By Adam Elliot-Cooper and Deniz Yonucu

Emergent Conversation 19

This interview is part of the series PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 19 on Racism and Policing in Global Perspective

In this interview PoLAR’s Directions Section co-editor Deniz Yonucu speaks with Adam Elliot-Cooper about his work on British policing, its colonial roots, gendered aspects, and the Black resistance to British policing.

Deniz Yonucu: How did you start working on policing in relation to racism?

Adam Elliot-Cooper: I was a youth worker in North London and East London for a number of years before the police killing of a man called Mark Duggan in 2011. At that point I started being involved in a number of community organizations challenging police violence in the city and it’s from there that I began to carry out my doctoral research on the kinds of activism that I’d become involved in. My research generally looks at state racism, policing, colonial violence and its legacies. But I’m also interested in cultural studies as well and thinking about how cultures of resistance can help us to understand the different ways that people are challenging these forms of inequality and injustice.  Doing youth work in East London, running educational projects with young people in the Northeast London borough of Hackney in 2010 and 2011 got me interested in what it was young people were motivated by and what young people would be engaged with. We always want to talk to young people about what kind of issues they faced and try to engage them in social and political discussions. Consistently policing arose as the issue which they wanted to discuss and talk about and take action upon—whether it was experiencing harassment or violence or neglect at the hands of the police themselves or one of their friends or someone in their family or somebody in their community. Policing was an entry point into wider social political discussions and action. I was asking questions like “Ok, so you don’t feel that the police protect you. If the police don’t protect you, who are they protecting?  What are they protecting if not you?”  and through that we could have conversations about class, racialization, and all of these different forms of hierarchy and power within society. I think it was really by using policing to have these wider kind of social and political questions being asked I began to be interested in taking these kinds of youth work and educational initiatives and turning it into something with more depth.

Deniz Yonucu: As you mention in your book, Black Resistance to British Policing, studies on police violence and racism mostly focus on the United States. Your book is an important contribution to the scholarship that attempts to understand the operations of police racism as well as resistance to police power outside North America. While exploring the black resistance to police power you put black women activists, such as Brixton Black Women’s Group or the United Black Women Action Group, at the center of your analysis. And, even though Black women have been main actors of the organization of black resistance to British policing, as you say, their activities have often been overlooked. Could you tell us about the gendered dimensions of policing and racism and the Black women’s role in the history of resistance to British policing?

Adam Elliot-Cooper: Gender is such an important way in which police violence and state power is rationalized, particularly in the colonial context. Historically, it hasn’t simply been colonial states saying that subjugated peoples are violent, backward, criminal or immoral because of where they sit in a racialised hierarchy. It’s also about how they’re gendered. If we think about the context of slave colonies in the Caribbean, enslaved people were gendered as being sexually promiscuous or sexually violent, and therefore, “in order to control and repress and contain this ‘promiscuity’, we need this system of enslavement. We need this system of incarceration. We need this system of colonial rule in order to repress this.” And you see comparable forms of gendering on the British mainland connected to these colonial legacies as well. So, black men, for instance, are framed as being hyper violent, hyper masculine, hyper dangerous. I think that we need a feminist analysis to unpack all of these kinds of gendered as well as racialized and classed forms of oppression. It made perfect sense to me to find the ways that these that black women were engaged in these kinds of struggles. Some of them might have identified as black feminists, some of them may not have. But they were bringing to light the ways that they understood gender as well as race and class, as being fundamental ways that policing was rationalized in colonial and post-colonial context.

Another way we see racism being gendered is through the family, for instance, by framing the black family as chaotic, where children are not properly raised due to absent fathers. These racial of stereotypes were challenged by mothers of black people who had died at the hands of the state. They articulated their demands as mothers who simply wanted safety and justice for their children. Crucially, however, these women campaigners did not simply seek to reproduce the normative nuclear family structure. The term “family” extended across familial relations, to a wider set of black and activist community networks. There was something quite complicated happening, with the challenging of stereotypes about what a black family is, as well as what a black family should be, that these women engaged with through their campaigns against racist state violence.

