigeria. And that was why I love Shama's detailed presentation because then they actually gave the numbers. What we're also trying to do is to get the numbers. For example, we've documented close to a thousand cases that have just happened this year and that's all via social media reporting, you know, people tagging saying that the police has just harassed me, the police has just extorted me, someone has been extraditionally killed in our community by the police and we're trying to track these numbers because then the fight for ensas has gone off the streets and the media may not probably put so much attention on it again, doesn't mean that the fight has stopped, it doesn't mean that police brutality is handed, it doesn't mean that the smearness of harassment has stopped and I was also part of the judicial panel of enquiry in Lagos where we asked that panels of enquiry set up to look into the independent panels, to look into those issues, these issues of the sexual judicial killing, these issues of torture and make sure that the officers are brought to the book. And one of the most defining moments for me on the panel was when a mother came to the panel and said that she has been looking for herself for 12 years, she has disappeared in the judicial institutions and it's nowhere to be found and because she saw her son at the police station and they asked us to go and bring money so that our circle will be built and when she came back they said that your son is dead and there's nothing you can do about it and then for 12 years she has been looking for closure and she said to me at the panel if he's not like again they need to release his dead body so that I can bury him and get some sort of closure and move on. And so these are some of the concerns about police institutions where increasingly citizens are getting killed, citizens are getting no justice at the end of the institutions that are supposed to kill them just as they're getting killed by the people that are supposed to be protecting them and then the Nigerian state is looking at and then so for us for movement like Black Lives Matter and NSAS also exposes our concerns regarding complex policy issues like policing institutions, criminal justice reform, you could see that we're looking at this movement and what is happening in India as well is adding to the growing discussion on the use of civic pressure, you know, true protest, true social movement for policy security, the society that we're seeking and then at the heart of this movement you can see that young people who have always suffered the consequences of police repression, of police brutality, of police harassment. And then for us also in Nigeria our police have never been viewed to serve the people. You could think it's probably you know just trying to draw straws but then the Nigerian police for us could be an example. The one in Budapur, the one established to be a service to the people, to protect the people, they were established to exert first, you know, on the people. They were established by the colonial class to be able to make sure that the people were kept under suppression and oppression and then even after the colonial class left they have not stopped there have not been the engineered or retort, you know, to actually be a service to the people. So it's amazing that people in the in the West, you know, in the United States can talk about Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality or maybe major issues like racism. But then for us in Nigeria, Nigeria is like the world's most populous Black nation on Earth. I think it's a study that said that everyone in four Africans is in Nigeria. So in every four Africans you find at least one Nigerian and then for us in the city, in the nation of the world most populous, you know, Black country, we still have to tell our police, we still have to tell the government that Black Lives Matter and so and somebody offered in to not survive for this brutality in Nigeria. One, expect it to happen. Two, run for your day life. Three, suffer in silence if you cannot escape. Four, hope to get to the police station in one piece because there could be a possibility that I say it's an educated officer there because then we have, we are recruiting people who do not understand what policing should be into the service. Why are we pushing for me in my words? I say why are we putting mad people into the police force. We're putting our guns into the hands of mentally unstable people who should not be in the police force at all because some of them even drive their way into the force. Five, don't use big words with Nigerian police officers. Don't use words like extravagant, you know, these big words because they don't understand what you're saying. Six, do as you're told. Seven, be polite. Even if they aggravate you, you can tell them that you can tell Nigerian police that I know my rights so stop harassing me. Just be polite. And then eight, hope that all your relatives, you know, find you fast because you could disappear in the system. They could kill you off in the police station and make sure that no one finds you. In 2012, there was a news that broke out in the country where about close to, I think more than 20 bodies so were found in a river in the southeast in Nigeria. There are bodies of young Nigerians who have been tortured and harassed in a police cell in Nigeria. It's one of the most notorious sas police cells unit in Anambra State. I think that article is actually online and those bodies were dumped in the river by the policemen until today nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been jailed. Nobody has been sent to prison for those bodies that were found. So for us, the police have always been used by the ruling class, you know, by the incumbent party to serve their own, to serve their own interests, to serve their own alignment. When you have issues of insecurity currently that is plaguing Nigeria's of this moment, the Nigerian police is nowhere to be found. But then when it is time to extort and harass and brutalize and extraditionally kill young Nigerians, then you can find them there. For us also, this is the right to existence. We haven't been dealt with a lot of things, you know, for Nigerians. You have to ask the government for a better life. You have to ask the government for jobs for safe spaces. But then you can't even ask for these things when you're still struggling to leave. And that was what led some of us onto the streets during the NSAS movement and made me become a frontliner because then the 16-year-old girl was cute. Her name was Tina Ezekwe. She was a school leaver that was supposed to write a school living exams and was killed by a police officer, by a stray blood of a drunk police officer. And then to me, it was a case of someone, an average person just like me in Nigeria because also, I think she was killed a few days by the police a few days after Judge Floyd. And for me, the issues that it embodied was marginalisation because I know that coming from a marginalized community myself, my family would have been in aspirant shoes with no access to justice, no access to wealth. So I was obligated to rise up and do something because I didn't want to die. And also, you know, like Sharma said, for us too, the police has been the repressive hogar of state rule. They have been the means by which our lives, our safety have been placed at the mercy of bureaucratic and personalistic rulers who use them for what they want, control the police for what they want. They have been protected by the police. Other than the police protecting the people, the police are only protecting the interests of the region. So for me, I think that those are some of the issues, the fact that our police, like I said, they're not actually for the people. They are for the 1% of the 1% of the politicians that can afford to make sure that they are doing their will. They've also, ever since time immemorial, as far as Nigerians can know, even right before independence, always been a repressive hogar for Nigerians. And there have been a lot of extradition killings undocumented that have been ongoing in the country, even before the end-sales protests started. And the end-sales protests as well, it could see what young Nigerians were on the streets for modern or close to two weeks talking about asking