Incredible scenes in Bristol yesterday as hundreds of people gathered in Bristol to pull down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and throw it in the river. This was an uplifting event that exemplifies the anger and frustration many people are feeling about racism after the protests about the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The Bristol police did not intervene.
The people of Bristol have been campaigning for fifteen years to have the statue removed without any success, having been ignored by the authorities. Its overthrow was an act of justice. Predictably, some people have complained about the manner of removal calling it vandalism, including Sir Kier Starmer, and some are talking about violence - there wasn't any - and also calling for those who pulled it down to be prosecuted. What this demonstrates is not only contempt for anti-racism and PoC, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of what the role of the police should be if we are to have a police force at all.
To understand fully the real role of the police you need to know about the origins of policing, and, you've guessed it, it wasn't to protect people. One of the earliest police forces in the UK was formed in London at the docks. Dockworkers carried out the practice of gleaning which meant they removed spillages and took them home. This was intolerable as far as the owners of the goods were concerned so they formed the force to put a stop to it. And Robert Peel, who is famous for forming the Metropolitan Police got his ideas from the suppression of peasants in Ireland. The army was too busy to do this job so a 'police force' was formed instead. In the USA the earliest 'police forces' were formed to protect (i.e control) another form of property - slaves. If you want to know more read the excellent The End of policing by Alex Vitale.
The murder of Floyd and the toppling of Colston raise fundamental questions of why we have the policing and what it is for. Do we need it, and how did we manage without it for hundreds of years? Before the advent of policing, disputes were settled and killers were brought to justice. The justice may not have been ideal but nobody thought there was a need for police. We can do better by rethinking what kind of society we really want to live in and how we can restore the commons and live together peacefully without the oppression of individuals and groups. If you want some ideas about this, read Human Kind by Rutger Bregman. Bregman argues that humans are fundamentally good, social beings, and convincingly explodes the myth that we are selfish, aggressive individuals.
In the USA there is now an active movement to defund the police which we should all support because recent events have exposed the fact that in a capitalist society property is valued more than human life. We still have a colonialist, white supremacist, capitalist order to dismantle.