Deniz Yonucu: You do an excellent job in showing how racism cannot be understood without taking gender into account and exploring how gender and racism are deeply intertwined.  You show how colonialism is not only a deeply racist project, but also a deeply gendered one. In your work, you also brilliantly show how racism and policing are deeply entangled. Pointing out “the imperial amnesia”, you go against the conventional claims that racism arrived in Britain as a response to immigration or as a reaction to difference and show how racism is deeply structural. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by “imperial amnesia” and the role it has played in framing ongoing forms of racisms and anti-racisms in Britain?

Adam Elliot-Cooper: There are lots of examples of this. But one really stuck out to me during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 was that news pundits and commentators in Britain would argue that this is an American problem, that this is a US problem. We can understand this as something that exists in the United States. There’s the history of segregation. There’s the history of slavery, which means that there are still profound racial inequalities in the United States. They also argued that “we didn’t have slavery here in Britain, we didn’t have segregation here in Britain. What we really have are a legacy of immigrant groups which haven’t yet integrated, and we haven’t quite managed the kind of multicultural question yet as effectively as we could.”  But, of course, British racism didn’t arise from people from the Caribbean and Africa and Asia migrating to Britain in significant numbers. British racism arose from Britain going to these parts of the world centuries earlier. This has been, of course, accounted by many historians and theorists of colonial racism. Racism arises out of the necessity to justify or to rationalize racial colonial exploitation, whether that be enslavement or settler colonial genocide, or simply stripping the rights and freedoms and sovereignty of colonized nations and peoples. So, it’s through those legacies of colonialism that Britain has exported racism across the globe, including to its most successful settler colony: the United States.

This history is integral to understanding how racism operates on the British mainland today. I think that because there is this geographical disjuncture, this geographical gap between Britain and its former colonies, it’s been able to create this conceptual gap between its own racism today on the British mainland and the histories of British racism which have existed and continue to exist across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and Australia.

Deniz Yonucu: Definitely. In Black Resistance to British Policing, you write that “racism is one of the most important ideological exports of the British Empire.” As you point out, the connection between the United States and Britain or the British Empire is often overlooked. It’s really important to bring back those connections into the light to remind how the enslaved African people ended up in the United States and what role the British Empire played in the slave trade. Your book also engages with the current debates on racism in Britain and addresses the perils of state-sanctioned or state-managed anti-racism. You also criticize the uses of concepts such as “privilege” or “hate crime.” Could you please elaborate on that?

Adam Elliot-Cooper:  I think that one of the ways that the state has responded to anti-racist campaigning in Britain is to try to incorporate some of the assumptions and views of anti-racism into a state managed system. What do I mean by that? One of the fundamental things about the history of British anti-racism is that it did not begin on the British mainland. It began in Britain’s colonies. People’s experience of racism wasn’t the everyday microaggressions or humiliations or forms of prejudice that they might experience from a co-worker or a neighbour or somebody else in their community. It was an experience of racism which was fundamentally linked to being exploited by the Europeans who might have owned the mines, mills, and plantations. It was the experience of racism fundamentally linked to capitalism and imperialism. And when they resisted those forms of exploitation, it was the state which entered the arena to repress these forms of resistance. I look at Trinidad as one of the examples of that. Racism is fundamentally linked to capitalist exploitation; it is fundamentally linked to state power–it enables capitalism to categorize different workers differently, in order to exploit them differently.  Therefore, in order for us to resist racism, we have to take this as the primary points in which resistance is targeted. State sanctioned anti-racism strips anti-racism of that history of anti-colonial resistance. It also strips it of the critiques of both the state and of capitalism. It reduces anti-racism to a critique of interpersonal interactions of privileges that somebody might experience on an interpersonal level. It reduces anti-racism to effectively politically correct language and to saying the right thing in the right circumstance. One of the reasons for me policing is so important, as I mentioned before, isn’t simply because policing is somehow the most important issue facing anti-racist campaigners today, but instead what policing does is it forces us to engage with state power. It forces us to understand racism as something which is intrinsically linked to the power of the state. And it’s that entry points that I feel helps us to better understand racism in policing as some way of understanding racism in these structural forms linked to imperialism, capitalism, and state power, rather than reducing it to these interpersonal interactions.