for accountability for particularly brutal police force that are responsible for dozens of extradition killing torture and ill treatment. I tell people that think of the worst thing that can happen to the police cell, and it wouldn't still come close what happens in the Nigerian police cells because then it's much more worse than that. So that has been, and then during the protests as well, you saw how you could see how the same thing that Nigerian, young Nigerians were fighting against, shouting against, were on the streets against, crying against, repeated itself. We did that and the repression. Also, there have been a lot of people that are still in prison for just protesting against police brutality. And I said to myself, we were asking for anti-police brutality, and then we're still facing the police brutality during protests where so many young people were killed. Like I said, where many others have been arrested in justly or justly rather. Bank accounts were found as frozen. Passports were seized. The passport was seized as well. People were placed on no fly list and couldn't leave the country. Other had to leave the country through other means rather than the airport. A lot of people were detained by the state's security service just for simply asking for an end to police brutality, just for simply asking for a right to leave. And then for us in Nigeria, like I said, again, the role of the police is to maintain the social order so that those in power can do their business, release some instruction if possible, if you know that the police can come to your house and pick you up and you could get to disappear in the jail in the prison for years. I mean, I'm also, my organization was also working with a lot of prison reform institutions. And you find people that have been in jail for a lot of years, 11 years, 12 years, 15 years for not committing any crime. Really crime they've committed is refusing to be extorted by the police or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And some of these people, when we're trying to get their release, they are not, no compensation on who comes from the state is different from in the West where if people are unjustly incarcerated, they get some sort of compensation. For us, it doesn't happen that way for the policing institution in Nigeria. As well, some of these issues are also caused by the working conditions that the government provides. The same police that it relies on to beat up protesting people or young people. And then this precarious situation, make the police come to their guns and their uniforms as an extra means of earning an extra income. And that's what happens basically in Nigeria. And that's what was still dealing with on astronomical scale, as the day increases. Because even if the protests, the global movement of answers happened in 2020, there was a bit of a spike for like three months where the police were sort of couch, but because of the attitude of the state's government, where I like to say that Nigerian politicians or leaders are not interested in ending police brutality, they have no will to do so because the police have their interests of suppression, they have their interests of domination, they have their interests of oppression. So why should I end the police brutality enables to be in power? And so we've had an increase in cases of extortion, harassment and extradition killing happening in the country since 2020. And it seems like there's no light at the end of the tunnel for Nigerians as we keep dealing with this police brutality with the government of the day doesn't rise and do something about it. However, I think that we've managed to record a lot of small wins which should not be discounted. So I would say in a pattern that there will always be resistance to change, change will not just give way at once, but then as you keep on doing what you can do to make sure that the system is changed, things will definitely get better. So there will things, there will always be resistance to change but without your actions, without our conversations with us, having the social movement and keep pushing and get better. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was a really powerful ending as well, to give us some courage to going. I think it's really useful to have a perspective of somebody on the ground fighting for this stuff every day and another testimony of how that price must be on the United States and how the struggles have been going on for a long time, a lot longer than what some people are currently waking up to and you've been fighting for a long time and energy is ongoing. It's not going to get lost as well from back in. Thank you so much. That really, really powerful book. I wanted to open up to questions on if anybody has any, just unmute yourself or raise your hand or whatever. May in the meantime, while you're wringing your hands, I thought I just had one question which was, it ties into upshelts during the time we were saying which is that we need to go beyond the decision between the global south, global north and because I can find myself caught in two sentiments, which is one, we need to go beyond US, but then two, when we do, we don't see a lot of people in the sort of global north kind of pointing to the global south to kind of exceptionalism to say, look how tyrannical, look how barbaric these nations are, these systems of police violence and I almost myself going back and saying, no, no, hold on a minute, you're running from the US, we're just some of the most barbaric police violence, so I kind of catch myself competing these two ideas. I wondered if you have that kind of frustration or how I navigate this idea of shining a spotlight on police violence in Nigeria, how kind of giving in colonial narratives that then exceptionalise these sorts of police violence, is that something you do yourself navigating? I want you to sort of rephrase the question, I think get the question properly. Sure, so I just wondered if you find yourself fighting against your narrative, which is one, not wanting to exceptionalise this, but then also not wanting to give in to colonial narratives, which often exceptionalise country in Africa and to kind of point to these countries almost uncivilised. And I wondered if you if you face that kind of narrative when you when you give to us and when you speak to people or maybe that's not something you experience. Yeah, of course, we've had to deal with some of the colonial narratives regarding the police in institutions that are happening in Nigeria. However, I like to say that the colonial have left Nigeria since the 1960s, and this is the 21st century, we're still dealing with politality. And for me, I see it as even if if the left something bad, I mean, you have the you have the power now to change it into into a good force for yourself and for your nation. So for me, it's that what I say as well is that the rulers inherited something and they didn't want it to change. So they also kept using that systems also for their own interests. So if we wanted to change every Nigerian government, so all our successive rulers rather wanted to change the state of Odesian in Nigeria since the 1960s, they would have. But then, like I said, in the in the world's most popular black nation or not, we still have to remind black that that the black life still matters or won't black be that's still looking at Nigerians. Just the hands of the officers on the streets have been extorted and they're not doing about anything about it. So would we really say it is still about colonial oppression or would we just say, this is just, you know, people being human being oppressive humans in general. So at times in those narratives could come up. I think that for us in Nigeria, it's about leaders or rulers, you know, institutions of the states that I've never talked about, then serving the people, but then serving their own interests. Did I answer that question? Thanks so much. Vanessa, you have your hand up. Thanks for joining us as well. Yeah, thank you and apologies for being late and that I missed. Yeah, I just actually jumped into the last present. No, the presentation before. I'm Vanessa Thompson. I'm an abolitionist scholar working in Europe, but with movements all over the black diaspora, particularly about police abolition, but how this is also connected to