Racism,radicalisation and Europe’s ‘Thin Blue Line’

Colonialism and authoritarianism: European continuities

This article, which takes the form of an audit in territorial policing, new technology and enhanced police powers under neoliberalism, was inspired by Shanahan and Wall’s Race & Class analysis of the Blue Lives Matter movement, which emerged in the US in 2014 as a rejoinder to accusations of police racism. ⁴ What follows revolves around a simple question – is a US-style Blue Lives Matter political and cultural force emerging in Europe?

However, despite differences in the way police forces have evolved organisationally, there is a common thread in the policing of Europe’s Black, Brown and Roma communities – which plays out differently in the US. While clearly Europe learns from the US, its policing practices are pattern-specific to European nation-building as well as the continent’s history of colonialism, authoritarianism and fascism. Rightly, the current militancy around policing draws on decolonising discourses popular in the Global North, as the ‘history of colonial domination’, according to Nijjar, reveals that ‘policing has, from birth, enacted extreme excessive and elaborate measures of regulation on racially coded populations’. ⁵ But I suggest that the boundaries of debate need to be pushed out still further to integrate into critiques of intrusive colonial-style policing, first, an analysis of the impact of neoliberal governance and technological changes on police organisation and, second, an understanding of the way neoliberal attitudes about surplus populations are internalised in the police psyche. The latter has created an elevated sense of police superiority, and a policing culture of impunity, which then justifies the use of dehumanising processes and lethal weaponry against the undeserving poor.

In this sense, the examples of racist, misogynist and even far-right police attitudes documented below need be understood not in terms of the police’s ‘few rotten apples’ thesis (part of the police’s layered culture of denying structural racism), but in relation to wider organisational, structural and operational changes in modern policing that have come about at a time of neoliberal economic policies and increasing inequality and poverty in Europe. Neoliberal discourses about dangerous urban spaces, where Black youth criminality, Muslim extremism and anti-social subcultures flourish, have paved the way for police officers’ sense of importance to spill over into open racial and class contempt for marginalised communities, exercised in lethal ways on the streets. Neoliberalism has, in effect, paved the way for the radicalisation of police officers into a culture of extremism.

The regulation of working-class life

Even before the pandemic, unfettered markets and the lack of action on poverty and inequality had stretched the social fabric of Europe to its limits. Austerity, poverty wages, lack of provision for young people and of investment in urban working-class neighbourhoods had put huge strains on communal living, justifying a policing approach based on greater regulation and control of working-class life and urban cultural expression. On the face of it, such policing is not new, as the history of police forces in Europe from the nineteenth century onwards is intimately connected to the need to maintain public order by suppressing the struggles of the industrial proletariat and gaining a ‘first-hand knowledge of the matrix of working-class life’. ⁶ Critical Resistance, examining the longue durée of policing in the US, points out that policing should be understood as a social relationship conducted through a wide set of institutions and made up of a set of practices that keep oppressive social and economic relations in place. In the UK and Europe, policing historically has been used to maintain the social and economic status quo through repression, with some of the better known, more contemporaneous examples including the mass policing of the 1984–1985 British miners’ strike leading to the Battle of Orgreave, and the injuries sustained by hundreds of people as the Spanish National Police raided polling stations and fired rubber bullets after they were deployed to prevent the 2017 disputed referendum on Catalan independence.

Nevertheless, there are crucial differences today in terms of the scope and manner of the regulation of poor urban communities via policing. First, justifications for regulation are not confined to public order, industrial disputes, national or racial cleavages. The fight against crime is now woven into the seductive narrative and bureaucratic practices that surround ‘safeguarding’ communities from harm, whether terror related, hate crime offences, drugs. Second, police have far more administrative mechanisms at their disposal to discipline and regulate physical and virtual spaces. For instance, in the UK, ever since 2000 when ‘zero tolerance’ policies for anti-social behaviour began to be introduced (as in the US model), we have seen the proliferation of anti-social and criminal behaviour orders, dispersal orders/powers, public space protection orders, civil injunctions, etc. Third, powers of surveillance and control are not confined to the police; rather, policing functions have now dispersed into other sectors of society, erasing the boundaries between the police and other statutory agencies through the so-called multi-agency approach. For example, in the UK, this has allowed police and housing departments in London to work together to secure evictions of whole families if one member is deemed gang-affiliated or, in Denmark, for the monitoring and surveillance by welfare departments of ‘ghetto families’. And the scope for the regulation of urban space is now drawn so broadly as to take in the criminalisation of Black urban musical sub-cultures, such as rap in Spain ⁷ or drill music in the UK. ⁸

Moreover, the monitoring and surveillance of working-class space has been massively increased by the introduction of biometrics, algorithmically based predictive models, artificial intelligence (AI), automated decision-making (ADM), data harvesting and network mapping. The use of mathematical models builds on an existing racial bias in data collection and provides justification for the intensive surveillance and racial profiling of poor urban communities. It also leads to the organisation of police operations around rapid response units such as Violence Suppression Units in the UK, the Brigade Anti-Criminalité (BAC) in France and Belgium. This style of policing, which has historic undertones of a colonial-style invading force, lends itself to a policing culture of violent confrontation. But excessive force, in turn, finds its justification in a wider societal and media tendency towards poverty stigmatisation. For the neoliberal market society, which values success, competition and individualism, regards those who fall through the net as bringing poverty and marginalisation on themselves. The targeting of poor Black, Roma and minority neighbourhoods of Europe by police officers who have absorbed neoliberal precepts about benefit scroungers and political malcontents has to be understood, therefore, in the context of changes in policing brought about by gentrification, smart city policies, big data technology and the designation by urban planners of Sensitive Urban Zones (interpreted as ‘hotspots of crime’).

