Reflections from the co-editors of In Our Hands

This is an excerpt of an interview conducted by Laura Kauer Garcia (INCLO – Argentina), with Emmanuelle Andrews (Liberty – UK) and Sherylle Dass (Legal Resource Centre – South Africa), all co-editors for the In Our Hands compendium. Together they reflect on the motivations that drove INCLO and its members to put together this unique collection of articles and their experiences working with collaborators and editing submissions, a very different approach to INCLO’s previous publications. Throughout the conversation, they tease out some of the main themes that arose in most articles. They close with their hopes for In Our Hands and for reimagining policing more widely.

Defunding, detasking and other debates in the long history of fighting policing discrimination

LKG:  It was over two years ago when INCLO started discussing what and if we should do something as we watched the powerful protests and heard the demands that followed the murder of George Floyd as this turned into an international movement. We had many questions about how these demands and debates echoed outside of the US and in different INCLO countries. To start, at what point was the debate on defunding, detasking or reforming policing in your countries, in South Africa and the UK respectively? 

SD: For many South Africans the perception of policing has not changed fundamentally since the abolishment of apartheid despite cosmetic changes that successive governments have made. The majority of members of the police service are people of colour, yet people still have the perception that the police are agents of government oppression and control.

This is a theme that comes up throughout In Our Hands: the impact of colonialism on policing, and how policing structures and institutions are –in and of themselves– inherently discriminatory and persecutory. Post 1994 there were several initiatives by the new democratic government to demilitarize the police: they stripped away military ranks in the police services but this is where it ended. Since then, government officials have begun advocating for the re-introduction of a more militarized police as a way of fighting rising criminality. They did not however dismantle institutionalized racism they inherited from the apartheid regime that dehumanized black and brown people, with policing used as a means of controlling these communities and stifling dissent. It is therefore not hard to believe that despite the integration of black and brown people within the police services, over-policing and excessive use of force by the police still predominantly affect these groups. 

This is a theme that comes up throughout In Our Hands: the impact of colonialism on policing, and how policing structures and institutions are –in and of themselves– inherently discriminatory and persecutory.

LKG: What you say about cosmetic changes is important: it’s not that there weren’t efforts to make reforms to policing institutions, but they don’t seem to be enough or work in the long term. For this project, our timeline began with the murder of George Floyd and the many protests it generated. Maybe that is the beginning of some folks’ politicization of this topic, but it’s certainly not the beginning of the timeline anywhere. What do you both think?

EA: It’s an important practice to acknowledge what’s come before. I’ll start by situating this in the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, which had the effect in the UK of helping people to identify the threads of police and state violence that are interconnected in histories of colonialism and Empire. Despite it being a global movement that was triggered by American police violence, almost because there was a sharp focus on the US and commentators were trying to situate the UK as distinct from that history, organizers disrupted the ability for people to use the UK as America’s foil. Instead, people rose up and said: this is not just an American problem.

People rose up and said: this is not just an American problem.

At the same time, we were experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic and a swathe of new protest legislation that would dramatically inhibit the ability for people to organize on the streets. This only intensified after the murder of a young woman, Sarah Everard, after the police officer who killed her used his Covid police powers to coerce her into his car. That was a massive turning point that brought home to more communities the violence and sexism and racism of policing and police power. Suddenly, the calls for rolling back powers were coming from various places, with different communities protesting together in solidarity –and also experiencing police violence during their resistance.

To be clear, this wasn’t a new conversation. For instance, in the late 1990s after the murder of Stephen Lawrence – a young Black 18-year-old boy who was killed in a racist attack by White passersby – an inquiry into how the police handled the murder investigation was prompted and the police were identified as “institutionally racist.”  That was a massive deal and still is. Yet the response from institutions of power to this identification was to implement changes with a reformist approach, even if activists and organizers who were trying to fight for change wanted something beyond that.

LKG:  Do the calls to “defund” that arose from the BLM movement only resonate in the United States? Or is it impacting the conversation and organizing elsewhere?

SD: I don’t want to speak on behalf of the movement. But I don’t think [the call to defund] resonated with other people outside of the United States in the same way it was perceived in the U.S.  The call to ‘Defund the Police’ was politicized in the U.S as a fear-mongering tactic to delegitimize the movement’s demands but I don’t think that is the reason why that call did not resonate with people outside the U.S. It meant different things to different people –similar to a hashtag– it is open to interpretation within your own context and for South Africans I believe we interpreted defunding as divesting power. We saw the metamorphosis of the campaign across the globe to calls for divestment of power (including reallocating police budgets) from the police rather than defunding.