border abolition, the abolition of militarism, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex. Thank you for this presentation. I was wondering, and maybe this could also speak also to the presenter before, because I do, although I do completely agree with the critique of US centrism, and that's not only a critique that unfolds in the so-called global north and south, that's something we've also seen in Europe, right, that many black movements, because it's not only that police has this kind of colonial institution externally, but also the role in terms of settler colonialism, and even within Europe itself, the founding of the police was necessary for the establishment of racial capitalism, right? Even within Europe, the police was always there to punish the poor and to make bodies suitable for capitalist exploitation. And of course, Frans Fanon has shown how this translates in the colonial context, that it was super brute, super violent, super violent to gain the kind of super exploitation. And I'm wondering, because I do agree with the kind of that we need to de-center the US, but I would also suggest to look at more the kind of transnational formations that are already happening. Like a lot of, like as an activist scholar and working with black movements in Europe, a lot of the movements are already drawing the connections. Like for instance, there were several manifestations in solidarity with ensas, in Berlin, in Frankfurt, and not only by the Nigerian community, but really like trying to understand a black international. And what was interesting that that was even then, I mean, we can see that now also with solidarity with what is happening in Sudan, right, where we see massive police repression. And I think their questions come up, and that's what I'm looking at in my work of an abolitionist international, like how various solidarity movements are already building transnational connections, although they're very, very porous and even kind of vulnerable. And I was wondering, Rino, if you could talk more on that, on the kind of transnational dimensions of these struggles, like our movements connected also beyond Nigeria and how that looks like, and also because abolition is always about alternatives, right, about the kind of different worlds that are built without punishment and without exploitation. And how would you see actually abolitionist practices that are already in place, like the fund is one strategy of abolition, of course. But I don't know, are there kind of models like transformative justice, you know, to really try to not only keep the police away, but to find different modes of being safety within the communities. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. And I'll start from the last part. You know, so there is this saying in Nigeria, what the police say, they say that the police force motor is the police is your friend. So they all, they repeat that a lot. And I do a bit of spaces where I invite public leaders and, and, you know, toad leaders in the society to come and discuss one of, it's on Twitter, Twitter spaces. And then I had the public relations officer, you know, of the police, Nigerian police force come on the space, because there was a case, there were rising cases of extortion in one of the north central states in Nigeria and we'll let you talk about that. And he said the police is your friend. They were trying to, the fact that they, because I asked the question, why had the police everywhere, every, every, every stop in the streets in this state, you have police everywhere. You know, we get the fact that Nigeria is ravaged by insecurity and terrorism, but then that's not in the south. That's happening in the north. And in the north where there is a lot of insecurity and terrorism, you don't even know the police there. So the basis of being on the streets is not for the protection of the community. It is for extortion. It is for indiscriminate arrest. They could just go into a neighbourhood just like Shamir said, and arrest people and, and take them off to detention. And then you don't know that those, those, those people are there. Those people can be legally detained there for, for days and you don't know they're there because they want to stop them. So why are the police on the streets when there is no imminent threat in the south? And then he talked about community policing and, and the fact that they need to, they need to be on the streets. I said community policing is not about police being everywhere. It's not about police that stops each, each and every kind of, why is the public relations officer of the Nigerian police force telling me that public community policing is about having the police stationed every few metres, but the time nearly this, they had the next topic starting to leave this topic at the next topic. You could find like hundreds of police checkpoints in a particular state. Why are you telling me that it's related to community policing? That is not related to community policing. We don't even have enough police officers in Nigeria. That is where we can't talk about defonding the police as a strategy in Nigeria with the movement because these guys are even very funded in the first place. However, we could talk about community policing, but then talking with one of the highest ranked police officer and is relating community policing to something else, it's not definitely what you think they are going to say because then these guys don't understand what they're saying. They probably just got the word from somewhere and then they think that they're doing the job and then they're not doing the job. One of the things we're talking about also is community policing, is that the police need to work together in tandem with the neighborhood to be able to make sure that crime rates are reduced, to be able to make sure that the public gives information, timely information to the police on time and reduce the rate of crimes and also the presence of the police in these neighborhoods, but then what do you find also is that we have a trust deficit? We are institutions, I mean a lot of Nigerians from the government to the judicial institutions, there is a trust gap where the police today no longer trust the police, the citizens today no longer trust the police. Approaching a police checkpoint for me as an Nigerian is, I feel distaste, I feel anger, I feel frustration because then I know these people are going to do something to me that I would not get justice. So there is a lot of anger, you find that there are cases of citizen retaliation against police officers in some part of Nigeria now because then people have seen that the government is not going to offer any sort of help or justice so they are choosing to go after the police themselves. So for us in the Nigerian interest context we do not bring in the defending police because then we also have issues of intercarriage and terrorism and then the government comes and say, and particularly when you start talking about the funding of the police then you find that the police do not respond to emergencies at all and then they are kept off from their normal posts, they don't respond to emergency response calls, they don't respond to any sort of criminal activity and then the government deliberately takes them off the streets so that there could be more criminal activity on the streets and then so that the general populace would say, oh these guys were preventing a bit of the crime so we turned them. So it's a very hard struggle for us in Nigeria which is when you have to deal with the evolution of the police and all of that but then also we have a militarised state in Nigeria and the government pins that on the intercarriage and terrorism. You have military everywhere, you have guns everywhere, you have uniforms everywhere, it is very restrictive even in one of the, even in the safest states you still have these guys stationed everywhere and it is hard for you to talk about it, it is hard for you to say this is not how people should be living because the issue of intercarriage is that, the issue of terrorism is that, the issue of the issue of crime is that. So then for us what we're trying to do is to make sure that people that are in the police force are at least psychologically stable people to be able to effectively pull these individuals. I was saying