Police and the underclasses in Britain

Factual Questions
1

As controversy continues over the treatment of America’s minorities (primarily African-Americans) by white-majority police departments, it occurs to me to wonder how this compares with the situation in Britain, both today and in the past.

Professional civic police forces owe much to Sir Robert Peel, whose Peelian Principles are considered the defining rules for ensuring that a police force is civic in character rather than acting as an occupying army. In particular, the insistence upon gaining and maintaining the trust and support of the people.

Yet, this was in an era where class distinction was alive and well in Britain. Cockneys, Irish, and other underclasses might have had the same skin color as the upper classes, but in every other way they were considered a breed apart, largely irredeemable and subject to blatant prejudice.

So were relations between the “Bobbies” and the denizens of Whitechapel and Limehouse as poor as between white police and African-Americans today? Or if not, what made the difference?

2

The UK police are usually drawn from the community they serve.

It is rare to meet a policeman who is not from a down to earth working class background. A lot of police work is dealing with the results of social problems that dog every community:drunks, domestic disputes, wild teenagers, various types of crime perpetrated by the usual suspects.

Cockneys? They moved out to the surrounding towns in the counties of Essex and Kent miles outside London decades ago. The poor East End of London is now a very diverse mix of different first and second generation immigrant group. More recently, it has middle class students and lot of migrants from a huge range of european countries who are often going back and forth to their home countries. It is a vibrant mix.

The Metropolitan Police are very sensitive about community relations, they have made some serious mistakes in the past, for which they had to answer to some long running inquiries into institutional racism, which they have tried to address.

There is an underclass in the UK and London, but it is not really defined by a particular group. More a collection of people who are unable to function in mainstream society for one reason or another. Bad education, social problems, addictions or just plain bad characters and criminals.

A couple of years ago in 2011, there were some riots in London that resulted in a lot of looting of shops. It came as quite a surprise to many and there are various theories as to why it kicked off, but it seemed to be mainly because the police mishandled a situation and did not react fast enough or appropriately. Policing tends to be naturally decentralised and they seem to need a bit of notice to get organised centrally. For planned events, they are highly organised, but in this case a police operation was badly managed and they screwed up. It happens from time to time, if they take their eye off the ball.

The UK is certainly a class based culture, but that does not mean it is simple and it has changed immeasurably in the past few decades as an industrial economy has given way to a service dominated one. Various shades of middle class now dominate and education is the passport to social mobility.

There is a lot of concern that the poor white British are being left behind by those who come from immigrant backgrounds who seem to value education much more.

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/education-committee/news/white-working-class-report/

There is nothing like the tension seen in the US. Successive governments in the UK have shared a multi-cultural policy consensus for decades. Like many European countries, they looked at what happened in the US in the Sixties during the Civil Rights era and tried their darnedest to ensure that the same conflicts did not happen over here. The size of the public sector in the UK gave the government a lot of power to ensure that anti discrimination policies took root. Some institutions proved very slow to adapt and when there was a riot of some suggestion of racism by the police, there were often calls for formal inquiry (we have a lot of inquiries in the UK) and a report produced that informs future policy.

The last really big one was the Macpherson report into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence at the hands of a racist gang in South London in 1993. That led to a big effort to make the police more accountable and eliminate racist attitudes.

When the police screw up in the UK people feel very let down indeed, the public has high expectations of integrity, impartiality and fair dealing. The police rely very heavily on public support and usually they get it. But…every now and then that relationship weakens and has to be repaired.

Contrast this with France, with about the same population, which employs three times as many police. There the police are not friendly community policemen, they are agents of the government, there to control the population. You don’t ask French police for directions, they would laugh in your face.

I am not sure how this compares to policing in the US. It is such a big country and we only hear about the extremes.

Is the expensive ‘paramilitary enforcer’ style of policing common in the US or do you have community policing as well?

It is easy to get the impression that the US is policed by Robocop and Judge Dredd.

3

Nah, Robocop and Judge Dredd are a lot more effective :stuck_out_tongue:

IMHO, the USA has a strange hybrid of community policing and state enforcers. The problem is that for a very long time blacks were beyond the pale- police were servants of the community, only blacks weren’t considered members. Within living memory there was a time when the police proudly considered it part of their job to make sure that the “coloreds” “knew their place”. That didn’t really start changing until the 1970s and although the police are far more inclusive than they once were you still have overwhelmingly white police forces patrolling mostly black neighborhoods, where often they’re considered little more than an occupying army. It doesn’t help that African-Americans (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) are far more likely than the average to be poor and live in neighborhoods plagued by a culture of crime, violence, drug dealing and gangs; and crime control efforts there sometimes look more like a war upon the inhabitants than community policing.