But such internal forces driving changes in the shape of policing need also to be linked to external factors, such as state approaches to interlocking economic, political and social crises, as well as the electoral strategies of political parties. Once in power, political parties are reliant on the police to handle political protests against racism, Black deaths in custody, climate change, political corruption or coronavirus regulations, etc. In this way, the state is not only complicit in the evolution of police authoritarianism but increasingly impotent when it comes to reining it in. Obvious signs of the increasing detachment of the police from any notion of accountability can be found in the racist, sexist and homophobic messaging on the WhatsApp groups reviewed in this article, as well as increasing documentation of police harassment and brutality arising from the use of excessive force in everyday encounters. But whereas the police leadership denies structural racism and seeks to attribute racist attitudes in the police to rogue elements (the few rotten apples) or the canteen culture, the real problem lies in the lack of accountability. A culture of impunity is being reinforced by failing bureaucratic complaint mechanisms and an acceptance of victim narratives within a framework of the institutional denial of structural racism.

Penal populism, territorial policing and Covid-19

Added to this mix have been the extraordinary powers given to police under coronavirus regulations. What is not questioned here is the need for European governments to take drastic action to protect public health in a pandemic, and to ensure that national health services do not collapse under the weight of hospital admissions in the face of a deadly virus. But what is disputed is the arbitrary application by the police of vaguely drafted coronavirus regulations and the discretion such vagueness gives them to decide interventions based on where people live, what sort of housing they occupy and their socioeconomic and ethnic background. During the pandemic, police officers in certain districts seemed to relish their extraordinary powers to interfere with the public, with lockdown measures, curfews and fines administered in ways that were arbitrary and discriminatory. ⁹ The argument, previously used in the context of serious youth violence and counter-radicalisation, that police were merely protecting public health and safety was exposed during the pandemic as fallacious, as those whose activities were more oppressively monitored and controlled were those who have historically borne the brunt of over-policing, namely Europe’s ethnic minorities, ¹⁰ with Gypsy, Roma and Travellers (GRT), migrants and refugees subjected to a system of targeted quarantine, with militarised zones of confinement even considered in some jurisdictions. ¹¹

The forces driving changes to policing are replicated in the electoral strategies of political parties that foreground law and order. The political climate ushered in by multiple intersecting crises has, to date, favoured those parties with a securitisation agenda. Penal populism which leads to the introduction of criminal penalties according to their perceived popularity with voters (rather than effectiveness) is deployed by all mainstream parties, not just the far Right. This was seen in the run-up to the 2022 French presidential elections when Valérie Pécresse (Republicans) promised, if elected, to send in the army to enforce a ‘Republican reconquest’ of the ‘zones of non-France’; neighbourhoods where ‘the little old lady is told to stay home’ because there is a drug deal under way outside her apartment. ¹² In a similar vein, in the UK the deputy leader of the Labour party Angela Rayner boasted of her hard-line law and order credentials; police should ‘shoot terrorists and ask questions second’ and ‘beat down the door of the criminals and sort them out and antagonise them’. ¹³

This is not just a matter of political rhetoric or mood music justifying the creation of new crimes leading to higher levels of incarceration of the poor and dispossessed. A seismic shift has taken place in the regulation of urban life. Big data technology, and smart city policies which embed digital technology across a city’s functions, also opened the door to the ‘predictive policing’ model which relies on cooperation between police and other statutory authorities. Within this multi-agency approach, the police are given a commanding role which blurs the boundaries between them and agencies of the local state. Another striking development during the pandemic has been the greater role the state has taken in managing the fall-out of austerity, neoliberalism and multiple interconnected crises, with ‘the state now a much more powerful economic actor than it was before the pandemic’. ¹⁴ If the policing of the public space during lockdown is anything to go by, the state’s resort to surveillance and ‘penal power’ to contain populations, and deal with the fall-out of poverty and discontent by stemming social protest, will become an embedded feature of the strong, interventionist state now promised by politicians. Previously forced to adapt to budget cuts and automation, as well as facing reorganisation challenges brought about by data technologies and predictive analytics, the police may sense now an opportunity to play a more commanding role in what has been described as a new era of securitised governance. The Fourth Industrial Revolution ¹⁵ has diminished traditional police roles through automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. ¹⁶ But these developments combined with territorial policing (the intensive policing of external and internal borders, and location-specific targeting of poor multicultural neighbourhoods, deemed ‘crime hotspots’), ¹⁷ in the context of ‘smart-city’ police policies, can be infused with heavily racialised discourses, as the study of the A2A Smart City initiative in Como, northern Italy has shown. ¹⁸

From racial profiling and mobile policing. . .

The police’s authoritarian enforcement of Covid lockdown in poor neighbourhoods, the growth of the increasingly unregulated immigration police, the creeping use of quasi-paramilitary squads in ‘hotspots of crime’, the lethal technology deployed routinely by riot police, coupled with biometric identification (including facial and fingerprinting recognition, gait recognition and speech analysis) and the ‘invisible surveillance of the public space’ (video and drone surveillance, covert listening, automated number plate recognition) ¹⁹ all signify a symbiotic relationship between predictive policing, data-driven surveillance and racial profiling, on the one hand, and a creeping militarisation of policing, on the other. All of which, as Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson has explained in the US context, casts a ‘dark shadow on the future’ of marginalised communities, particularly poor communities of colour. ²⁰ Three European NGOs, Fair Trials, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR) and Statewatch have raised similar concerns. ²¹ Fair Trials argues that artificial intelligence and automated decision-making systems utilised in European criminal justice systems reproduce and reinforce discrimination, fuelling and legitimising racial profiling and effectively ‘automating injustice’. ENAR points out that predictive policing’s presentation of specific locations with a high proportion of minority ethnic people as ‘risky’ is actually a reflection of racial bias in existing data collection, and that long-standing racist policing practices, such as ethnic profiling, have now been hardwired into the algorithms that inform modern policing. ²² Statewatch identifies EU funding streams and centralising practices, such as its ‘interoperability initiative’, the Common Identity Repository, and the EU’s Police Cooperation Working Party, which are preoccupied with biometric identification systems technologies. It concludes that the EU’s vision for the future is one of ‘mobile policing’ whereby police carrying out identity checks, equipped with mobile fingerprint and facial scanning technologies, have access to all EU security data on their mobile phones. As the European Network of Law Enforcement Technology Services mobile sub-group proudly put it, ‘Mobile technology is now a disruptive force for reform’ and a strategic priority for the police, involving a large-scale ‘integral change process’ in police organisation. ²³

