Policing the Future

Preface

This paper was written for the History Workshop 20 in Leeds, during November 1986. In the workshop which I gave, I introduced the paper by pointing out that the arguments within it were very general and the paper itself entirely polemical. I explained that each of my last three books contain detailed case histories and stories from people ‘in their own words'(1). For the History Workshop, however, I felt that it was important to look more closely at the developing role of the police, their philosophy and social context, and thereby to draw some very general conclusions about the nature and meaning of police power.

I suggested that the audience might bear one very simple criterion in mind when considering the changing nature of police power, namely the high level of arrests over the last few years: 10,000 during the miners’ strike; 200-400 during various single peace movement demonstrations; between 400 and 500 during each of the two ‘Stop the City’ actions; 300 arrests, often after dawn raids, in the months immediately following the conflict at Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham; 1,000 over the period of the Wapping dispute.

This high level of arrests during various kinds of protest are an indication of the shift by the police from crime control to a more military and ‘political’ style of policing. They tell the story as well of a shift from policing the criminal law to a more general policing which is often beyond statute or legal precedent. Other indices of the new areas of repression in our present society are the sudden and phenomenal rise in the level of the prison population since the late seventies and the ever growing backlog of cases waiting to be tried (2). Government ministers, senior police officers and even some sociologists will tell us that these statistics are illustrative of a society beset by rising crime. I would argue the case that increasingly they have more to do with expanding police powers and a constantly broadening criminalisation of the employed and non-working class and marginalised people.

Introduction

This paper argues very generally that the police at the present time are gaining greater powers both with the backing of the law and beyond its accepted boundaries. And that this power is exemplified and will be manifest in the future in three main ways: firstly with greater and more general ‘military’ tactics and organisation, secondly by an increasingly clear division between a ‘civilianised’ or ordinary policing system and that of a ‘standing army’, and thirdly by an ever more intrusive police control of everyday life and the civil structures under which we live.

The paper hints at a general development within the police force away from crime control and towards a deeper political consciousness which sees social control as its main purpose. This direction could be seen as a consequence of a continuing criminalisation of political views and actions which are a threat to the ideology and culture of the State and not simply a specific threat to different kinds of property relations. The paper makes the point that the increasing politicisation of the police leads to a targeting of certain identities as enemies both of the police and the State. Finally the paper presents the view that although the police are increasingly becoming an autonomous power, they, like the government of the day, are the servants of the changing needs of capital.

I am going now, to draw together a number of themes which have preoccupied me over the last decade and which I believe are important to an understanding of policing in the future. I would like to do this under a number of sub-headings.

Policing the Changing Means of Production

The fact that in 1986 I was asked to talk about the policing of the miners’ strike in Yorkshire, suggests to me that even now, many people have not grasped the meaning of the miners’ strike, let alone the various mechanisms which were employed to defeat it. Somehow, we have to divest ourselves of the myth that the miners’ strike was a seminal turning point, either in the history of the working class and its resistance to the State, or in the policing of our society. If the miners’ strike represented anything in an absolute sense, it was the point at which the working class were forced to forsake their origins in the industrial revolution and move into the post-industrial era. With the crossing of this line, there comes a qualitative change in the strategies employed by the State, which should be followed by a new consciousness and organisation of class struggle.

Despite a number of individuating phenomena which I will mention later, the miners’ strike has to be seen within the historical context of deindustrialisation, deskilling and deunionisation; within the context of capital’s need in the face of international competition and decreasing resources, to cut its wage bill, make continual technological advance and hence keep up the rate of profit. Naturally the miners were not the first or only group of industrial workers to be affected by this historical process. The years from 1970 to the present are littered with the skeletons of the older industrial social base; the dock workers were attacked in the early seventies, as were the ship builders; the car workers’ strength and militancy were gradually eroded throughout the seventies; and the steel workers were attacked at the close of the decade. But perhaps the most continuous and most embattled position was reserved for print workers, especially within the newspaper industry. It is here in the printed word that the massive and sudden change from older machinery to new, high technology, has presented the owners of capital with an immediate answer to overmanning and the unprofitability of carefully guarded craft deployment of skilled workers. By a means quite different from that used by generations of miners, the print workers managed for years to stave off a final confrontation in their industry. Internal agreements within the industry rarely needed support from other industrial workers and printers came to be seen as a ‘race apart’. Now, at Wapping, they are paying the price for this means of preserving their own powerful craft base. And much more clearly than during the miners’ strike, the tactics which they are using are shown to have little effect against the post-industrial State.