The call to ‘Defund the Police’ was politicized in the U.S as a fear-mongering tactic to delegitimize the movement’s demands but I don’t think that is the reason why that call did not resonate with people outside the U.S.

EA: In the UK, many people might say that the police have been defunded for decades thanks to policies of austerity in this country. But interconnected to the demand to defund is a call for a reduction in police power, as Sherylle says. I would add that it is also a question of looking beyond the uniform of the police, to other carceral structures and institutions. Funding is one part of the conversation, the other is where can those resources be better placed?

LKG: People all over the world will immediately recognize the name of George Floyd, while just in the United States there are hundreds of names of others who have been victims of violence perpetrated by police and other punitive institutions. Are there names or particular cases of violence that have resonated in that way in your countries?

EA: I noticed that many of the articles in In Our Hands start with someone being named. The Australia Northern Territory article begins with the murder of an Aboriginal man called Comandhi Walker, the Colombian article with the community leader Guillermo Quintero. In the Argentine article on sex workers, Brenda who is assaulted by a police officer and is the object of a police-staged drug seizure. There are multiple George Floyds, right? People who due to their race, identity, and challenges that they face to live the best life they can achieve for themselves or their loved ones, deal with violence from police. The context may be different but you could go into any of these countries and identify similar conditions. I think there’s something quite haunting about that. 

SD: The killing of 34 striking miners by members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) at the Lonmin mine at Marikana on 16 August 2012 was a profound shock for the South African nation. In turn, it also raised major questions about policing and the extent to which the SAPS was adhering to its constitutional duty to act, teach, and require its members to act, in accordance with the Constitution and the law. The subsequent Marikana Commission of Inquiry highlighted a range of systemic problems in the functioning of the SAPS, in particular at the senior management level, and in its ability to handle complex crowd management operations. It was clear from the findings of the commission and the subsequent high-level panel that police had no business in negotiating what was essentially a wage dispute where they clearly had no mandate, training or power to do so.

LKG: These catalysing events that gather so much attention are almost like a knot that you stop at and when you start following the string, you realize it keeps going back and back, touching so many individuals and communities. And you realize that this is something that’s been weaving for decades and forms the fabric of society. The timing or details of the “aha!” moment might be completely different in every country. In Argentina, our understanding of the police or our discomfort with its power is largely based on what happened in the recent military dictatorship more than colonialism. Although of course that’s at the root of many forms of racism that exist today and that our society is beginning to acknowledge and deal with.

Key realizations from the articles of In Our Hands

You’ve read and sat with all of these articles. What are some of the realizations that really struck you as you were reading all of these articles?

SD: This is a difficult question to answer. The Colombian article on community action and the peasantry in Colombia was the first time that I’ve been introduced to the peasantry community. And that sort of highlights how many of these stories are not known outside of their country or region.

This article is about the peasantry organizing themselves as a group to fill the gap left by the authorities because they were seen as an internal threat or a terrorist group. It is an example of how the police state apparatus can be used for divisive, discriminatory, and persecutory purposes. It’s really the police themselves that have been used to persecute this particular group. For me, while the article talks about the need for legal recognition of the peasant guard, I was intrigued by the State clearly deciding it needed to create a new external structure rather than repair relationships between the state and the community and work from what already exists and works for them. 

Then the Australian article with the northern aboriginals, and the West Papuans in the Indonesian example were both examples of the community advocating for self-determination and, to a certain extent, self-governance in that they really have completely lost faith in policing and these groups were sort of proposing an alternative to basic self -governance, to self-police. They refer to it as alternative policing but essentially for these groups, I feel like they are more leaning toward an abolitionist theory rather than a reformist theory. 

EA: One thing that struck me is how central conflict resolution was to the expected role of police. In the Australian Northern Territory article, conflict was being caused by poor and insufficient housing in remote communities, lack of education and employment opportunities, the historical and ongoing impacts of colonization and the experience of having been dispossessed of land, with missions having come in place, dispossessing clans and tribes and then forcing them to live together. 