In a nutshell, data-driven policing, which incorporates data harvesting and network mapping (the use of a range of technologies to build a picture of social interactions and relationships) leads to data-driven suspicion and guilt by association. ²⁴ It also justifies a rapid aggressive response by special patrols acting on the data. Data-driven policing drives an increase in suspicionless searches as well as other punitive measures in areas identified as sensitive crime zones, zones of gang activity, ‘high risk’, or ‘hard ghettos’ or ‘harsh penalty zones’. In Denmark, for example, those who live in certain neighbourhoods will be more harshly punished for certain crimes. ²⁵ In the Netherlands, since 2017 a Crime Anticipation System (CAS) has been in operation across the country which uses, alongside national crime statistics, benefits data to target police resources at specific locations. ²⁶ Amnesty International in the Netherlands has warned that predictive policing systems using mathematical models to assess risk and direct resources towards individuals or locations deemed ‘high risk’ are leading to unjustified mass surveillance and are ‘inherently discriminatory’. It analysed a pilot project in the city of Roermond which concluded that the algorithm deployed in the subsequent police operation was ‘prejudicial not predictive’. ²⁷ The ‘Sensing Project’ to detect property crime in Roermond was specifically ‘designed to racially profile and target people of Eastern European nationality’, designated by the police as ‘mobile bandits’, with ‘mobile banditry’ defined as economic crime ‘committed by foreign groups of so-called bandits’. ²⁸ Though the Roermond police never clearly articulated which nationalities were defined as eastern European, they ‘specifically associated mobile banditry’ with the Roma, according to Fair Trials.

In this way, data-driven policing confirms existing biases amongst officers and distorts their perceptions about the residents of those neighbourhoods, opening up the way for a culture of contempt to develop, with wide swathes of young people in poor urban communities seen as potentially linked to benefit fraud, crime or gangs. ²⁹ This in turn justifies data harvesting and network-mapping initiatives. In London, the Gangs Matrix, a secret police gangs database, ³⁰ and in Amsterdam, the Top600 and Top400 automated risk-modelling and profiling system ³¹ mapped associational links between young people, further ramping up the potential for injustice and racial stigmatisation. In October 2017, for instance, 78 per cent of those listed on the Gangs Matrix were Black, with the youngest 12 years old, while one-third of those listed on Top600 in January 2020 were of Moroccan descent, the majority from Amsterdam Oost. In December 2021, in the UK, further concerns were raised about Operation Pima, an initiative of the Met’s Violence Suppression Units whose officers visited or attempted to visit 758 of those identified in internal crime or intelligence reports as the ‘most prolific or violent offenders’ in the capital, offering them some sort of diversionary intervention to stop reoffending. That 61 per cent on the list were Black people, with the same percentage teenagers (15 per cent of whom were under 15) called into question the credibility of the scheme, as did the use of non-factual intelligence reports in compiling the list. ³²

As Ferguson pointed out in relation to the US, this may result in the police feeling that they have ‘additional license to investigate more aggressively’, altering, in the process, ‘the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society’. ³³ It is clear that this warning now needs to be taken seriously in Europe, and the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is currently researching whether geographic locations targeted in police data mapping are also more likely to experience the greater use of lethal weaponry and more deaths in police custody.

. . .To militarisation and the epidemic of police violence

Just as the incorporation of big data technology into everyday policing is more advanced in some European countries than others, notably the UK and the Netherlands, so organisational models for policing also differ across the continent. Some countries, particularly those in southern Europe under dictatorship until the 1970s, are building on a paramilitary tradition. Philosophical and constitutional questions related to police independence and political neutrality also differ; in some European countries the police have the right to join a union, and to take industrial action, while in the UK police are banned from forming or joining a trade union, with police officers below the rank of superintendent represented by the Police Federation. The notion of ‘policing by consent’, and the idea of political neutrality, are also specific to the UK. The French model for policing, for instance, is much more overtly political, in that police are expected to use their powers to advance the interests of the state. Despite these differences, it is clear that the role of the police, in all jurisdictions, reflects the ideals of the state and normative views of the natural social order, irrespective of which political party is in power.

What is unique today, though, is the way in which the incorporation of data-driven surveillance, targeting and predictive analytics into everyday policing, is accentuating quasi-military policing. Increasingly, the more aggressive policing of the public space, usually associated with dictatorial or authoritarian governments, is becoming universally applied. Where some national traditions may have previously incorporated aspects of community policing, which tends to obscure policing’s more war-like or coercive functions, the move towards territorial policing ensures that there are fewer and fewer positive engagements with the police.