earlier that we have mad people in the police force in Nigeria, they're not mentally stable people and that's why one of the requests for the NSAS movement was the psychological evaluation of these police officers of each of them to force you to be able to know that these guys that were putting our guns into their psychological stable also were asking for an increase in their salary so that they will not have to turn to using their guns to extort the citizens. One of the things we did was to also set up inquiries, panels of inquiries to be able to look into the actions of the police. What have they been doing? Who have they extorted? Who have these guys killed? Can they come to the panel? But then you find out that there are also a bit of people who do not want to come up, people have given up on any form of institution that wants to sort of give them justice, right? So I mean basically I said earlier what we are trying to do on their hands is keep documenting these cases, keep tracking out these cases because every effort that we want to make would not come to fruition if we do not have a government that is willing to act but then our government is currently also resisting the civic pressure that people are putting on to be able to make sure that they do anything. I already set reason for that. Also for the transnational social movement that are currently happening today you have people taking from me what has happened to George Floyd and seeing how a black man has been killed in the west and the states did not want to do anything about it. So what we are doing now is taking strength from each movement, taking strength from the movement happening in Myanmar into that. They fixed the country in Ghana. Gambias decided SSOT in South Sudan movement happening in Senegal and taking strength from each other. So you have that during the NSAS movement people were not just protesting in Nigeria just like it said, you have people in London, you have people in America and some of them a majority of them maybe were not even Nigerians they were just people that found voices and wanted to support the movement, wanted to have solidarity to the movement. So I think that we also need some of that a lot of that today because there will be repression in our states but then when the governments, these governments we have to they see that there is solidarity across borders they will be forced to do something. So if young people have been shot and killed in Nigeria and the young people in New York are still protesting they will have to do something because then even if you take young people off the streets in Nigeria or in London you can take them off the streets in every country not every government you know can't do that and I think that that is very important that's also an important lesson we learnt for us in Nigeria that your movement should not just be restricted to your country it should be intercontinental actually there were people protesting in Ghana I met one last week it told me they were protesting at the Nigerian Embassy he's a Kenyan they were protesting at the Nigerian Embassy in Kenya during the protests I didn't know that they were protesting in Kenya and it is also an opportunity to be able to to know that your movement has given hope to others as they are also starting up their own social movement and taking experiences and lessons from what has happened in Nigeria. I don't want to take a lot of time thank you I'm so sorry Oliver. No thank you very much for that really deep response really changed it. I know that Leandro had his hand up but I know that Shosa and Sam and Sam want to respond to the question. Leandro it was yours another question was it uh you okay because then we've got to get to the accurate presentation as well but Shelter and Amia please you offer some brief responses to Vanessa. Yeah I'll try to keep it brief and I just want to say that I resonated a lot with what Reno was saying about the mechanics of how the police actually operate within the global south physically within the Indian context and while she was presenting as well I think the one point if I was to think about if I had to stress on something which is particularly non-US specific is the how embedded police impunity is within these countries and she said it very well and how historically the distrust of the state and the police is actually built in. It's sometimes surprising to me that we don't have equivalent you know kind of social movements as the Black Lives Matter or you know this kind of systematic understanding of the police within the South Asian context but we have community understandings of the fact that police is bad so that is not equivalent to having campaigns that are built around having specific demands but the communities live in specific ways where they know that you know in this era in 1980 all community like this particular minority was completely you know raised out from this particular city by the police and what not so it's sometimes surprising but also it's not it's also the way these countries or the violence in these countries the way that communal policing in these countries I think functions. The other thing I think what also Reno kind of responded with was the idea of community policing as one of the responses that US you know that that brings in just adding to that that the community within again the Global South or the specifically the Indian context is very complicated and Somya said that in her presentation that you know the understanding that now the foot soldiers of this government which are known as the RSS are appointed and have historically been appointed with forces of the state as police friends police mythors to kind of police minorities police religious and other minorities in the country to do their bidding to do the bidding of the state which is corporatisation which is communal violence so again like if you say community policing in India it'll be a different different context you know it'll it'll be castus it'll be gendered it'll be so it is a confusion from my end as well coming from the Indian context how we talk about abolition which obviously that is something that we understand as activists and whatnot but how do we translate that in the Indian context and the other thing is obviously again defunding the police does the does the Indian police even get that much money to for us to be actually saying that we need to defund the police um and you know the fact that the US is the global police it it the war on terror meant that 2000s onwards we had laws which specifically targeted the UN resolution minorities and Muslims even in India anti-terror laws that specifically you know criminalized such a large population what does that kind of also mean in this you know um yeah so those so many thoughts and so many confusions when I remember also reading so much around the agenda of what abolition means and how it actually translates because I do not find myself and that can be my limitation and find myself actually resonating with it although I do understand the intuitions of doing this so because violence is so central but in a very different way within the global south or the Indian context so yeah that that was my preliminary thoughts and doubts of course. Thank you. Did you have any thoughts this time as well? Yeah I'll try I'll try to be quick um I know this is a very big topic and uh maybe we'll have time in the end to talk about it um thank you Reno I think I also like Shelds are related a lot to the kinds of harm that you're seeing um and I also really appreciate your question Oliver about um the managing the global south and global north uh thing I just wanted to say one point about that that I think that it seems so uh for much of the year most of the time I'm in the US because that's where I'm doing my doctoral studies and I feel very much that that point comes up for me when I'm there because it's relevant there to remind people that there isn't a unique barbarism happening in the colonies of outside but actually it's pretty pretty barbaric all around when it comes to the police um so but when I'm in India I don't feel like that struggle comes up for me and I'm much more geared towards you know listening to other people from the global south sharing this experience and having a conversation with them um which kind of shifts the the