#misconceptions that people hacve about the UK police

[txttletale]

wanted 2 ask u cuz i think u know more than me:

most of the acab / police aboltion stuff i see is based on the US system, backed up with US stats and events, and suggesting changes to the US policing system.

but a lot of the proposed changes i see are similar (i think?) to what we currently have in the UK, and the power imbalance and training issues and violence are much worse in the US (but not absent here obvs). while the institution is still racist. but I'm wary of the usual 'it doesn't happen here' response that ppl usually employ to dismiss movements like BLM in the UK.

how much of acab rhetoric applies here, and how should we adapt the plans for reform for the UK policing system?

i mean the USA is definitely an outlier in terms of police and prison violence but this is broadly a quantitative rather than qualitative difference. i assure you that the police in the UK are just as horrifically racist and violent--they're just not as armed and don't have the same amount of political capital as the far more militarized USAmerican police.

the Metropolitan Police's own report (lol) found them to be 'institutionally racist'. police in the UK have fucking absurd powers, such as being permitted to commit any crime while undercover without judicial review, as long as it's in the interests of 'national security' or 'preventing disorder' or 'protecting the economic well-being of the United Kingdom' (!). they are relentlessly and disproportionately violent towards BAME people. they have a systemic culture of violence and brutality. Bristol police tased their own race relations advisor, twice. when a woman, sarah everard, was raped and murdered by a police officer, police suppressed and brutalized protesters at her vigil.

here are stop and search statistics for the UK police in 2021:

the UK policing system is just as racist and just as much of an oppressive apparatus as the USAmerican one. don't trust anyone from the UK who tries to tell you otherwise. all cops are bastards because the institution of policing under capitalism exists first and foremost to protect capitalist property relations.

obviously the demands of BLM protesters in the USA cannot be adapted 1-for-1 to the UK, and as a revolutionary communist i think there are very hard limits to what can be meaningfully accomplished under liberal democracy. but i think a good place to start if you want achievable short-term reform to happen is relentless protest and action against the recent bills that have expanded police powers more than ever, against the Blair-era counterterrorism legislation, for the abolition of the Met Police, and for justice for victims of police brutality.

Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class […] This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds

— Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State