In turn, this more aggressive form of policing is location specific, targeting areas of Black, ‘immigrant’ or Roma settlement, with patterns of racial segregation, for instance, of the Roma in eastern Europe heightening the tendency for invasive policing there. As we have seen in the UK, location-specific policing, often based on crime-mapping software and the identification of ‘hotspots’ shapes police patrols and routines, justifying the use of suspicionless searches, leading to increased conflict with local communities. This pattern has also been identified in the suburbs of major cities in Sweden where the crackdown on drugs has disproportionately targeted Black and minority Swedes through ‘selective policing’, ³⁴ as well as in Germany, where in certain districts of Berlin the designation of an area as Kriminalitätsbelasteter Ort (places prone to crime, KbO) provides the legal mechanism for police to check identity documents and search people and property without suspicion. (And other Länder operate similar schemes.) ³⁵ As Ullrich and Tullney point out in their pioneering study of the construction of zones with special police powers in Berlin and Leipzig, the official designation of an area as a crime hot spot creates the legal authorisation for selective and proactive measures. ³⁶ At the same time, an area is often labelled a ‘dangerous place’ on the basis of an artificial construction of threat, with this conflation in turn linked to normative ideas about appropriate behaviour and cultural expression, especially relating to youth sub-cultures, the homeless and other marginalised sub-cultures. In Portugal in December 2020, NGOs and prominent individuals, published an open letter asking the authorities to address a breakdown in trust in policing. ³⁷ Cases of police violence and racism are not a matter of a few rogue elements, they argued; rather, they are built into the structural relationship between police and racialised communities, where the deployment of specialist units such as the immigration and public security police is shaped by the identification, based on ethnic criteria, of Zonas Urbanas Sensíveis (Sensitive Urban Zones, ZUS). ³⁸ The letter called for the prohibition of lethal weapons and restraint methods that have led to a number of deaths in custody and an end to the systematic use of drones, surveillance cameras and rapid intervention pickets in ZUS – where immigrants, their descendants and the Roma live, and which are being treated as ‘war zones’.

‘Our critics do not understand the realities of policing’

It is becoming more common for incidents in which police are seen to have conducted a needlessly violent arrest or escalated a situation to be captured on mobile phones and circulated via social media. Across Europe, police leaders are trying to minimise the damage caused by these embarrassing revelations about police misconduct by utilising variations of the argument, ‘our critics do not understand the realities of policing’. This seemingly off-the-cuff phrase serves to trigger an image of policing that owes a lot to popular police TV series, reality TV, tropes of ‘no go zones’ and crime reporting generally. In this scenario, inner cities are an urban jungle of deprivation and depravity where police fight valiantly against the odds. Yes, they may use unorthodox methods, or violence against the bad guys, but this is necessary to maintain a semblance of civilisation in the face of the depraved, whether they be organised criminals, drug dealers, sex traffickers, rapists, terrorists or feral youth. In this way, irrespective of whether it is advanced by the police or others, the idea of the crucial nature of the ‘Thin Blue Line’ becomes culturally embedded, as does the notion of a defensive, ‘prerogative violence over and above law, but licensed through law’, as Wall puts it. ³⁹ But the view from in front of the TV contrasts dramatically with the view of a young person on the streets experiencing constant stop and search, including the humiliation of handcuffing and strip search, aggressive racist language, and excessive force.

Those calling the police to account for such abuses face a particularly aggressive response in countries with a nationalist and authoritarian tradition where support for the police and the military is seen as a patriotic duty. This would include France where the Gendarmerie Nationale has a military status and is a branch of the Armed Forces under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior – with additional duties to the Ministry of Defence. The BAC also has a reputation for acting as a paramilitary force. However, over and above local and national traditions of paramilitarism, the policing of the pandemic has heightened criticism of police racism and the use of force, with a number of journalistic and NGO critical reports drawing attention to discriminatory policing in neighbourhoods such as, in Portugal, the Bairro de Jamaica in Lisbon; in Spain, the San Francisco neighbourhood of Bilbao; in Belgium, the so-called ‘Brussels triangle’; in Netherlands, Amsterdam Oost; in France, the suburbs of Paris. In addition, there are the Roma settlements in eastern Europe, with intensive public order policing controls in Slovenia now being implemented with the assistance of horseback units in impoverished Roma settlements. ⁴⁰ Critical reports have been compiled by the Observatory of the Belgium League of Human Rights, the European Roma Rights, the IRR/Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, Liberty, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Rights International Spain, amongst others. In France, Amal Bentounsi, the sister of Amine Bentounsi who was shot in the back and killed by a police officer in 2012, launched, alongside other families, the Emergency-Police Violence app, to record abuses and bring cases to court. The point is that discussions around an epidemic of police violence are becoming more commonplace around Europe and anger over police methods is unlikely to go away.

Community alienation from modern police methods and allegations of police violence are not confined to countries with an obvious authoritarian policing tradition. Since the 1970s, the Netherlands has been associated with a liberal, community-oriented model of neighbourhood policing. Here, the organisation Controle Alt Delete have analysed national data provided by police which documents altercations with the public that have involved violence. Prior to 2019, there were around 11,000 recorded incidents a year; in 2019, when a new system of recording was introduced, this shot up to 24,000 instances; by 2020, 27,271 acts of violence had been recorded. ⁴¹ But police unions in the Netherlands are responding aggressively to criticism, particularly attempts to rein in racial profiling through the introduction of monitoring measures. The Dutch Police Association (Nederlandse Politiebond, NPB) even went as far as to install its own monitors to monitor civilian observers at a ‘preventative frisking’ trial (to combat youth gun crime) in five districts of Amsterdam, calling it an insult to their profession to imply that they might be guilty of racial profiling. ⁴² The same aggrieved tone was taken by the VSOA, the largest and most aggressively defensive of the Belgian unions, in June 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests. As politicians pointed to police racism closer to home, the VSOA dismissed a proposal to record the ethnicity of those stopped and searched as ‘totally unworkable’ and said that listening to accusations of a generalised racism in the police ‘was a bridge too far for us’, as incidents were very rare. In an eight-page press release, the VSOA, naming certain politicians, called for an end to ‘police bashing’ as sending out the wrong signal both to criminals and undermined police officers who need to ‘stay motivated’ in order to ensure that neighbourhoods are ‘liveable’. ⁴³ Previously, in 2018, the VSOA had opposed the introduction of bodycams and dashcams. ‘We learn from experience that such gadgets are only used to check personnel. Police officers are now the most highly supervised workers in the country. We just haven’t got an ankle bracelet yet’, stated VSOA spokesperson Vincent Houssin. ⁴⁴ Houssin’s repeated attempts to present the police as vilified and victimised came at a time when a discussion about racial profiling and Black deaths in custody was opening up in many European countries, particularly in the Netherlands. But at the beginning of 2022, media reporting of an academic study by Bureau Beke threw the police something of a lifeline. ⁴⁵ That 82 per cent of those who died in custody were from an ethnic minority background was down to the psychiatric problems and erratic behaviour of the victims. This particular framing reinforces the idea of urban spaces as dangerous and broken, with police as victims of societal collapse now having to cope with the added burden of erratic behaviour from disturbed residents.