Rather than the miners’ strike being a watershed of industrial conflict, or the most seminal period of policing history, we have to see both these aspects within the broader context of State policies over the last decade and a half. In most periods the State realises its future needs in a more articulate and co-ordinated way than those who resist it. Preparations for policing an industrial conflict of the type which the miners’ strike represented had been going on since the late sixties (3). Perhaps more seriously than this, the culture and philosophy of the State institutions which legitimised police organisation had also been prepared. I would suggest that the fulcrum of this police organisation did not depend upon any new or break-away strategies, it did not represent some apex of police power in the way that it has been represented. It appeared this way to many trade union leaders because more than any other group these people have been blind to the way in which the State has reorganised its cultural messages and its means of repression. Carefully guarding their patriarchal and craft based power, many elements within the trade union bureaucracy have paid scant interest to what has been happening to marginalised groups and particularly to the unemployed. Had the leadership of the NUM had a better grasp of this slow change in police organisation and State philosophy between Saltley and 1984, they might have employed different tactics during the strike (4).

The most important and the simplest view of policing the miners’ strike rests upon the recognition of well-proven historical strategies: sheer power of numbers and an increased rationalisation of para-military formations, discipline and organisation. In the second of these, we saw a return to the military tactics, not only of the early nineteenth century when the police were still heavily influenced by the military, but to later periods of colonial resistance against a British army and police presence.

Having said this, there were distinct and idiosyncratic policing developments which came to fruition during the miners’ strike. Firstly, as in all wars, technology and strategy advanced apace. After a relatively quiet period in terms of lengthy mass confrontations on the mainland, the year of the miners’ strike provided the State with an anvil for technological advance, not only in hardware but in the expression of its new philosophy and in organisation (5). The second ‘new departure’ was only new in relation to the period. As has periodically happened before during times of crisis, the State wove together a variety of strands of the criminal law. These various facets were not new, but combined at one time, and heightened by the crisis, they formed for the first time, a structured whole; a new matrix of criminal law to be used in mass confrontation and later to be drawn up and included in statute (6).

I will sum up this section by saying that the period of change from the older industrial and labour intensive means of production to the new, high technology and labour atomised means, has been characterised by a series of industry-based mass struggles between labour and capital, at the workplace and in the community. Those struggles, such as the miners’ strike, which took themselves beyond the factory or the workshop, have been policed in a certain way. The more specific needs of the criminal law have been set aside and replaced by very general rules. The police officer has increasingly become ‘the law’ rather than acting upon it, charges and trials simply expedient justifications for this power. To this understanding we have to add the fact that the language of industrial struggles has radically changed. The traditional language of a working class in ascendancy, of strikes, pickets, scabs, has been replaced by the culture of a strong post industrial State. This new language pervades our everyday life and inculcates new values based upon property relations. During the miners’ strike this new cultural language was not resisted by any new political culture expressed by the predominantly male NUM members (7).

It appears unlikely that in the present climate there will be any mass struggles as well organised or as long as the miners’ strike. The State’s organisation against the miners, however, and particularly the police strategies employed, will continue to be used in other mass confrontations not based around the means of production. What singles out all these conflicts is the fact that they are primarily conflicts which could be resolved politically, but which are predominantly resolved by the employment of the police and the criminal law. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act now gives the police powers to surround areas and put up road blocks and we have seen a number of circumstances since the miners’ strike in which the police have diverted traffic and used news censorship. Future large scale confrontations between the police and the people will be characterised by the increasing use by the police of military type tactics, edicts, organisation and hardware.