context I think shifts my perspective a little bit and I thought that might be useful to think about um I also wanted to say that I I really appreciate um your comments Vanessa about the existing transnational solidarities um and here this is something Sheldah and I talk about a lot because I think that if you were to look at the US context you will find also similarly that in community there is racism like that's not if you just leave it to the community you will still find the punitive techniques reproducing themselves and so which is why the point that we tend to make is that the abolition like abolition would not be possible in the Indian context without the annihilation of caste like it won't happen without that in the same kind of way that it won't happen without the abolition of racial capitalism so I think that those are all fairly interconnected things but the point that we were trying to make also through our presentation was to say that if you were to appreciate the particularities of the mechanisms and logics of policing it allows you to think of the ways that we can get to a different world and a transformative world very differently so for example the defund the police example allows us to see that that maybe defund the police is not the answer here even if our goals end up are are similar maybe that is not the tactic that we necessarily need and so using the same tactics may not actually end up and help us end up in the same kind of transformative world that we want to see our abolitionist world that we want to see um yeah just wanted to add that thank you so much because it's really helpful that you brought together a lot of amusing thoughts in my mind like it makes it very well so thanks to all of you for that um I just wanted to now bring in Leandro sorry it's a lot of you Leandro um I hope we can be out of it a little you know precious and you need to um need to leave um so Leandro uh we love to take from you as well um you see my screen now yes okay um okay first off thank you for all previous presentations um it's been really really enlightening and inspiring and even though it's I mean the topics that we work on are very heavy of course and also the comments so my name is Leandro I work at Stockholm University I'm a criminologist and I will let's see if I can make this work yeah I will address some of the topics that or some of the questions that you have brought up during the other presentation but my presentation differs of course because I work from Sweden which is a very small country with nine million inhabitants compared to I mean Nigeria or India which are have different histories so um but I'm gonna start briefly by presenting myself and then highlight my work on racial profiling uh which I've been been working on for the couple the last couple of years and then address the question of the the of the workshop which is I mean thinking or theorising beyond the the United States and yeah and then finally open up for for for questions so that's my my plan for these just in 20 minutes um and I think I've already presented myself I'm a criminologist I'm an activist scholar working with uh currently with a community centre in Husby which I will talk a little bit more about and Husby is situated in one of the poorest neighborhoods in in in Stockholm which is the capital of of Sweden uh so uh but I get to that so uh on on the topic of racial profiling so this uh the the question uh was uh my daughter is here in my house so I'll be close to windows sorry um so in 2013 uh suddenly this discussion appeared in Sweden uh and it was so so it's the topic of racial profiling has been I mean discussed in the Swedish context for not so many years and what happened in 2013 was that we had uh and we had a police operation which is the photo on the bottom uh which was targeting uh so-called illegal immigrants where they were trying to identify people and in in order to to deport them so and and what did the police do? Well they went to different subway stations and stopped people who don't look Swedish and what does that mean? Well I mean and this is a a central problem in the Swedish context which is that the idea is that Swedish is a white country so Swedes are white but the problem is that Sweden has transformed because of immigration since the 1970s and even before that I mean the idea of Sweden as a white country is actually a very uh I mean it's a construction which is the the the point with the uh the other scandal that happened in 2013 also uh on the lines which is with a scandal with the police in the south of Sweden had been registering all Roma people and and the Roma population has been around in Sweden for for more than 500 years and so they had like registered like 4 000 people who had not committed in a crime but because they were Roma so the and the police in the first instance they were like this is not a illegal registration but an file where we so they had all these type of arguments that they put forward but in later stages when they were brought to to justice and actually were condemned for for discrimination which I think is important to highlight that we have this one of the few cases in Sweden where the police has been having brought to justice because of problems with racism but and that this is a key key point nothing changes so the the the state is is lost because the police as the the the state as were convicted for discrimination but no police officer or no police chief was lost his job or her job so nothing happens within the police organization so these ideas still exist within the police institution and I think that's I mean a very big problem in Sweden that that the police institution is intact no matter how much criticism we bring forward or how much or or whatever happens outside outside its its parameters so in 2013 we started having this discussion about racial profiling that doesn't mean and that's I think it's very important to underline that doesn't mean that we haven't had problems with police racism or discussion about discrimination within the police system but we are very inspired by the US discussion and then it is translated into the Swedish context in 2013 and it is within that context and with that that movement or with that I mean the social movement who brought that topic to the forefront in the Swedish public domain that I brought my dissertation which is called race in order critical perspectives on crime in Sweden and I mean Sweden is a very rich country and we I mean my colleagues within the criminological field they do studies about everything especially about the crime of immigrant of people with immigrant descent or I mean there are different concepts and categories that are used to to pinpoint groups racialized as non-white but since the 1970s there have been a numerous amount of studies on this topic while I mean and this is a big shortcoming research on racism and especially research on racism and policing is extremely underdeveloped I mean the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention which is like a state organ state in state I mean who do a lot of the state funded research concerning matters of crime and they in a report they made the following comment they said bias treatment has hardly been studied in the other Nordic countries and in Sweden most studies are published before 2010 and after that only three studies have that data material that covers the time period after 2010 and none of these newer studies address the police so I mean in a in a society like the Swedish one where there's a lot of studies done on I mean whatever none of these or almost none address the problem with the police so so I think that's a very important I mean as a researcher that's the point from where I start to think I mean there's a big absence of knowledge or at least academic knowledge because within the communities there's a lot of knowledge about police racism of course yeah separate those so what I've did and what I've done during my research is that I've interviewed I mean I've done interviews with police officers I will not go into that so much in these presentations but I mean when I interview police officers about racial profiling they say no we don't use this tactic etc so they so different forms of neutralisation techniques are are invoked by the police to to say race is not a topic