In the UK, there have been repeated and well-documented cases suggesting an excessive use of force, increasing significantly during the Covid-19 lockdown, ⁴⁶ with video footage on social media going viral. But the police counterclaim, that video footage does not tell the whole story by not showing the violence that preceded arrest, lacked credibility, given that a leaked Metropolitan police memo revealed in October 2020 that the force’s reluctance to release bodycam footage was because it often supports the public’s complaints of ‘poor communication, a lack of patience, [and] a lack of de-escalation before use of force is introduced’. ⁴⁷ Victor Olisa, one of the most senior Black police officers to have served in the Met, has warned that the excessive use of handcuffing, force, and stop and search is being used to humiliate largely young Black men and ‘assert power’, with Black men being treated as ‘property’ by officers. ⁴⁸ Finally, experts from the Home Office-funded police recruitment programme Police Now warned that attempts to recruit Black and minority ethnic police officers are being made ‘10 times’ harder by police racial profiling, as well as the criminalisation of young Black men for minor offences such as cannabis possession. ⁴⁹

Like their Dutch colleagues, police leaders in England respond to criticism with a narrative about the failure to understand tough realities. They have defended the racially disproportionate use of Tasers on the grounds that critics of this lethal weapon do not understand the realities of policing, ⁵⁰ resisting also any attempts to end racial disproportionality in stop and search on the grounds that young Black people are disproportionately involved in homicides and knife crime. ⁵¹ Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick first made this argument in the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, where she also deemed the term institutional racism outdated and ‘not helpful’. ⁵² In September 2021, the government said that, according to its own equalities impact assessment, the disproportionate impact of enhanced stop and search powers in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill against Black people and Gypsy Roma and Traveller communities is ‘objectively justified’ and ‘potentially positive’. ⁵³ Most importantly, as all these responses demonstrate, discriminatory policing is justified by the citing of data that has the ‘perverse result of exacerbating existing inequalities by suggesting that historically disadvantaged groups actually deserve less favourable treatment’. ⁵⁴ In such ways, then, we see that the notion that the police should be accountable and subject to oversight, is being steadily undermined by the police leadership itself. At the same time, police can rely on the unquestioning support of leading politicians, whether centre-left or centre-right, who are also shielding them from much needed reforms. Hence, the leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, describing the BLM call to defund the police as ‘nonsense’, felt the need to declare that his ‘support for the police is very strong’. ⁵⁵ And the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also made clear his unequivocal support for the police. Responding to a question about the use of pepper spray, water cannon and rubber bullets, against the Yellow Vest movement in March 2019, Macron asserted, ‘Don’t talk of “repression” or “police violence”; these words are unacceptable in a legal state.’ ⁵⁶

The need to protect ‘blue life’

The European Confederation of Police (EuroCop), an umbrella organisation for thirty police unions and staff organisations across Europe, as well as national police trades unions, such as Alliance Police Nationale (France) Jupol (Spain), the German Police Union, the Dutch Police Association, Police Unifying Movement (Belgium), are beginning to extend their demands from the economic sphere to the more overtly political. They often campaign around the idea of ‘status respect’, an ever broadening category covering not just pay and working conditions, but the respect that the public should show them. In order to get their message across, they often utilise the colour blue, a long-standing metonym for police power. For instance, in April 2016, in the UK, the Police Federation launched the campaign ‘Believe in Blue’, which aims to build an online community of public support for the police. The campaign is intended to act as a ‘rallying call’ to the public to celebrate British policing and highlight why it’s ‘the best in the world’. ⁵⁷

In other cases, calls for more respect for the police are linked to the demand for more police powers, weaponry and legal protections for police officers who use excessive force. Too much has been invested in law-and-order solutions to the social crisis, police bodies may reason, for the political parties to ignore them. Strikes against exploitation and low pay, and radical social protests, whether in the form of Extinction Rebellion, Yellow Vests, Black Lives Matter, or, from the libertarian direction, the movements of anti-vaxxers and ‘sovereign citizens’, are growing – as are laws to regulate and control street protests. This puts the police in a unique position to negotiate with governments for increased weaponry and powers. But negotiation has not just been left to the official bodies. Police officers are now mobilising unofficially at the grassroots, often forming new bodies that bypass or supplement official trade unions which are seen as too slow and deferential. This grassroots mobilisation is underpinned by the logic that blue life is a unique form of life that needs to be protected.

As Shanahan and Wall ⁵⁸ have demonstrated, when police, acting at grassroots level as well as officially, recast themselves into a specific and racialised life form – Blue Life – the effect is to elevate what is in effect a career choice to the ontological status of a protected characteristic (such as race, sexual orientation or gender identity). This is no longer just a case of victim narratives within the police, but a matter of ‘legislative warfare’, as Blue Lives Matter campaigns for hate crime legislation to be extended to include the police and other first responders, with close to fifty ‘blue life’ hate crime bills introduced into twenty US states and the US congress since 2016, and four southern US states – Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Kentucky – actually passing ‘blue life’ hate crime laws. The ‘blue life’ metonym has come, then, to represent not just an explicitly reactionary response to BLM but also an attempt to reframe the history of police brutality towards African Americans by claiming that police are the real victims of targeted Black on Blue violence. Today, the Thin Blue Line avatar, which encapsulates the idea that the police are society’s last defence against collapse and chaos, is now firmly associated in the US with white nationalism, opposition to racial justice and Black Lives Matter. ⁵⁹