Public Order Policing

Here, I would like to focus upon small scale public order situations and examine them within a social context (8). As capitalism rationalises its productive forces, just as it did in the early nineteenth century, not only does the whole administration of capital and the State become more centralised, but choice for large groups of discarded industrial workers and smaller groups within the community is eroded. Decreasing productive work and the loss of the wage that this previously provided marks out growing numbers of people, not only as impoverished, but as personally and politically powerless. It is this latter factor, the distance of individuals from any location within the structures of the State, its culture and ideology, rather than simple poverty, which leads to them being considered enemies of the State. Those whom the State casts out from its enclave, it also comes to fear.

Demands for collectivity, for skilled work, for the conservation of community and for economic autonomy; demands for sexual preferences and the expression of different identities – essentially the demands of human community and individuality against a State enforced alienation – create a myriad small conflicts. Against these more organic demands from the population is ranged the centralised, machine-like nature of the State and its dehumanising message. Given this condition, it is important that we understand what the State and the police mean by ‘Public Order’; we might easily imagine that this encompasses both democratic consensus and the peaceful and non-violent expression of dissent (9). But it is not just the affray, the riot or the disorderly crowd which the State sees as problematic. The way in which the police and the State perceive public order has little to do with the public and much more to do with a new vision of ‘order’. The police perceive order in a far more total manner than do individual groups within the population. The idea of order needs definition just as much as the concept of the public.

Increasingly the State conceives of order in a manner which attempts to reduce the human individual to an object stripped of feeling. At the same time, the personnel of certain State agencies, particularly the police, conceive of order in an individually personal and subjective way. Disorder is that which hampers or fails to facilitate the advancing philosophy or the smooth running of a high technology productive process. This includes: diverse cultures; diverse expressions of sexuality; styles of dress and appearance; life style attributes such as drug-taking or nomadic travelling; personally held philosophies and political positions; and even more conservative views such as an insistence on the use of cash rather than cheques or credit (10). All of these things militate against order in the strictest sense of the word because while some of them express individuality or extreme states of feeling, others challenge the generally accepted property relations upon which capitalism is built.

Public order in the post-industrial society comes to have more to do with life style and therefore ‘identity’ (11) and less to do with violence or the physical collective which might destroy property. Deviation from that order, designed by the State, is also deviation from the philosophy of order articulated by the police and comes to be synonymous with subversion.

To sum up under this heading, we can describe the role of the police in the future in relation to the two words which make up the expression Public Order. With respect to the public, which is to the State and the police an alternative public, not the one of which they are a part, we can expect the police to become preoccupied with disassembling this mass, this group with a common voice. In order to do this, and perhaps as a first imperative, they have to control what has historically been considered public space, whether it be within the community, at the point of production, within points of exchange and consumption such as shopping centres, or at any symbolic political locations.

In relation to the word order, we can expect the police to play an increasingly intrusive role in the organisation of our personal habits, views and leisure behaviour. Policing in fact begins to inhabit an area of social discourse which was historically occupied by morality; a morality which was laid down and then policed in different forms by the Church and various agencies of the State. The question to be addressed here is to what extent this new morality is first articulated by the personnel of the State’s central institutions and to what extent it has become purely a product of police philosophy. The question is important in that its answer hints at who holds power (12).

If you detect within the last section of this paper an analysis which suggests that those most open to police attack and control are those who are marginalised, culturally different and without productive work or any power in the State, you would be right. However, I personally would not draw the conclusion from this that it is necessarily from these groups that there comes the most substantial or organised resistance to the State. The question of who is most open to attack from the State is a quite separate question from that of who is able to organise the most effective opposition to the State (13).

The Policing of Crime

It is not surprising that I come to this subject after discussing changes in the means of production and public order. For a number of reasons I believe that this area of policing has become the least important to the police themselves. Perhaps the most central reason for this is that those who have committed crime for hundreds of years are not usually antagonistic to either capitalism or the State. As the police develop increasingly and specifically in defence of the State, they show less and less political or professional will to be involved in crime control except where that ‘crime’ threatens the State (14).

A major concern in any discussion about policing is that we understand the changing police response to ‘crime’ as well as changes in the composition of the ‘criminal’ community itself. Although a State police force has always appeared to be concerned with protecting property relations regardless of class, and although it came into existence in part as a response to the growth of urban crime in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we have continually to remind ourselves of the State’s changing definition of crime.