As for the paramilitary style of policing, that took off in the 1980s when the introduction of “crack” led to a surge in drug dealing and trafficking controlled by local street gangs. Police want to go home alive as much as anyone, so the standard for confronting violent, armed and often high gangs in drug arrests was a blitzkrieg of overwhelming force. Even today an allegation of being a drug dealer or trafficker is enough to have a score of armed and armored police breaking down your door in a no-knock warrant raid.

And then 9-11-2001 and the “War On Terror” came, and since then the militarization of the police has gotten absurd. Blessedly the USA has largely not suffered from domestic terrorism; but perceived threats are met with a grossly disproportionate response. One armed suspect brings twenty police, two brings a hundred, and four would nearly call for mobilizing the National Guard. In the Boston Marathon bombings, the manhunt for two suspected terrorists led to Boston being virtually under martial law for 24 hours.

4

I like it. A lot.

I would like to see it in action in situations ranging from jay walking to serious threat.

5

French police isn’t nearly as respected/loved/relied upon as what you describe for British police, but for the record, you can ask them for directions, in fact.
(neighbourhood police has been gutted by the right that wanted less good relations and more repression, by the way. I still think it was a huge mistake.)

6

I think you need to look rather wider than direct law enforcement and through to public institutions.

The problem is that in certain institutions there is an over representation of BME staff, certainly in the NHS, London Underground and some others. It also seems that BME staff are far more heavily concentrated in the lower echelons of these organisations.

When it comes to Armed Forces, Customs, Prisons, Probation and other central state function, there is a problem. It can be patchy and regional in nature, but typically much less than 5% of those workforces are from BME backgrounds, which gets much worse the further up those organisations you go.

I have been to various meetings where very senior managers have openly stated this is a problem and work needs to be done to find out where the process is failing, is it in job adverts, is it in application screening, is it in interviews, or perhaps there is a cultural issue where BME citizens simply do not consider applying for such state institutions.

I can think of one scheme that was doomed to failure from the day it started. We had a mentored accelerated development scheme that was open specifically for BME staff, however the huge barrier is that applicants must already be at a minimum of junior manager level to access this opportunity - quite how this helps BME staff actually get into management from non-manager roles seems to have escaped the staff development team.

7

FYI

BME = Black and Ethnic Minority

TTFN

8

I experienced an example of UK policing last night; I was double parked outside a restaurant - not actually parked but I’d pulled up alongside a parked car waiting for someone.

A police car then pulled up alongside me (making three in a row!).

It was only afterwards I realised his whole approach was trained. Nothing at all that invite a defensive response let alone reaction.

Passenger cop opened his window and said ‘probably not a good idea waiting here, could you find somewhere else?’. Then they drove off. Total time: 5 seconds

Issue dealt with.

No idea how that would work elsewhere.

9

Tweaking institutions until they work properly is an important job.

Maybe making black and minority ethnic members of the ‘funny handshake club’ would enhance their career prospects in these slow-to-change institutions.

:wink:

The police in the UK are polite as long as you are polite as well and show respect. They have discretion over what laws they enforce and it is possible to convince them you have made an honest mistake and let you off. However, if you use abusive language or are rude, they will warn you that you risk arrest for a breach of the peace.

The British have a tendency to fight when they get drunk and part of police work is to patrol the known troublespots in city centres on Fridays and Saturday nights, breaking up brawls and giving out warnings for people to cool down. Usually the sight of a uniform and a squad car has a significant effect. People get taught to respect the police from an early age, the police visit schools on public relations exercises. Tales from the police station is a staple of TV drama and the police tend to live in the communities they serve.

Here is an example of the police dealing with an madman armed with a machete in London.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8523151/Police-tackle-machete-wielding-man-with-wheelie-bin.html

It looks messy, but they all lived. The police carry a short baton, sometimes pepper spray and rarely a taser. Any reports of firearms being seen usually involves an armed response team and they go into full anti-terrorist mode. Bear in mind the penalty for possession of an illegal firearm in the UK is 5 years in prison.

Most of the time the police are dealing with the usual mad, bad, sad and hopeless cases. They tend to constitute the underclass of British society and they consume a lot of welfare, health, police and social work resources.

At the moment, the big issue for the police is how to deal with wannabe Rambos who go off to fight in Syria and who might bring their fight back to the UK. The police seem to be getting information from the within the communities involved, which is encouraging.