Given Blue Lives Matter’s association with white nationalism as well as the active participation of serving and retired officers in the Capitol Hill siege, one might have hoped that European governments would be alert to the danger of police blue-life metonyms as signs of radicalisation into white nationalism. But, on the contrary, governments, now trying to meet police’s ‘status respect’ demands and asking the public to get behind the police, are turning a blind eye to the radicalisation of a section of police officers. As does, far too often, the police leadership, which is in any case locked into an organisational model that is reliant on racial profiling, and a public relations strategy that is tied to denying the prevalence of racism. Documented cases reveal that far-right activity is flourishing in the security wing of the state. In certain parts of Europe there is a revolving door between police, military and the far Right. And in Spain and France (see below) there have been some highly publicised police/military mutinies against governments, and even talk of attempted coups. Police and military are deeply hierarchical orders; police officers acting on their own initiative and engaging in anti-state activities and attacks on the constitutional order are, if nothing else, clearly a threat to hierarchical power. In August 2020, the far Right – which regularly dominates anti-vaccine protests in Germany – attempted to storm the Reichstag (national parliament), with some commentators linking the protest to the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich), known to have support amongst the police. ⁶⁰

Certainly, since the BLM protests travelled from the US to Europe in summer 2020, police unions and associated bodies have become more vocal in demanding status respect, more weaponry and related powers, just as citizens, as well as advocacy groups, are becoming more adept at filming violent arrests on mobile phones or developing apps to record violence. Yet, in response to the increasing number of recordings of violations, the police seem to demand immunity from criticism, let alone prosecution, with states passing or attempting laws that criminalise the filming the police.

Whereas we haven’t, as yet, seen anything in Europe comparable to the full-blown Blue Lives Matter campaign of the US, the ideological underpinnings of the movement, in victim narratives, first about the ‘realities of policing’ and now about blue life and blue pride, are prevalent in a myriad of official and unofficial initiatives amongst police officers and their supporters. In 2015, the chief of Sussex police in England seemed to recognise the danger to police neutrality and internal discipline that came from allowing police to elaborate their uniforms with non-authorised symbols. To the dismay of the Police Federation, Sussex police officers were instructed to remove a badge from their uniforms in support for the Care of Police Survivors charity, which had a blue line across a white union flag. ⁶¹ But despite this intervention, the Thin Blue Line avatar and hashtag are still regularly seen on the twitter feeds of individual police officers (who post comments attacking BLM and defending police weaponry such as tasers). They have recently been found on the official site of a Safer Neighbourhood’s Team in New Cross, London, and in Manchester as an embellishment to police uniforms, despite the suggestion, as in the Sussex case, that this is a violation of the police’s uniform policy. ⁶² Meanwhile, the Belgian Blue Line ASBL, ⁶³ formed after terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016 to provide financial assistance to police officers injured in the course of their duties, was, in 2020, forced to distance itself from the private WhatsApp group, Thin Blue Line Belgium, exposed for sharing extreme racist content.

There are also parallels in Europe with the US Blue Lives Matter strategy that attempts to recast attacks on the police as hate crimes. In France, police trade unions have pressured the government to crack down on community sharing of images of law enforcement on social media, by arguing that this would crack down on hate speech. For instance, David-Olivier Reverdy of the Alliance Union told journalist Sonia Phalnikar that ‘in certain low income neighbourhoods you can find walls with the names of police officers saying their daughters or wives will be raped’. ⁶⁴ Aurélie Laroussie, the president of a controversial organisation representing the wives and relatives of police officers states that ‘We wives and children are insulted and threatened because we are the wife or child of cops.’ ⁶⁵ A Belgian police officer made a similar accusation on national TV, claiming that in certain Brussels neighbourhoods, posters have been put up calling for violence against the police. ⁶⁶ The extent of the graffiti in both Belgium and France is exaggerated and mixed up with general (i.e., not individualised) anti-police sentiments in street art, according to sociologist Laurent Mucchielli − all part of a political message, fed by the media. ⁶⁷ Creating an urban myth of the victimisation of the police and their families helps insulate the police from calls for accountability and justifies the introduction of laws that further entrench their power.

The country in Europe that has been most explicit in legitimising the ‘hate crime’ approach has been Spain which, in 2018, attempted to extend hate crime legislation to include protection of the police. ⁶⁸ In one notorious case, the context of which was the Basque conflict, eight young people were found guilty not just of assaulting off-duty members of the Civil Guard in a bar-room brawl in Altsasu, near Navarre, but of ideological discrimination against the police. ⁶⁹ These prosecutions were criticised by Spanish jurists as well as inter-state bodies, and in 2019 the Attorney General published clarifying guidelines. ⁷⁰

Changing the subject

In yet another variation on the theme of ‘our critics don’t understand the realities of policing’, police bodies and government ministers in Germany and France have developed a tactic of deflection and distraction – in effect, changing the subject from a discussion of police violence to one about violence and hate against the police. In Germany, the Police University (Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei) was commissioned to carry out a three-year study, ‘Motivation, Attitude and Violence in the Everyday Life of Police Officers’ (MEGAVO) after a government-commissioned independent study of racism in police departments – including far-right activity and racial profiling – had been cancelled by the interior minister Horst Seehofer. ⁷¹ Rafael Behr, a former police officer and professor at Hamburg Police Academy alleged at the time that police unions had influenced Seehofer’s U-turn. His suspicion was confirmed when it was reported that the Police Union (GdP) had negotiated a ‘compromise’ whereby there was no explicit investigation into police racism. The study could examine whether the police force lived up to its claim that extremism, racism and antisemitism were not tolerated in its ranks, but only if it foregrounded hatred and violence directed towards the police. ⁷²