or a matter within the swedish context we work with facts we work we're colorblind etc and then I also of course grounded my work on on interviews with people subjected to racial or ethnic profiling and so I've interviewed Afro Swedes Muslims people with Roma background and I mean and also many young men especially young men living in the peripheral more poorer neighborhoods where the levels of people with migrant background round is about I mean it can be up to 80% in some of these neighborhoods so that's where I'm conducted my interview so and what I've also done is I've done this work with Folketshusby which is like a community center in in in Stockholm I don't know if anybody has been to Stockholm but it's like in the one of the peripheral areas one of the poorest areas and it is surrounded by also Tenstan, Rinkebyn and these neighborhoods together are called the Järva område and it's been the epicenter of deadly violence and shootings the last years in Sweden with nine people shot to death in Sweden in 2020 so and I think also this number is I mean if you I don't know the numbers from Nigeria or or India or even England but I mean Sweden is a very small country and we have about 40 killings which are related to to what the police call organized crime per year more or less 40 more so if you have nine in one area it's a lot in that context but Järva is also one of the poorest areas of Sweden with about 80 to 90% of the population with foreign background depending on how you how you count and how you measure and and I mean you see here some some news footage on the on the right side with with media cover coming to to address what is happening in Sweden with this with this problem and and theoretically I think it's very important to underline that I mean Sweden has has transformed a lot the last decades I mean there's a transformation of the welfare state into a very neoliberal system it is marked by welfare chauvinism I think we see that across Europe authoritarian populism where hard I mean our authorities are are are advancing harder sentences more policing I mean also private security guards having a more important role in society etc and then also penal nationalism or penal racism if you would would like it because those who are targeted are of course racialized minorities or or ethnic minorities depending on the language you prefer so and so in my in my work I've tried to highlight the topic of racial profiling inspired by the by by US writings and also writings from the UK of course that's also why it's so interesting to hear about the the experiences from from both India and and Nigeria and especially underlining it as an everyday experience of over policing I mean we don't have the problem with shoot deadly shootings from the police in the same amount as in the US context or or as you indicated you know in Nigeria with with all the problems who would lead to to like torture etc etc but it is an an an experience of everyday policing for example this guy that I interviewed a man who's 25 living in Stockholm he said I was walking with a couple of friends it was a regular evening nothing special suddenly police stop in front of us they get out and push us up against the car it happened for no reason whatsoever none of us was wearing anything strange none of us had anything to do with the police before it was a question of our appearance we're black so we saw another group of guys in front of us all of them white they want to stop this is something that happens continuously I can tell you about several similar experiences it's nothing unusual so for some segment of the patient it's nothing unusual to be stopped from a very early age like 12 13 years old and then are continually stopped and harassed and I mean there are of course experiences of of violence in these encounters I mean symbolic violence and other forms of direct violence but in many instances what the police are are doing is asking for ID or or trying to control in a morse I mean violence in its most subtle forms in essence and and this guy in the bottom it's a news article about a guy who was Thomas who had been stopped for 150 times when he tried he worked in Copenhagen and he travels to back and forth between Sweden and Denmark because of work so he had this control 150 times during the last year so he had to start to film every encounter so he became like a discussion identical underlining the problem with some people especially young men with racialised as non-white being stopped frequently by the police and then when we did this community survey with Folketusby I mean this is a I indicate we was a small community survey conducted together with the people the inhabitants there so we went out and we had like 30 questions and so and and and we we we developed the survey because I mean as I indicated before there's no no there is there is very few very little knowledge about the problem about with racism in in in the Swedish society so we asked have you been stopped by the police during the last 12 months and of the the 750 person who will respond to our survey which is actually I mean a classic tactic by by critical criminologists working with communities a technique 45 percent said of the the respondent's answer that they had been stopped by the police and especially was young men but also as the numbers and unfortunately they are in swedish 26 percent of the women who responded the survey also said I've been stopped by the police the last so in some places in some neighbourhoods in sweden to be stopped and and controlled by the police is a very frequent experience and it happens I mean it's it's become normal life in in a sense even though it's never normal because so was an abuse and every abuse is is special so and what's interesting with the survey that we did was that we also asked okay but we also tried to address the the problem with I mean who is stopped is it is it randomly and it's of course it's not randomly but there's a system a racial system there so so we divided the statistics on background and what you see here in the bottom is of the of the those who have been stopped 53.9 so 54 percent of the people had of those with background in in in africa and the middle east so more than about half of the of those who have been stopped had background in in the middle east or in africa in different parts of africa and then you see background in asia and background in south or central america like myself it's it's a smaller portion of the of those who have been stopped so you see the like the right racial hierarchy of police stops in this in this and in the last it's background in the in the north and I want to stress that I mean these statistics that we have collected is not I mean you cannot generalize from this survey but it's indicative of the situation in in in in husby of course but also I would argue in other poor urban areas where populated by I mean the racialized working class in Sweden so my first point that I want to make is that I mean we see we have the problem with over controls and I mean if you read the literature from the US you see the problem with I mean walking while black or driving while black and you see the same type of stories or same type of experiences being repeated by young people in in the the the Swedish context so so so it it is expressed in in similar ways but then and this is a very important argument that I also want to stress and I we and I raised my hand because I would like I mean understand that the role and the task of the police is to enforce the current order the current racial order the current capitalist order the cast order whatever I mean in different context it's the different groups who rule but they want to in different ways use the police or the police is used to enforce the order but I mean the idea with the police is that they should solve crime I mean that's that's the that's why we have them or what that's why we should have them and and so the second argument is about racial problem profiling as a as a problem with under protection and in the community survey that we did of the 715 respondents 55 percent and knew somebody in their neighborhood who had lost their life in this little violence that we've seen in in in the area so I mean the the whole community is is is affected by the the high indices of little violence in in the the