The State is now, and has always been, concerned only with that crime which threatens its power. It has been concerned essentially with those modes of organisation which present autonomous economic, political or organisational threats to its hegemony of power, or to less organised crime which because of its large scale nature seriously threatens the persons or property of State institutions. So it can be said of the early nineteenth century, as it is said today, that the State and its law enforcement officers were not concerned with the breaking of any universal moral laws which they designated as crime, but with containing or liquidating only that crime which represented a threat to the State.

In the early nineteenth century the police did not descend upon the working class ghetto in order to find the person who had stolen Mrs. Smith’s wages (it was probably Mr. Smith anyway!). Apart from murder, the violence of which is always a serious threat to the State (15), the police only went into working class areas in search of those who had roamed beyond the boundaries of the ghetto and carried out attacks upon the industry, the organisation or the person of the middle class.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the police developed a very definite relationship to this kind of crime. In order to steal or rob effectively, working class people and a few better educated but disaffected members of the middle class, organised. The period from the middle of the eighteenth century through to the nineteen sixties and seventies was a period marked by the sudden growth and slow decline of a criminal class, a dangerous estate. This society had as many professional aspects, organisations and rules of membership as the middle class society which it mirrored.

The growth and development of this subterranean society mirrored also the growth of all capitalist production; first individual craft work, then a more collective and labour intensive base and finally monopoly and administration. The police grew and developed alongside of this increasingly organised and professional society; the relationship was very exact. Dickens, on the inception of the detective police in the 1860s, described certain detectives whose whole lifetime was spent in controlling only one very specific kind of criminal activity. As these two republics – the detective and the professional criminal – grew dependent upon each other, there were many crossings of paths and many bridges built between them. This was not simply so that information might be gained by the detective but also so that the detective could gain financial advantage through crime and so that criminals could gain social advantage by being associated with the law. In effect, both these ‘societies’ had the same vested interest in the continuing culture and ideology of the State.

This period of classic crime is now in its death throes. Its twilight between 1970 and 1980 saw the demise of the last organised firms with long criminal histories, the armed robbers who densely populated those years. These firms were made up in the main from criminals trained in the fifties. Changes in money security and the means of production, and an economy drifting deeper into crisis, allied with increasing police powers, make it now virtually impossible to be a young trained criminal with a professional heritage.

What has happened within the criminal world seems to me to be relatively straightforward. The older and more established criminal firms which served their apprenticeship in the fifties have now forsaken robbery and theft, and even to some extent fraud, for more legitimate business. This last statement should be qualified by saying that legitimate business hides dealings in illegitimate commodities, such as drugs. A few serious professional criminals who saw the sign of the times moved into new technology. However, I think that one could say that a great deal of professional crime is now all but masked by the legitimate organisation of capitalism and the culture of the State.

If the professional criminals have moved on or have been incorporated into more legitimate business organisations, what has become of the professional police officers who shared their world? Some have accompanied the criminals with whom they were working into quasi-legitimate business; others have moved on into social control, politics and the policing of subversion. All of this has had the most serious consequences for the current generation of marginalised or dispossessed youth in the inner cities, where much crime is now characterised by a lack of training or professionalism, considerable alienated violence and a lack of respect for the class, age or sex of the victim.

The modern inner city law breaker is unable, because of a lack of training, and because older structures are in chaos, to leave the ghetto and join any wider and more socially mobile criminal fraternity. That former criminal community, which committed crimes beyond the boundaries of the ghetto against the middle class population, is now trapped within the ghetto.

The disintegration of a more professional criminal world which grew up through an apprenticeship and which was based upon certain defined modus operandi, together with the co-operative organisation of different skills, is mirrored by a prevailing lack of professional detective policing at the base. In turn these officers now perpetuate a new philosophy which does not equip them to catch by scientific detection, or even get close to, those who commit crime. A further aspect of this burgeoning gulf between the police and the youth of the inner city areas is an ever widening cultural gap, primarily around the power and philosophy of the State. The detective and the ‘criminal’ today have much less in common than they did 10 or 20 years ago. There is a decreasing dialogue and little exchange of information. The two groups have ceased to be ‘cops and robbers’ and have increasingly become participants on truly separate sides in a political war for and against the preservation of the State.(16).