Deniz Yonucu: Exactly. And this why anti-racist resistance is framed as and attempted to be reduced into an identity politics. You so powerfully argue that “race and blackness are not simply an identity.” You cannot solve structural issues by diversity programs or diversity projects. Instead, as you point out in your book, we need to learn from the long history of anti-colonial, anti-racist resistance waged by the colonized and enslaved people.

Adam Elliot-Cooper: Diversity initiatives are often considered to be something quite new. They’re often considered to be modern, progressive, and arising in the twenty-first century. But of course, Britain has been doing diversity initiatives for a very long time. In order for it to be able to control its colonies, it needed to do indirect rule. It had to train police officers and judges and other bureaucrats and officials into its systems of power. And after formal colonization came to an end, for countries like Britain to still maintain a colonial or neo-colonial relationship with its former colonies, it had to inaugurate natives, colonized peoples, formerly colonized peoples into these positions of power and influence. In Britain today, by bringing people from black communities, from Asian communities into its systems of power and governance, what it does is create an illusion of progress, create an illusion that change has taken place. And I think no political entity has been better at doing this than Britain’s current Conservative Party. It is by far the most ethnically diverse cabinet in British history. Liz Truss has put into place possibly the most powerful black man in Britain’s history. Her new chancellor is an ardent free marketeer. They put people into their home office, which are more draconian, more violent, more anti-immigrant and more pro-border than any home secretary in modern British history. I hope that the contradictions of the politics of ‘representation’ evident in the British government, will move anti-racism beyond diversity politics, and refocus attention to systems of violence and exploitation.

Deniz Yonucu: One of the perils of racism in relation to policing, as you mention in your book, is the production of the myth of “black criminality.” You demonstrate how this is deeply rooted in imperial discourses and policies.  Today in the Britain, myths about “black-on-black crime” and the stereotype of the Black criminal persist in media representation. Would you like to elaborate on these myths that transform Black and brown men into main targets of police violence in contemporary Britain?

Adam Elliot-Cooper: Sure.  First of all, historically linking blackness to violence and danger was a really fundamental way of rationalizing the violence of colonial slavery and of other forms of colonial violence which came after it. Framing black people as being savages and violent better enabled countries in Europe, such as Britain to simultaneously claim that they were the bastions of the enlightenment and all the freedoms and liberties and rights that come with it, while at the very same time becoming the largest slave trading nations in human history, overseeing the genocide of indigenous peoples across the Americas and Australasia, and stripping the rights and freedoms of colonised peoples across Africa and Asia. In other words, by framing colonised people as uncivilised, through the violence they engage in towards each other, Europe could more easily tell itself that colonised people did not have the moral or intellectual capacity to participate in the enlightenment project.

But what’s also, I think really important is that what the legacies of this pattern of racial thinking does is it enables the emergence in the 20th century, particularly on the British mainland, of racial categories of crime. And I talk about some of these categories of crime in the book, particularly in some detail mugging, but in more detail, so called knife crime and gang crime and mugging. I think it’s useful to think of them not as crimes, but as categories of crime. What does that mean? That means that there aren’t necessarily laws which use phrases such as “mugging” or “knife crime.” These are categories of crime that emerge in particular historical moments. In the 1970s, the category of the mugger emerges in Britain. It’s used in political rhetoric by politicians, by certain sections of the press, as well as in press statements by the police. And it’s borrowed from the United States.  What does this new category of crime do? It vacuums up lots of existing crimes, such as theft, robbery, assault creating the impression that there is a new problem. And if there is a purportedly new and different problem, it can be attributed to a new and different people. And it is young black people to which this new category of crime and therefore this allegedly new problem is attributed.  We see a similar process emerging in the early 2000s in relation to knife crime. Crimes involving knives, of course, have existed for hundreds of years, as long as knives have existed. But we see this category of crime— knife crime— emerging in the early 2000, not in response to an increase in crimes in which a knife is involved, but rather a kind of media, political and police led moral panic in relation to black criminality and black violence. With this new category of crime, we see that the police begin to record crimes differently and therefore create the impression there is a new problem. It is young black people for whom this this allegedly new problem is attributed. The first thing it enables is this to be framed as a crisis that needs to be dealt with by the government. If there is a government which isn’t able to deal with the multiple crises that currently exist in Britain (whether it be the global financial crisis, the housing crisis, the health and social care crisis, the looming climate and ecological crisis), they are able to gain more legitimacy in the eyes of the public if they are able to deal with the so-called knife crime crisis. It enables the government to assert its legitimacy in the eyes of the electorate. The second thing is, it enables for the police to reaffirm its own power and legitimacy:  whether it be through gaining more legislative powers to stop, to search, to apprehend, to question, to incarcerate, or whether it be through more powers of o weaponry, militarism, whether it be through tasers and stun guns, or whether it be through forms of surveillance operations. The third thing, of course, it does is it reproduces existing forms of racism which feed into many other spheres of life: whether it be racial inequalities in relation to employment, our border regimes, our housing policies. All of these types of things are reproduced through this fear of black criminality, and it is connected to these other forms of racial hierarchy as well.