area and the problem is that the police is not doing their job they're not solving the the the violent crime but they're constantly stopping and harassing young people for for minor offenses and most often not for any offense at all so one of the the the men that I interviewed he said the following say a month ago there was a gunfight in Husby somebody had mixed up the card that my brother and his friends were sitting in and fired several shots at him they were injured but miraculously they survived the ambulance didn't dare to come until the police were on site so when the police get there everyone's everyone's screaming where's the ambulance the guys start to argue with the police that's when the police grab hold of my brother and say you're not going nowhere while he's bleeding from his face there's a fuss and the police put the guys in a car then the ambulance arrives only after they've been free uh are they taken to the hospital so I mean these guys are treated as criminals and not as people have been injured in a in a deadly uh in a in a cross in the crossfire so there's a criminalisation of people for being uh I mean black or or racialized and not as not as not white uh and and I think that I mean I'm a very uh a very striking difference between the situation in Sweden and the situation in for example Nigeria as you were as Reena was discussing is that in Sweden people trust the police and people trust the police to to provide security so that's why it's a very important anti-racist task to highlight and indicate that the police are distributing security very differently across urban space and across different populations of the of the of the population uh so they're not doing their job so they're they're repressing people and and so what's actually their function um so so this is my last slide and then I will try open up for questions um so racial profiling is a very powerful terminology in the swedish in a Nordic context to address problems with the with police repression because uh it's I mean Sweden is there's a very strong understanding of Sweden as a colorblind equal just society where there's no racism etc etc which is false and it's been false since the premise of the the construction of the nation state system because it was grounded on this idea that everyone was white and everyone was Christian and and I mean the Roma weren't Christian and the the the Roma population were sterilized etc etc so it would be not like a very and the Sami population in the north of Sweden also had had the same history and and then um I mean the the the Finns who are now regarded as as white in the in the 70s they were not regarded as white but regarded as I mean as more like Eastern Europeans or whatever so I mean who Sweden was constructed as a very specific white homogeneous society excluding producing categories of of inhabitants as as the other and and who is the other has transformed over the years now it's not for example the Finns but people especially with African origin or background and from the Middle East and and and and giving this history and especially the the the problem is when that we don't have any language to discuss problems with racism because we we don't see race racial profiling is a it's a very powerful language it provides a language to social social just movements to close in on matters of race and racism so and it also I mean it's a way to challenge this criminalizing narrative about people with immigrant descent being over over of being um I mean the bias focus on on immigrant crime in in the Swedish and Nordic and European context so it's very important to address police repression to and to advance a victimological perspective that acknowledge um problems with state violence uh state sanctioned violence of course because these people uh I mean these these tactics are are sanctioned by the state in in many regards and and with that said I mean beyond the US and and also the question is if it's beyond the the UK um my perspective and my work is uh and I I know that we as academics we need to say like this is all such a this is a new argument and this is a so innovative but my perspective is not new nor innovative uh I actually work within uh I mean I'm very inspired by the work that is done by by critical scholars in the US and also I mean in the UK in in the McPherson very famous McPherson report that I mean where it was stated that the police in in Britain had in the UK had problems with institutional racism uh David Munir representing the black church who states that the experience of black people over the last third years have been that we have been over-colleased and to a large and under-protected I mean so we see the same situation uh that was identified in the 19th in the UK in the in the Swedish context at the moment so so rather than going beyond research from the US and the UK I think it's important to draw from the critical parts of it in order to be in and of course in a strategic manner so and with that said thanks so much and I hope I I I manage within my my time limit thank you I thought the US is often seen as the uh the only start of police repression in Sweden at least from my perspective in the UK and my experience is it's in some social democratic haven or the no-cons at all so I think your research is incredibly important especially what you say about you know police there are many shootings there are many police deaths but very profiling itself as a form of violence I think that's really important well and also because Swedish it could potentially if we do this um idea of Sweden as a more equal society and it could potentially undermine the the prevalence of violence could potentially undermine our uh concepts about the relationship between policing and racial capitalism by what you've shown is that that is also a serotonin to be given for this massive increase in inequality and neoliberalism um that's kind of a shatworth estate so um I think that's really important so thanks so much um I there's a question from heli in the chat um which is that during COVID um there was a noticeable one noticeable increase in stop and search and racial profiling um heli knows that there was no lockdown um so resuming we would expect little to no loss in ratios and then we have Vanessa as well so um a tough task if you if it fails I mean get those more questions so much sorry you want me to go Andrew sorry I mean this uh a different I mean I should have said that in the presentation I mean it's in the US context and in the UK if you go into government I mean UK.gov you have the stats on how many the police stop and so you have a lot of documentation and then the police I don't know how you evaluate it from a from from a UK perspective if it's good or bad or whatever but I guess that that produces a different type of of of discussion at least and you can show that during COVID there was a lot of people from the racialized community who were stopped because of these laws that were introduced during the COVID but we don't have that type of statistics in Sweden because we don't measure race or ethnicity or whatever I mean however we want to to identify or or define this this this concept so so we can't say what happened but I think it's very interesting that that the Swedish strategy of which was very mild compared to other places was in that sense less repressive because we didn't give all the powers to the police the police hadn't an important role in that in that context so so in in different discussions I I with I think that's important to remember that the police were not the the institution and forced to safeguard us from from COVID in Sweden it was done in a more a more ffocodian way with our we had to stay at home etc etc if we had a call thank you so much thank you much Andrew I know where you have to leave so just want to thank so much for everything you've done for us in this session thanks for such a wonderful position we really appreciate you sharing the time um yeah hope we can operate again so thank you on the yeah that's super interesting Andrew but I remember we similar thing in Norway where we visited a prison in a way and we asked the authorities how many black prisoners are there here and we were so offended by the question they said we mean we don't keep we don't know almost as if they you know they were very they