Capitalism
about justice have become conversations about sensitivity; heavily unequal material conditions have become disparities of ‘offenc e ’ . 8 When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from its benefactors to those who are affected by it. 9 The primary way in which capitalism maintains itself is often overlooked. We must understand that the police exist to protect you is not true; the police force are the ultimate enforcers of inequality and capitalism. David Bayley explains how the police do not prevent crime by noticing that liberals view police as the legitimate mechanism for exercising force in the interest of society, because they see violations of principles or laws as individual failings. 10 This narrative is encouraged by those in power to refrain from spending money on community development. Oliver Letwin MP, adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, chose not to accept proposals from cabinet ministers keen to implement positive action schemes and refurbish estates, because in his words, ‘riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by indi vidual characteristics and attitudes’ . 11 This is another of capitalism’s techniques that works to transform the responsibility of fixing a broken social system to the individual. In the student protest campaign of 2013, Cops Off Campus, the students understood that the purpose of police is ‘neith er to fight oppression nor to reduce violence, but to uphold “ public order ” – which means the order of capital and private property, of white supremacy and patriarchy.’ The category of criminal exists for those who disrupt this order, yet the term also con veniently coincides with meaning ‘bad,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘harmful,’ and ‘immoral’. 12 ’Conveniently’ , as this assumption serves to maintain this unjust system of policing by stigmatizi ng anyone ‘who falls foul of it’ . 13 It is crucial to understand that our ‘social reality’ is created through policing – the stance enforces and affirms itself. Alex S. Vitale’s The End of Policing outlines why we must rethink the role and function of police in society. Throughout the book, however, he fails to mention how the role of police is inherent to the maintenance of capitalism, which, in material terms, is the preservation of current distribution of wealth and power, that is, the perpetuation of extreme poverty. Vitale poses an important question; 14 is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, immigration, youth violence, sex work and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? As long as police are tasked with simultaneous wars on drugs, crime, disorder, and terrorism, we will have aggressive and invasive policing that disproportionately criminalizes the young, poor, male, and non-white. The police force was never meant to solve all these problems, even though the origins of police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class. The suppression of workers and the micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been the central project of policing. In 1829 the London Metropolitan Police (often referred to as the original police force) was created by Sir Robert Peel. It was this model that was imported to Boston in 1838. Peel developed the idea during the colonial occupation of Ireland, seeing the need for new forms of social control to allow for continued political and economic domination in faces of growing insurrections that
8 Eddo-Lodge 2017. 9 Eddo-Lodge 2017. 10 Bayley 1996. 11 Eddo-Lodge 2017. 12 Duff 2021. 13 Ibid. 14 For this next section I am indebted to Vitale 2017.
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