The police answer to the deprofessionalisation of urban crime has been the increasing use of military and blanket type operations, or prejudicial rather than scientific investigations, which have little intention of discriminating between honest and dishonest individuals, violent or peaceful individuals. Over the last twenty years or so, the whole of the working class and the whole of the marginalised or non-productive population have slowly become criminalised. There is a war now, not against crime, but against both the pauperised and the productive working class of the inner cities per se. This war is not against crime but against those whose culture and philosophy, whose ‘identity’, clashes with the culture, philosophy and State orientated identity of the constable (and ultimately of the State).

To sum up under this head, we could say that broadly speaking the most successful criminals of the latter period of industrialised society have become incorporated within the world of legitimised business and State institutions, and that much of the professional policing service has turned its attention to ‘political’ control. What we have left at the base is not a policing of the criminal law, or the apparent traditional protection of property relations, but an organised military and disorganised subjective response of power, to the poor, propertyless and increasingly powerless younger generation within the inner cities.

Police Intervention in the Civil Administration

This is the last of my far from exhaustive list of sub-headings in this paper. The historical inadequacy of the police in catching those who now break the law, written and assumed, within the inner cities has led recently to the police making a serious intervention in civil administration.

With links to the working class, and especially the new designated criminal community, denied them, the police have moved in parasitically upon the structures of civil administration and welfare which have been built over many years with sound municipal intent, if not always with success. This attempt to enter democratic administration by the back door and turn the instruments of municipal welfare into instruments of social control has been resisted by the most far-sighted and progressive of the Labour dominated authorities. The constituents of other authorities will come to rue the day that the police were ever allowed to take part in their civic organisation because, like an ever growing parasite which kills its host, the police have their aspirations firmly set upon the actual administration; no longer a means to an end but an end in itself (17).

Conversations about multi-agency policing and the sharing of information, which take place now between local authority officers, politicians and well groomed, seemingly socially aware police officers, will result within the not too distant future in police officers controlling the administration of many of the municipal functions which we presently see as the domain of political administration. The most serious dangers in this are twofold; firstly police philosophy is always conservative and state orientated; secondly, the objectives of the police force as a direct employee of the central state are inimical to community democracy and welfare (18).

Before summing up this paper, I have to mention the role of judicial administration and law within this whole process. When the State police force came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the power of the constable was mediated by the Justice, what we know today as the Magistrate. It would be naive to pretend that the Justice imposed severe limitations upon the power of the constable, or that he acted on behalf of the people (19). They appear, however, to have been an administrative and inquiring tier rather than a military one (20), they settled disputes between labourers and masters, as well as policing many commercial relations and arbitrating conflicts within the community. The Justices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are thought of now as the early form of the local authority.

Unlike the present local authority, however, the Justice did have the power to fine and discipline the constable, to interrogate him in court, to inquire into his investigations and to question the propriety of his evidence. When not in league with the constable, he did provide some measure of accountability, an accountability which was more real because it was worked out on the ground during the investigation and the hearing of legal cases (21). Over the last fifty years, the rising power of the police force (vouchsafed by the parliamentary middle class) and its increasing proximity in culture and ideology to the State itself, rather than either the law or any judicial or legal tier, has brushed away the power of the magistracy and overtaken it. This has exact parallels in the way the police are now attempting to usurp the power of the local and county authority.

The police now have a tacit power over the Magistrate’s Court rather than the other way round. If we add to this the new power of ‘cautioning’ which allows the police to virtually try individuals within the police station (22), and a growing number of summary offences which either do not go to court, or go before magistrates rather than juries (23). And then, if we look to the other end of the judicial scale and see that the jury system itself is increasingly being eroded (24), we can understand that not only are the police gaining political and moral power on the street and within the civil administration but they are also cleaving off and assuming to themselves great chunks of judicial and legal power.

Conclusions

I have called this paper ‘policing the future’ and perhaps the picture that it paints is a depressing one, with the State and its agencies slowly consolidating new power. We should not however be depressed by realistic appraisals of the State and its developments but should constantly remind ourselves of the objectives which the State has in mind. We should increasingly formulate our resistance to the State on the basis of these objectives.