were out of this kind of a color blind which which is just so a um so a lot of people in here watching a lot people put this alien to me and I've seen it so unhelpful um and almost just to pretend like it's just a joint warranty that exists despite saying well I don't know because you'll treat me as equal citizens which is very very very weird um Vanessa you had a question yes thank you Leandro for this for this presentation um which I find really crucial and very interesting also looking at racist policing in Europe because I I find it very interesting that the debates around racial profiling in many western european countries and northern european countries as far as I because I was a bit following the work also some of the colleagues have been doing in the northern european countries that the debate like started around 12 around 2012 2013 so I think that's very interesting although a lot of the movements were not really connected I know you had MPAD and some of the movements that really brought also racial profiling um to the agenda and I think there's something interesting um here to look at particularly also with regard to contexts that do not measure race and don't really have racial ethnic statistic or at least do not conduct them I was wondering so one question is maybe just to to to reformulate because I do I don't really think that it's a paradox that police is upholding the social social order and thereby only like you said distribute security different differently I think that's the kind of differentiality of policing that is inherent to to it to the institution of police or to policing as a as a mode of control and criminalization because also the question is what do we understand um when we think of crime right so also how biopolitics and acropolitics are always intervened in the kind of racial capitalist system but that's more a remark I think the question I have is um how do you like what are kind of calls from the racialized communities that are critical of racial profiling as well as racist death by police which do happen in in that context too I'm asking this question because I think in the current conjuncture when we look for instance when I work in the German and France context and also dealing with Switzerland where these issues are like since at least 10 years more and more debated um and I think that's that's where it is so important that we go beyond the kind of question of statistic because we see from the US and the UK that doesn't really stop the violence of policing right so it's the question like what to do with statistics who's in a way conducting the statistics and for what and is that even a claim by movements and the other question is because what I observed in the German context particularly with the struggles against racial profiling was a bit this kind of move why are we controlled we are citizens we've done nothing wrong but this separates from the struggles of migrants who are pushed into illegalized economies and maybe have to sell drugs sometimes right that's the issue for instance at the Berlin girl it's a park so I think the question of nationality here comes in also in terms of the of the claims and struggles of movement and I was wondering if you could talk about this more so you have several very big questions and I think that all are amazing and very I mean thought provoking um I mean for me uh I I I see myself as an activist scholar so I want to produce knowledge that is uh can be used and then we also have to publish in in these theoretical magazines etc but so when we do this community survey we produce the data why do we produce data because there's a need to say oh we have these facts about how many uh people have been stopped because of the shortage of of facts from the state that then but of course as you're in I mean there are being voices especially for afro sweets uh afro the afro swedish forum for justice who want to have police data on based on race uh on who they stop and search uh from from the Roma population uh they are much more critical towards that type of data because their history within the Swedish I mean they don't want to be registered by this repressive state apparatus so we have different view points I would argue depending on the your history in the and your experience of the Swedish state uh but that's absolutely a discussion and there's conflicting uh views I would say uh I think it's very I mean from my perspective uh I would be very glad I think it's enough that the the I mean we produce all these uh statistics about who commits crime in Sweden based on uh origin where your parents are born and where your and your grandmother even I mean now we are talking about the third generation of immigrants so we even your where your grandmother is born so I mean we that would be enough for me as a as an anti-racist scholar but to have that data or based on on where you live I mean how often are you stopped if you live in a rich area or in a poor area because segregation is so in the class segregation is so intertwined with the racial and ethnic segregationist so it's it's a very complicated matter uh and it it has to do with your understanding of the state uh it's the state good do you trust the state or do you think that if the police would have uh this type of and produce this type of of knowledge what would they do with it and and that it's linked to your second remark about I mean the conflict between those who are citizens and those who are non-citizens because the from the police perspective it would be used in order to I for example find these illegal immigrants and that's not a progressive project so and and within I mean this unjust world order that we did so it's it's really I mean we work on a very I mean the police is is a repressive institution and it's it's a complicated matter and I think we have to like navigate it within the within the political conjuncture that we are and from where I stand what I see is that politically it's getting worse in Sweden with I mean the police is is more and more openly racist now we're talking about clans for example in a discourse imported from from the from Germany about families who are linked together and that's why we have criminality instead of talking about and these these these are discourse produced by the police so so so yeah so it's it's a very long answer on on your two remarks and then yeah and yes we are yeah I'm sorry sorry sorry for for for talking so much no need to apologize Joe thank you so much for that discussion where you put in both of you I love for this I really would love for this to continue I know that everybody has really important issues and stuff so like I want to keep talking to the APN but I don't want to keep you all too too much longer so unless anyone has any final questions or comments no the end of yet no no thank you everybody thank you for the question thank you for inviting us let's keep connected for sure okay fantastic so I just um want to thank you all so much for joining especially to our speakers for sharing your time and your knowledge and your wisdom and thanks Vanessa for your questions it made she got me out of having to think of the questions from the chair so there's a fantastic constructive discussion and I think you'd be able to be pointing out that these transnational solidarity do exist and not hiding them and I think this discussion in its very small way is proof of that especially you know Joe you know you're you're you're based here in the UK um a kind of building solidarity on the ground here whilst searching um probably in India you work with detention solidarity so these transnational solidarity do exist more broadly I think it's really encouraging to see that um all of you are activists um you know we hear about the academics just they all have busy ideas they don't care about making change of the world all this stuff you work here um there are a few of our kind of disproving that area um and yeah just thanks so much for such a rich kind of diverse discussion I think we uh successfully show that the question is not just the US reality um and it's given me a lot to reflect on um you know all concepts of race of caste racial capitalism neoliberalism the workplace they all have different contexts but that doesn't mean there are things you can draw together to build something of solidarity