We don’t have good models for how we deal with conflict in our communities, our instinct is often to take a very punitive approach.

We don’t have good models for how we deal with conflict in our communities, our instinct is often to take a very punitive approach, rather than, say, facilitating conversation and understanding between groups. This feeds into racist discriminatory tropes about communities being more violent which of course detracts from the question of why this violence is happening in the first place. The answer is that it’s often historical systemic issues, capitalism and the conditions of our lives that have broken down trust and solidarity between people who might otherwise be natural allies. Then police sweep in and that generally leads to more chances of violence, arrests, and strains on the community.

One important takeaway for me came from the article which explores alternatives to calling the police when someone is in a mental health crisis in Toronto. There they had set up an alternative phone line but the state had only agreed to give them the power to run that service for what was considered low-level issues. The authors share their concerns that this practice might actually just displace really violent policing to more marginalised, vulnerable communities. We have to be really careful and intentional about what our alternatives look like because there is a risk that even our alternatives only serve a small subset. That may still be an important harm reduction, but the work is not done until all of us are free.

LKG: In addition to having a lot of articles that focus on police responding to conflict like the Argentine article focused on sex workers, many focus on police getting involved when the basic needs of people are not being met and issues arise from that. That’s the case of crisis response that you mention, Emmanuelle. Sherylle, could you speak about this issue in the context of the South African article and the right to dignified housing? 

SD: Yes, the article focuses on a community demanding and protecting their right to housing. But I think it’s really about homelessness and criminalizing poverty. That is the root cause of the problems in the South African context. Across In Our Hands I think the underlying issues around all of these cases is that it’s with a group of people that have been historically dehumanized in society across the globe. The police mirror these views and implement strategies aimed at dehumanizing these groups of people further. There are groups at risk of police brutality, and it’s merely because of who they are and how they are viewed within society. I think that the police end up being a mechanism to entrench those dominant narratives. 

LKG: A dehumanizing narrative that doesn’t stop at the police, even if they are the most visible arm of the state.

SD: No, it goes far beyond that. It touches on every state institution. The criminal justice system, healthcare, social welfare system, you know, even people handing out charity. 

Power and the impact of narratives to combat the criminalization of communities

EA: Power is so central to this conversation and how narratives can entrench or challenge who are the holders of power.

In the article about peasant guards in Colombia, the state has labelled the peasant guards as terrorists, the internal enemy, the insurgent subject, and then the peasants themselves as lawbreakers, and drug traffickers. And because the peasants and Indigenous groups have been at the forefront of pushing back against deforestation, they’re now labelled as environmental predators. It’s so important that we identify what these labels are because the state always shifts the goalposts for what ‘the other’ looks like. For us as a society to push back against that and not fall into those traps of dehumanizing our fellow or potential comrades, our communities, we need to realize that that’s the game they’re playing. 

These narratives serve a function, and it’s to justify the need for police, for more funding to police than to other social services. They are used to justify us not giving these communities housing or health rights because they don’t deserve it, they are less than others, so we can dehumanize them.

SD:  Policing structures view themselves as protectors of safety. It’s an important vision to question because, you know, for one to be safe, there has to be an enemy. And nine times out of ten, the police are saying “We are stopping the enemy from infringing on your safety”. And usually,  the enemy that they are trying to protect you against are the very people that have been historically persecuted because of innate characteristics like their race,  gender, ethnicity, or for the work that they do. And the “you” that they protect is a very select slice of society.

Policing structures view themselves as protectors of safety. It’s an important vision to question because, you know, for one to be safe, there has to be an enemy.

Instead of people feeling safe and secure, governments create an environment where there is that enemy and the only people that can protect you from that enemy are the police. We can see that in many of the articles like the Irish one focused on Traveller and Roma communities who are not only the most underserved populations in Ireland, but also very hesitant to reach out to institutions for support given the history of discrimination they have faced and still do.

LKG: When we think of violence to communities, what is our definition? There’s the very physical violence of police but there are also different forms of violence that exist that deepen that sense of de-humanization of some or of being less worthy of care.

EA: There are two quotes I’m going to lean on here. One is by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, she says, “racism specifically is the state sanctioned or extra legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” I think it’s the violence that pushes you to premature death that is what links all the articles together. Whether that’s because the police are particularly violent against a particular group or it’s because the state is not providing or communities don’t have access to for various reasons, the things that enable them to live full lives. 

