#KillTheBill

A night of rioting in Bristol.

Yet another set of grim and deeply depressing headlines. 

Police officers with serious injuries. Police vehicles overturned and in flames. Police buildings under sustained attack. Extreme violence and endless vitriol directed yet again at the brave women and men who stand on the thin blue line.

What the hell is going on?

I don’t know whether I’m actually capable of a coherent answer to that question, but I do know that it’s about more than a single night of criminality in a single urban neighbourhood.

It’s about much more than that.

At this particular moment in time, it feels as though police officers are being attacked from every side:

• By those who think the policing of protests is far too robust
• By those who think it isn’t nearly robust enough
• By those who think the policing of Covid regulations is far too draconian
• By those who think it isn’t nearly draconian enough
• By feminists
• By misogynists
• By anti-racists
• By actual racists
• By those who accuse the police of being facists
• By those who accuse them of being liberal snowflakes
• By politicians and commentators of every persuasion
• By those who think one thing
• By those who think the other

At this particular moment in time, police officers feel damned every which way.

Somehow we have allowed policing to become a kind of punchbag for the rest of us – a focus and an outlet for so much of our frustration and rage. As a society faced with a huge set of desperately serious challenges, we appear to have settled on the police as the ones to blame.

Perhaps it suits us to think that way. Because it means that we don’t actually have to think about – much less do anything about – what’s really going on.

Let me try to explain.

I. We are living in a divided society

British society feels to me more divided than at any previous point in my lifetime. 

Divided between: 

• male and female
• black and white
• rich and poor
• left and right
• north and south
• leave and remain
• us and them

Shouting has fast become the only means of communication that some of us know and the distances between us are continuing to grow. 

People are angry and they’re looking for someone to blame.

None of it is the fault of the police, but we ask them to stand in the gaps that have opened up between us – and to hold the line.

II. We are living in an unequal society

British society feels to me more unequal than at any previous point in my lifetime:

• The rich are getting richer
• The poor are getting poorer
• The privatisation of profit and the socialisation of debt
• Wealth and power, privilege and opportunity concentrated in the hands of the few

Research published by Oxfam in January 2021 suggested that the wealth of the world’s ten richest men has increased by half a trillion dollars since the Covid pandemic began.

Meanwhile, the queues at Foodbanks continue to grow. Research published by the Trussell Trust tells us that:

• From 1 April – 30 September 2020, Foodbanks gave out 1.2 million emergency food parcels to people in crisis
• On average, during the first six months of the pandemic, Foodbanks gave out 2,600 parcels to children every single day

Poverty and inequality have far-reaching consequences that can take whole lifetimes to overcome. Given that fact, perhaps it’s not surprising that people are angry and in search of someone to blame.

None of it is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

III. We are living in an unjust society

Far too many people in this country are facing forms of injustice that are both societal and systemic. If that hasn’t been your experience, then you are one of the fortunate ones.

Last year, people took to the streets to protest about the injustices of racism.

Last week, people took to the streets to protest about the injustices of misogyny and male violence.

And their causes were just. They were calling attention to some of the most urgent challenges facing this generation.

People are angry and in search of someone to blame.

But blaming police officers for the existence of racism and violence makes about as much sense as blaming doctors for the existence of disease.

None of it is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

IV. We are living in a traumatised society

Far too many people in this country are facing unimaginable levels of trauma.

The trauma of:

• Domestic violence
• Sexual violence
• Child abuse
• Human Trafficking

And so the list goes on.

Like poverty, trauma has consequences that last a lifetime.

People are angry and they are looking for someone to blame.

None of it is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

V. We have defunded the police

Though none of challenges set out above is the fault of the police, the fact remains that policing stands first in line to respond to the consequences of all of them. It remains the agency of both first and last resort.

The problem is that the Government of the last decade has done untold damage to both the operational capacity of the police service as a whole and to the professional confidence of individual police officers. 

From 2010-2018, politicians cut 44,000 officers and staff in England & Wales alone. And this happened in the face of almost every single piece of expert advice. The Government was warned repeatedly that their short-term cuts would have severe long-term consequences, but they went ahead regardless. 

And look where we are now.

None of this is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

VI. We have defunded every other part of the public sector too

The harm done by austerity is not unique to policing.

• Listen to what @tinysunbird and @doctor_oxford and @amateuradam and others are telling us about the NHS
• Listen to what @BarristerSecret and @EssexBarrister and others are telling us about the criminal justice system
• Listen to what teachers are telling us about the education system
• Listen to what youth workers are telling us about the young people in their care
• Listen to what we are being told about the probation service (not least about the desperate failures of privatisation), about the prison system, and about every other part of the public sector.

All of it has been stripped to the bone.

None of this is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line; to pick up the pieces that everyone else has left behind.

VII. We are led by politicians who repeatedly offer the wrong answers to the wrong questions

Whatever the particular question facing society (whether about Covid or protests or violence or anything else), there will always be some politicians telling us that the answer to it lies in a combination of:

• More legislation
• More police powers
• More prison cells

Politicians call for more of these things because they think that it makes them appear tough. And it affords them the appearance of doing something while actually achieving almost nothing of real and lasting substance. 

None of this is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

VIII. We are led by politicians who are desperate to distract us from the truth

There is plenty going on at the moment that the people in charge would prefer us not to be thinking about:

• One of the worst Covid death rates on the planet
• One of the worst economic downturns on the planet
• The billions of pounds of public money ‘spaffed’ (£22 billion on Test & Trace alone)
• The catastrophic long term costs of austerity
• The dawning realities of Brexit
• The widespread injustice and inequality described above.

Which is why they are so desperate to confect rage about statues and flags and whatever else comes to mind. And some in the media seem only too happy to help them.

It suits them for the focus of our rage to remain on police officers. Because it keeps us looking in the wrong direction.

None of this is the fault of the police, but still we ask them to hold the line.

So where do we go from here?

I don’t know how well I’m managing to make my point here. I’m still trying to make sense of it all myself. Nonetheless, there is no doubt in my mind about the urgent need to start doing things very differently.

• We need to change the way we think about the world we’re living in
• We need to change the way we behave
• We need to change the questions we’re asking
• We need to look beyond the symptoms to understand the causes of all that is facing us as a society
• We need to confront injustice and inequality wherever we encounter it
• We need to confront racism and male violence and every other disease of this age
• We need to understand trauma and its consequences
• We need to change the way we communicate with one another
• We need to build bridges, not walls
• We need to demand much better from the press
• We need to demand much better from politicians

Of course, we need to demand better from our police officers too. We should continue to hold them to higher standards than we do anyone else. Precisely because they are the police.

But, at the same time, we have got to stop blaming them for things that have got nothing to do with them.

We need to stop blaming them for things that are not their fault.

And we need to stop blaming them for the failure to fix things that are beyond their control.

This is not on them.

It’s on us.

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