My first conclusion, then, is that we should always be aware that the direction of the police, their organisation, ideology, culture and technology, is not separate from, nor can it be divorced from, the demands of the State. This should affect our attitudes and strategies to the police and the State in everyday life as well as large scale confrontations at the point of production. Although the police appear to be most prominently involved at the ‘front line’ of any conflict or contradiction, at the point of a picket for example, we have to understand that the ambit of their power and the power of their culture exists within a much wider radius than this. Recognition of this extensive protection which the police offer the State and vice versa should determine other tactics of opposition as well as those of mass physical confrontation.

Recognition that the role of the police is dictated by the objectives of the State should also warn us against being drawn into small scale inquiries into the more intrapersonal aspects of police behaviour. Much more concentrated work has to go into examining the nature and strategies of the State in post industrial society, as well as the mediating institutions and culture which the police are bound up with.

The direction of the police will be dictated by the objectives of the State and it is these objectives which we must address; we should not fool ourselves that in tinkering with the policing system, inside this or that local authority, this or that community, that we can radically affect capitalism’s means of repression.

The future of policing will inevitably mirror the changes in the means of production. If the means of production are to be scattered and almost invisible rather than labour intensive and based upon the socialisation of a class, then policing will pursue a programme of social control which makes this means of production effective. We can expect the police to be concerned with collective and communal philosophies and movements, we can expect them to try and isolate and individuate us. They will do this increasingly by making incursions into public and private space and ultimately into our personal being, our identity. This power will begin first by extending itself to the control of domestic space with such things as curfews.

The present period is characterised by an ever growing surplus population. This surplus population, because it is pauperised, has no control over productive forces and is propertyless, is a constant threat and an irritant to the order of the State. A great deal of policing in the future will be political rather than criminal in that it deals with this population per se and not simply those amongst that population who break the traditional statutes.

At the base of this policing system for the future is information, exactly as the new means of production is based upon information technology. What the police previously learned just about criminals, through members of the criminal world such as the informer, they will now try to learn about the whole population through those who share the new philosophy of the State. They will approach, for example, a Director of housing services. They will also collect information through ‘invisible’ informers such as listening devices and computerised records. All strata of the civil administration which collect and collate information will sooner or later be forced to turn that information over, as a matter of course, to the police (25). Policing will become more and more to do with social control and social engineering and less to do with traditional crime control.

A number of police researchers have already pointed to the growing politicisation of the police; few have suggested where this politicisation is heading. It seems fundamental to me that developing political ideologies and cultures grow from and look for structures of power through which they might express these philosophies. The journey of the constable from the early nineteenth century to the present day has been a journey from servant to master. With the public unveiling of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) during the miners’ strike, we can see a vanguard police institution which is in the process of integrating itself into the structure of the State.

Finally, we can expect much talk in the near future of the need to differentiate between the paramilitary police and the more ordinary constable (26). To my mind, this will not simply be a replay of the debate over a ‘third force’ which took place in the fifties and sixties. It would appear much more probable that large parts of the lower echelons of the police will be replaced by civilianised or privatised workers, or even voluntary citizen workers, while the major concentration of police personnel and organisational capability in the future will be turned towards militarised and political policing.

Whatever the reasons given for the further militarisation of the police and the separation of this force from those employees involved in the community, we should be aware that both arms of the police have exactly the same final objectives. The strategies and the degree of force available may be different at any time but their aims are identical, and always have been, increasing State order and control of our everyday lives.

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Notes

This paper was originally quickly written to be read at the History Workshop Conference. When people asked for copies, I decided to add a number of notes in order to explain and extend some of the arguments.