However, it is France where such deflection has been most effective in closing the door on much needed systemic change, as demonstrated in the history of the parliamentary commission on state deontology, practices and doctrines of law enforcement (Commission d’enquête relative à l’état des lieux, déontologie, les pratique et les doctrines de maintient de l’ordre). ⁷³ The parliamentary commission was set up in July 2020 at the request of the Socialist parliamentary group, following controversy around the public order policing of Yellow Vests, labour and pension reform protests. Human rights associations and the Council of Europe human rights commissioner criticised the ‘unlawful’ use of rubber bullet guns (LBDs), and the serious injuries, and even deaths they cause. ⁷⁴ But from the outset, the appointment of a former high-flying police commissioner, Jean-Michel Fauvergue MP, as chair, fatally compromised the Commission’s independence. ⁷⁵ And its double remit – an examination of the methods of the public order police and riot squads, combined with an investigation of the everyday experiences of officers confronted with ‘violent delinquency’ – opened up the space for multiple groups of ‘angry police officers and related protest groups to mobilise to ensure their perspective was dominant’. Between September and December 2020, the Commission heard forty-six testimonies from law enforcement officials, police union representatives, representatives of police-supporting protest movements, lawyers, magistrates and representatives of businesses affected by street protests. Despite the initial claim that the Commission would look at police violence, not one victim of police brutality was called to give evidence, though the testimonies of Amnesty and La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme were heard. Most controversially, Aurélie Laroussie, the head of the pressure group Femmes des Forces de l’Ordre en Colère (FFOC – Angry Law Enforcement Officers’ Wives Association) was called to give evidence, despite being mired in controversy over her links to the Facebook group TN Rabiot Police Officiel, where racist comments were frequently posted. ⁷⁶

The changing legal framework and the role of pressure groups

The reasoning that underpins a legal framework that institutionalises status respect naturally builds upon the different traditions of policing in different European countries, as noted previously.

For example, while the notion of ‘policing by consent’ is specific to the UK, the Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill undermines the notion of the police as public servants by providing for a police covenant, a declaration of support for the police which privileges the police’s wellbeing and health, their physical protection and support for their families above those of other emergency workers, suggesting that the state views the police today in much the same way as the armed forces. ⁷⁷ In France, status respect for the police is also being guaranteed for the police through new sentencing guidelines designed to ensure courts crack down on anyone disrespecting the police; in addition, Article 24 of the Law on Global Security imposes a jail sentence of up to five years and a €75,000 fine on anyone who helps to identify a police officer, including through filming or photographing, with the intention of threatening their physical or psychological wellbeing. Citing attempts to stifle reporting on Gilets Jaunes and anti-racist protests in the quartiers populaires, Cole Stangler points out that the ‘government has effectively chosen to intervene on the side of aggrieved police unions, right in the middle of a growing national debate about police brutality’. ⁷⁸

While attempts by the Belgian government in 2015 to ban the photographing of police officers to improve police safety were resisted by parliament, there is confusion amongst young people as to their civil rights under the law if they film police stops. In 2021, the Standing Committee of the Local Police reacted dismissively to a suggestion by the Flemish Youth Council that filming a police encounter will increase trust, stating that the advice, by assuming an agent will not ‘act correctly’, does the exact opposite. ⁷⁹ It is a view that coincides with the former New Flemish Alliance (NV-A) interior minister Jan Jambon’s standpoint that any monitoring of police behaviour during identity checks (to ensure that ethnic profiling does not take place) creates ‘perverse side effects’, in this case the hindering of police through the creation of extra paperwork. ⁸⁰ In turn, Jambon’s view mirrors that of the VSOA police trade unions, which reacted sharply when the local authority in the Mechelen-Willebroek police zone introduced a project in 2017 to combat ethnic profiling through a central register of checks. ‘This is the world upside down’, declared VSOA spokesperson Vincent Houssin, ‘Do we really have to prove that we are doing our job well?’ ⁸¹

In Spain, the actual inclusion of police as a distinct category of life protected by hate crime legislation may have failed, but the legislative framework has been otherwise strengthened. As far back as 2015, the Spanish Law for the Protection and Security of Citizens (popularly known as the ‘gag law’) introduced new crimes of obstructing authority, with police given powers to issue on-the-spot fines against those who ‘show a lack of respect’, and to fine those (including journalists and media organisations) who distribute unauthorised images of the police. Changes in the penal code also made in 2015 allowed for the increased criminalisation and suppression of public criticisms of state institutions, including the police – leading, by 2021, to the closure of more than 140 websites, the censorship of musicians, writers and artists, and increasing pressure on journalists to self-censor. ⁸²

It is in France and Belgium where union militancy has been most effective in blocking any attempt to address police racism or introduce reform, with such attempts seen as disrespectful of the police’s status. In France, the interior minister was even forced to backtrack on an attempt to abandon dangerous restraint techniques. Trade union bodies have now entered into uncharted territory, mobilising on the street, on duty and in police uniform (which is arguably unconstitutional) ⁸³ not just to protest pay and conditions but also to demand laws that would insulate them from criticism, reform or oversight. Irrespective of the policing model deployed in either country, these are striking examples of police insubordination which, if carried out by any other public sector workers, would surely have been disallowed.

Blocking police reform: convergence with the far Right

Racism, stigmatisation, power

As the cases above (many of which only came to light via police whistle-blowers, many of them Black or ethnic minority) show, there is professional opposition to racism and abuse of power within the police. Too often, though, it is the whistle-blowers who are penalised, ostracised for breaking ranks, career paths blocked. ¹⁴⁵ But irrespective of whether dissenting voices can be heard, there is a need to address the root causes of racist and authoritarian trends, both historical and contemporary. ¹⁴⁶ At a time when local democracy has been diminished, due to budget cuts and political changes in the nature of governance, the police have been afforded a more commanding role in managing interlocking social, political and economic crises, with other social agencies expected to follow their lead. As this puts the police at an ever-greater distance from the communities they should serve, it is not surprising that a gulf has opened up that threatens to become insurmountable.