Deniz Yonucu: Here we can also think of the gang concept.  As you mention in your book, those who were resisting to the colonial government were labelled as gang.  And, in today’s Britain, the gang concept is exclusively associated with young black and brown men. As you also show in your book, when we look at the statistics, most of the serious youth crime is not conducted by black young men. But still it is associated with young black men. You show the complicity of the media in this— not just the mainstream or right-wing media, but the liberal media as well. You show the violence and brutality of racist structures and police power by showing that those who lost their lives because of police violence are killed twice: One is the physical death and the other is the character assassination. And this shows how police violence is supported by a wider assemblage, including the media.

Adam Elliot-Cooper:  Yes.  I think that for me, unpacking the details of police killings is important not simply to expel some of the myths that are often disseminated around people who are killed at the hands of police, but also connect these deaths to wider structures of racism.  I think it’s really important for us to not atomize or individualize specific cases, and rather it’s important for us to connect what we see happening to an individual to what is happening more widely. And I think the example of gangs is a really useful way of doing that. We see the police killing of Mark Duggan in August of 2011, leading to a media campaign which frames him as a violent gangster. We see an all-out war on gangs and gang culture being announced by David Cameron, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time. And we see a whole swathe of police powers being brought into the fore to deal with this so-called gang problem. For me, what it’s useful to do is to think about what this study of Mark Duggan tells us about policing. To ask questions about cultures of racism? What does that mean for how the state operates? And I think the “gangster,” as you mentioned, was also useful because it is, of course, a very historic word. And it is a term that has been used for the so-called communist “gangsters” of Malaya, for the so-called terror “gangs” of the Kenya Land and Freedom Party. The so-called “gangs” in all of these different colonial contexts as a way of rationalizing a form of collective punishment imposed upon a colonized population which was seen to be inherently violent, inherently dangerous, and therefore requiring a different form of policing and prison control.

Deniz Yonucu: Your argument on collective punishment is very important. Police brutality and the racialization of black and brown communities as “violence-prone” and “dangerous” also pave the way for and legitimize collective punishment of communities. This is what colonialism is about: Collective punishment of the of native, Indigenous populations. And this continues to be the case not only in Britain or in the US but in other parts of the world as well. I also show this aspect of policing in my book Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul. Racialisation working-class Kurdish and Alevi communities as crime-prone or violence-prone in Turkey enables collective punishment of these communities. And criminalization itself can be seen as a form of collective punishment. Racism and policing work hand in hand in punishing racialized and formally colonized or still colonized communities.

Adam Elliot-Cooper: Yes.  I think it’s really important as well to think about how the role that class plays here as well. Because while these police powers in relation to criminalizing so-called gangs or people involved in so-called mugging or knife crime, all of these categories of crime, they are introduced through racial ideas and imagery. When we look at the Britain’s prison system today, black people are disproportionately incarcerated. We also see these powers being used against working class populations of all ethnic backgrounds. While racism is the way of justifying and rationalizing the introduction of this expansion of police and prison power, when it’s actually used, it’s used against oppressed or working-class peoples across the board. And I think this connection between race and class is really important. Racist policing in Britain don’t simply affect black or Asian and other racialized populations but are eventually used against working class people of all ethnic backgrounds as well.