1. State of Siege with Jim Coulter and Susan Miller, A Turn of the Screw and, most recently, With Extreme Prejudice. These books are all published by Canary Press and are available from: Canary Press, BCM Canary, London WCIN 3XX.
2. The prison population has risen by 4,000 in the last six years, from 44,000 to 48,000. The number of prisoners in custody on remand has doubled since 1979. There is periodic discussion about an amnesty for many prisoners and those awaiting trial, so that overcrowding and backlogs might be resolved.
3. See State of Siege by Coulter, Miller and Walker. Also the State Research publication on the formation of the SPG and other para-military units.
4. At Saltley in 1972, a mass picket which had marched through the outskirts of Birmingham forced the police to lock the gates of the coke depot. The police were massively outnumbered and outflanked, not only by miners led by Arthur Scargill, but by other workers who joined the march. The new Tory right which began organising around 1974 saw this physical confrontation as symbolic of the weaknesses of the Heath administration. At Orgreave, which elements of the NUM saw as a replay of Saltley, the police deployed over 6,000 officers thoroughly trained in para-military formations; the miners, on the other hand, failed to change their strategies even marginally. Not only that but many area officials vacillated even over the use of traditional strategies and withdrew their members from serious confrontation.
5. Although new technology, new language and new formations had been developed through the various inner city disturbances and smaller industrial conflicts such as Grunwicks and the NGA dispute in Warrington, these advances were consolidated and refined during the miners’ strike finally coming to fruition in the ACPO Training Manual.
6. See State of Siege by Coulter, Miller and Walker. The elements of this legal overview are too many to mention, but close observation of legal cases over the previous decade would have given clues to them all. Curfews attached to bail, for example, were used in a number of public order cases in the seventies; road blocks and car searches had been going on in some black communities, such as Stoke Newington, for a number of years; aspects of processing, such as the taking of polaroid photographs, the fabrication of verbal evidence, etc. had a history, particularly in London. The new Public Order Act of 1986 put into statute many of the controls which the police had used against pickets during the miners’ strike.
7. Beatrix Campbell argues that the women involved in the strike did break with the old language of industrial struggle, but that they were never in control of the strike, or even allowed to be equal participants. See “Proletarian Patriarchs and the Real Radicals” in The Cutting Edge: Women and the Pit Strike, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.
8. I have always considered the expression ‘Public Order’ to be a typical example of State distorted language. The use of this expression for situations of potential disorder hints at the idea that the public is policing itself, and that there is a consensus amongst the public about their own order. For the police it is a safer expression than ‘public disorder’ since the latter exposes a contradiction in which the public could appear as a majority. What the police and the State mean by a ‘Public Order’ situation is in fact a situation in which there may be a need for the State to impose order; a ‘State order’ situation.
9. Quite obviously there is still room in our present society for the expression of dissent. However, in any conflict between public interests and the private interests of the State, dissent is allowed only as long as it is impotent. In the final analysis, dissent and protest, however peaceful, are stopped (said to be anti-democratic) if they appear to be influential or effective.
10. Some facets of diverse behaviour are countenanced and even advanced by capital and by business while the police still act to repress them. There exist now, and have been since the early nineteenth century, contradictions between a police ideology with its need to control, and capital, the continuation of which sometimes necessitates diversity. The police have recently begun to understand that diverse cultural interests can in fact help them with control and they make apparent attempts to work within and respond to the needs of smaller cultural groups. However, even within these groups, they still face the central problems of those who show an allegiance to the culture and ideology of the State and capitalism and those who, whether simply younger or more particularly revolutionary, are intent upon struggling against post-industrial culture. These contradictions between State institutions, capital and the police are diminishing as the police move closer to the centre of power in our society.
11. By ‘identity’ in this context, I mean a central and unified personal view which is in part opposed to capitalist property relations and also to post-industrial culture. This identity is ideologically defined, even though it might have grown as a consequence of disaffection, rebellion, or even alienation. It challenges the State in a most total way, unlike, for example, the identity of the criminal who reserves a faith in the property relations of capitalism while simply having an illegitimate mode of work.
12. This question relates to the contradiction mentioned in footnote (10). There are clear examples of this in Manchester in the struggles between less legitimate business interests and the Chief Constable. Capital’s interest in the State nationally and its philosophy of laissez faire determines that little restriction is placed upon the production of soft porn, its exchange and distribution. The policing interests of the Chief Constable, James Anderton, however, and his personal morality, have meant a crack down on this kind of commercial business over the last ten years.