This cannot be entirely attributed to the impact on services of austerity and cuts (a partial explanation within police circles which helps sustain a culture of denial) but needs to be related back to internal and external drivers. First, the way modern data-driven policing is organised around the regulation and control of working-class life and the targeting of specific neighbourhoods and locations, must be considered. This increasingly militarised aggressive response, laid bare during the pandemic, relies on racial stigmatisation of areas, whether it be ‘hard ghettos’ in Denmark, ‘problem estates’ in the UK, or the ‘zones of non-France’/lost territories of the Republic’ in France. ¹⁴⁷ It is this stigmatisation en masse of Black and minority ethnic neighbourhoods as inherently ‘risky’, or even war zones, that not only educates and integrates police officers into a highly racialised culture of dehumanisation and contempt but, in the words of the Paris-based architect Léopold Lambert, ‘introduces ambiguity into calculations’ of who is ‘considered a civilian’, thereby legitimising the indiscriminate use of force against those members of the public who live in certain neighbourhoods. ¹⁴⁸

In addition to this, there is an external driver of extreme racism in the police – the cumulative and degrading impact on society and political culture wrought by the neoliberal onslaught on welfare provision, with those in receipt of welfare benefits viewed as undeserving. Sociologist Imogen Tyler has described the ways in which welfare stigma changes the way the public make value judgements about those in receipt of benefits, with ‘stigma optics’, altering the way people perceive poverty, hardening people’s responses to suffering. ¹⁴⁹ In this, Tyler utilises Fanon’s revolutionary insights, particularly surrounding the internalisation of inferiority (the way in which colonial dehumanisation is internalised in the human psyche) so that welfare stigma and the politics of disposability become etched into people’s sense of self. The flip side of this is the way in which the right to dominate the marginalised etches itself into the police viewpoint, justifying brutality, and normalising the use of lethal weaponry against people seen as morally repugnant and human waste, or racially and sexually inferior.

Tyler quite rightly sees this development as both old and new; new in that it has resurfaced at a particular time when the logic of neoliberal capital has become embedded in the structures of local government, but old in the sense that it is a recurring form of power entangled with histories of authoritarianism, colonialism and patriarchy. In this respect, it is worth reiterating the insights of former Met police borough commander Victor Olisa, who warned that stop and search, accompanied by excessive handcuffing, exemplifies the notion of police ‘property’. The link with marking, branding and public shaming under slavery may not have been explicitly drawn out by Olisa but his metaphor of ‘police property’ is dramatic. Excessive handcuffing reinforces ‘the stereotype that conflates black boys with dangerousness’, Olisa goes on, ‘without a rational justification’. He concludes that the ‘answer is to stop stereotyping black people as low status, unintelligent, aggressive, dangerous, self-destructive, and subhuman’. ¹⁵⁰

Power can be thrilling and charged with excitement, as one north-east London police officer inadvertently made clear in a tweet from a police account, with the text ‘Kicking down doors, is probably one of our favourite things to do’ accompanied by a picture of police with a battering ram. ¹⁵¹ (After political commentator Owen Jones objected, the tweet was removed, the officer reprimanded). In France, on Facebook, police officers, sharing tips for arrest, also made clear their contempt for suspects – when you place a detainee in a police vehicle, give them a push so that they hit their head against the car, was one tip. The list goes on. In Belgium, officers shared jokes on Facebook about Black people who had died in police custody. In the UK, two Metropolitan police officers, subsequently jailed for misconduct in public office, shared crime scene images on WhatsApp of the mutilated bodies of two murdered Black sisters, referring to them as ‘dead birds’. They also used the racial slur ‘P***s’ in a message to other officers. ¹⁵²

Racial contempt is not innate, it is learned; nor is it confined to policing. Neoliberalism is premised on the idea that the flexible resourceful individual, freed from the interfering hand of the state, thrives in an open market which is equated with a free society. With poverty and marginalisation reconfigured as a matter of choice, those who do not succeed have apparently only themselves to blame, held back by a victim culture or innate criminality. Hence, in the UK, the government-commissioned CRED (Commission of Race & Ethnic Disparities) report mirrored neoliberal precepts when it depicted the British Black Caribbean community as having internalised past injustices to the detriment of its own social advancement; it was, in short, lost within a victim culture, with its young mired in a criminal one. Today, it is not just individuals who are stigmatised for failing to achieve, but whole communities. In many parts of Europe, stigma is attached to the Black, Brown, Roma and eastern European residents of entire neighbourhoods, particularly those with a high level of public housing, ‘sink estates’ linked to gangs, ghettos and anti-social behaviour, according to former Prime Minister David Cameron. ¹⁵³

Stigmatising frameworks about strivers and skivers, and alienated, dangerous political malcontents mirror Victorian ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor, with the undeserving treated as objects of disgust. At the same time, neoliberalism directs resources, financial or otherwise, towards developing an infrastructure for warehousing and disposing of populations deemed surplus (making them so in the process) rather than taking care of them through education, job training and placement, access to public health and youth services, etc. Policing has inevitably been impacted by technological, cultural and economic change. Historically and geographically forged in different conditions in different European contexts – whether colonial or authoritarian, and also evolving around spatial segregation – policing today orientates around neoliberal precepts, targeting the urban poor, as well as social justice activists who threaten the interests of the powerful. The dehumanising and contemptuous attitudes of police officers revealed in WhatsApp groups are not a break with these precepts, rather they reflect the systemic race, class and political bias which has been hardwired into the organisation and culture of policing. Stigma and stigmatisation, which involve a narrative of social relations as one group in society passes the shame on to another, lie at the heart of these developments. But, as sociologists studying modern developments have warned, stigma is dependent on social, economic and political power – it takes power to weaponise stigma. ¹⁵⁴ When professional bodies justify coercive control over communities on the basis of that stigma, we need, as Imogen Tyler has said, to address the political economy of stigma, as well as the societal order that the police are there to enforce.