Deniz Yonucu: Definitely. That’s the “boomerang” effect of colonial racism (Césaire 1950, Arendt 1951). Once developed in the colonies, racist policing techniques could also be exported to the mainland and used against white “dangerous classes”. That’s why, I think, racial capitalism is such an important concept to understand the (re)production of capitalism and racism. You also show the solidarity relations between white working classes and black and brown working classes in your work—though unfortunately, these solidarity relations are not historically consistent. I would argue that one of the main aims of policing as governance is to disrupt those forms of interracial alignments. And racism has been successful in turning a significant portion of white working classes against themselves, against their own class interests, by turning them against non-white populations. So, there’s that governmental function as well.  But my last question is on abolition. You frame abolition as an ongoing process that requires collective work. Could you please tell us about your understanding of abolition and how it is influenced by ongoing activist work?

Adam Elliot-Cooper: I think this maybe brings us back to one of your earlier questions about the importance of thinking through gender. Because, of course, a lot of the arguments around prison and police abolition emerged from a black feminist tradition.  In places like the United States particular forms of gender-based violence, domestic violence are not being effectively dealt with by the existing police and prison system. I think it’s from these kinds of conversations that we can have wider questions around what safety look like, what care looks like in a system in which we have seen a consistently expanding police and prison system. In Britain, since the 1990s, the prison population is almost doubled. In fact, since the 1990s, the women’s prison population has almost doubled. We have far more police power than we’ve ever had— whether it be through weaponry or their power to stop and search and apprehend or whether it be through their massively expansive surveillance systems, whether it be through CCTV or monitoring or digital communications.  So, if there can be no doubts that this huge expansion in prison power has not led to an improvement in public safety and a reduction in harm within our society, then it opens the door to us for us to think about the kinds of changes that can arise within a community to improve safety, to reduce harm. On the one hand, I think we can think about what people like Angela Davis refer to as “abolitionist reforms.” This is an argument to say we’re not going to abolish prisons today and abolish the entire policing system tomorrow. But instead, what we’re going to do is make small incremental reforms which erode society’s reliance on the police and prison system. So how can we erode our reliance as a society on the police and prison system? It can be done by improving access to mental health services, secure housing, domestic violence services, to youth services and green space and other forms of social care  and by reducing exploitation in the workplace. All of these types of forms of community led infrastructure can reduce people’s likelihood of coming into contact with the police and prison system and thus reduce our society’s reliance on police and prisons to solve what are often social problems. It is through these kinds of abolitionist reforms, these community led forms of alternative systems of care and safety that we can erode and chip away at this assumption that prisons and police are what improves public safety, as well as making practical improvements in the lives of ordinary people. But I think it’s also important to say that abolition, of course, is a revolutionary vision. It seeks to revolutionize our social relations, not simply our relationship with work and exploitation under capitalism and imperialism, but also our social relations with each other. Relations in relation to gender, relations in relation to race. And I think it’s thinking through all of those different forms of social relations and how they all need to be transformed if we are to have this vision of a future in which prisons and police are obsolete. I feel that these kinds of arguments for abolition are so important, not simply for the everyday in how we interact with each other, but also for a broader vision of thinking through a future which is which sees a world beyond these forms of hierarchy and exploitation.

Deniz Yonucu: Absolutely. I think oppressed communities have no other option than making abolition happen in their everyday lives. This is what I saw during my research in Istanbul. For such communities, as you also show, police are the opposite of the source of safety. On the contrary, police appear as a life-threatening force for many racialized and other oppressed populations across the globe. So, they have long been experimenting with abolitionist safety practices. And I think for us scholars it is really important to learn from those experiments and experiences. Your book Black Resistance to British Policing does an incredible job by bringing not only police violence against black communities in Britain into light but also by showing the centuries long enduring resistance to oppression, policing, racism, and colonialism.  Thank you very much for your work, Adam.

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a lecturer in social and public policy in the school of politics and IR at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of Black Resistance to British Policing and co-author of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State. He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group.

 

 

Deniz Yonucu is a lecturer at Newcastle University. Her monograph Police, Provocation Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul is the winner of the 2023 Anthony Leeds Prize. She is Directions Section co-editor of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) and co-founder and co-convenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 1951. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Césaire, Aimé. 1950. Discourses of Colonialism. Paris:  Éditions Réclame.