The second quote I wanted to lean on is by Shanice McBean and Aviah Day in their book, Abolition Revolution. And they say “ abolition isn’t just a struggle against the physical manifestation of violent institutions – the cuffing, the caging, the death –  but also an ideological struggle to dismantle the narratives and ideas used to uphold them.”

It’s insidious how the state uses these narratives, because they birth new possibilities for how communities are policed. In the UK there is a  narrative of ‘thugs’ and ‘gangs’ and all of this means the state is going to physically stop and search people and check them for drugs or weapons – a very physical manifestation of policing – but  these narratives uphold other tactics, too. “What music are ‘these people’ listening to? What cultural events are they attending?”  Narratives expand the methods by which policing operates. We need to be really alive to this, especially as policing gets more technical, as these practices improve. A new UK budget was announced not too long ago and the Chancellor spoke about more investment in drones… more tracking and surveillance in all parts of people’s lives to manage the perceived threat, right?

In Our Hands: lessons going forward

LKG:  Right, which raises serious concerns because we don’t want more funding for more and better facial recognition when we know the basis of how it functions is racially hinged. We don’t want tech to do more harm, and more efficiently.

I think it’s really helpful to ground these reflections on the very specific experiences explored in the articles. But, what do you think is the value of someone from a very different context reading this compendium?

EA: I think there is plenty to learn from each other, from folks trying to resist these forms of institutionalized and entrenched violence. Policing in the way that we know it is not inevitable. One of the Colombian articles discusses how whenever there is a police raid people show up and start recording what’s going on and when they do the police stand back. I can see that in conversation with community-led resistance to police violence in the UK against police harassment and raids of migrants. 

One article we haven’t spoken much about is the Brazilian one. The scale of police violence in Rio is mind-numbing: in the first nine months of 2019 there were 1402 civilian deaths by police patrol operations in the State of Rio. The article discusses how they paused policing. The result? In the first months that the measure was enforced, there was a reduction in the number of deaths as a result of police intervention but also crime in general, from homicides to thefts. It’s important to be able to show that another way is possible.

LKG: When we started this project, we didn’t know what shape it would take, but we knew that it needed to take a different shape than our usual reports. We needed to be humble and acknowledge how little impact the reformist approach many of our organizations had supported enthusiastically, but also wanted to delve in the differences that come out of different historic relationships with colonialism, Global North vs Global South etc. It was a huge learning experience for our small network of organizations. Bearing all this in mind, what hope do you have for the impact In Our Hands can have beyond us and how it can be useful to readers?

LKG: When we started this project, we didn’t know what shape it would take, but we knew it needed to take a different shape than our usual reports. We needed to be humble and acknowledge how little impact the reformist approach many of our organizations had supported enthusiastically, but also wanted to delve into the differences that come out of different historical relationships with colonialism, Global North vs Global South etc. It was a huge learning experience for our small network of organizations. Bearing all this in mind, what hope do you have for the impact In Our Hands can have beyond us and how it can be useful to readers?

SD: In Our Hands is a thought provoker. We have barely touched the surface [in this conversation], but it does engage you to want to think about the alternatives. What actually is policing and who does it serve?  I think doing this exercise and starting off with ‘reimagining the police’ as the title and then ending here is actually indicative of where we have gone, and where we have grown as we engage with the topic. 

I think for me, this is a start or it can be used as a start for a conversation about how we divest power from the police. I think that’s what came out in all of the articles. Firstly and foremost, there is a need to determine how we divest power from the police. Then the second thing is how do we address these dominant narratives that actually entrench inequality, entrench the de-humanizing of people who are directly impacted by over-policing and police violence. I think for me that’s what came out in this exercise. I think that because we’re looking at different contexts, I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all process. But there are central things or common themes that you can take forward. 

EA: Yes, maybe the best we can do is allow people to critically interrogate where they are. All the articles are on a spectrum – and it’s not even a spectrum of A (reformist) to B (abolition) – but more of a circle of different ways of responding to this issue. Maybe that’s actually a really strategic way of moving people. Maybe there’s something to be said about the fact that you can read one chapter and then turn to the next article and be like “Oh I’m now able to form my position in my view of what I think would work in my jurisdiction.” It’s an offering.