13. This is clearly the case where large numbers of criminals are concerned because although there appears to be a serious conflict between capital and those who pursue property crime, the ideology, philosophy and culture and language of the two groups are often identical; there are simply conflicting structures for capital accumulation.
14. It is possible that in the future the policing of large parts of ‘crime’ will be civilianised, privatised or organised by communities with aid from the State. I have not touched on this in this paper but the emergence of Neighbourhood Watch Schemes, as well as the handing over of certain policing functions to private security firms, does suggest that this is a trend. If this were to happen in the future. it would leave the police free to act politically in defence of the State.
15. The primary power of the State is physical and material. It is not only the violence of murder which is a threat to the State, it is also the fundamental ‘lack of respect’ which murder shows for the physical being of the individual. Bourgeois ideology and bourgeois power in both industrial and post-industrial society is founded primarily upon the inviolability of the physical, male, bourgeois individual. There are also contradictions here which are illustrated by the indolence with which the police respond to racial killings and the killing of women in our society.
16. The drifting apart of detective and law-breaker is a complex phenomenon which is not simply based upon culture or class but perhaps even more importantly on ethnicity. The detective of the 1950s was a counterpart of his socially mobile working class adversary. The modern detective is part of a white, male, employed lower middle or even professional middle class, which is highly antagonistic to the marginalised, often black and/or female, unemployed, low paid or unskilled worker.
17. After I had given this paper, someone raised a point about police intervention in schools. Certainly this is a part of what I describe as intervention in the civil administration. Those interested in this area should contact the Police Committee Support Units in London boroughs such as Hackney and Greenwich, the Police Monitoring and Research group of the London Strategic Policy Unit and the City Monitoring Unit in Manchester. These units have been occupied with the various aspects of this intervention and in the formulation of policies to defend Service Departments and ratepayers against encroaching police powers. Unfortunately much of this vital work has not permeated the academic or sociological debate about policing.
18. There are those who argue that the local State only mirrors the culture and ideology of the central State. Although this may often have been true in the past, the recent contradictions which have emerged between left Labour councillors, the Central State and even their own State orientated parliamentary party, gives some hope for optimism.
19. E.P. Thompson and other contemporary historians appear to me to have over-argued this case simply in structural terms, with no concern for the real or very diffuse social and cultural State power which emanated from these officials. Besides which in non-structural terms my reading of history finds no female Justices who might have acted on behalf of the female part of ‘the people’. There are, however, a massive number of examples of men, fathers and brothers as well as employers, taking women before the Justices. These accused persons were generally given very short shrift, being consigned in droves to mental institutions and prisons, often for ‘moral’ offences which needed no legal proof
20. Even this can be seriously questioned, because from the inception of the office in the 13th century, the Justice was empowered to raise, co-ordinate and deploy the militia.
21. It should be borne in mind that from the inception of an organised State police force in 1829 until 1945, the representatives of the bourgeois State were profoundly mistrustful of the police force. The bourgeoisie were concerned that a powerful. organised and armed group might at any time forsake the side of the State and take the side of the employed and unionised part of the working class. This mistrust can clearly be seen in the constant attention paid by the middle class to their civil rights in the detection and apprehension of ‘criminals’. This mistrust first came to a head in 1911 when the police struck (mutinied) for better conditions and wages. The century from 1829 to 1930 can be understood as a period in which the middle class disciplined the police with some severity, inculcating in them the culture and ideology of the State.
22. With the advent of cautioning in 1984, the police became able, if the suspect admitted guilt, to hear certain cases and administer punishment (a caution) within a police station. During the administration of a caution the senior officers involved wear their uniforms.
23. Interestingly, many of these new powers are in their initial stages linked to motoring law. ACPO has recently begun to campaign for the imposition of curfews on young drivers.
24. The new Criminal Justice Bill is a concerted attack upon the system of trial by jury, not only doing away with the peremptory challenge of jurors but also designating more offences upon which the defendant can not opt for trial by jury but has to be tried within a magistrate’s court (a police court).
25. This process could be seen initially in the clause within the original Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. This demanded that general practitioners and other professionals turn over all their records to the police in the event of a crime in a certain geographic area.
26. This has been expressed recently as: ‘One minute we are expected to fire guns and the next minute we are expected to be the ordinary copper on the beat in the community.’