At last year’s Conservative party conference, while the largest anti-racism protests in Britain’s history were taking place across the country, the former home secretary, Sajid Javid, declared that Black Lives Matter is “not a force for good”. This week, following the outcome of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd, Javid tweeted triumphantly: “Black lives matter”.
Although this about-turn may seem counterintuitive, it’s perfectly consistent with the government’s position on racism. Rather than reflecting on the demands for systemic change made by Black Lives Matter protesters, Britain’s political class has championed the role of the courts in punishing individual perpetrators of racial violence. Similar celebrations took place when the killers of Stephen Lawrence were eventually found guilty of murder, even though the Police Federation remained in denial about the institutional racism that characterised its response to his death. Viewed from the perspective that racism is an issue of a few bad apples rather than a structural or institutional problem, the single guilty verdict of an individual police officer in the US is something to celebrate. But can criminal prosecutions and prisons ever really deliver racial justice?
Prosecuting state officials who have committed acts of racial violence can be cathartic – and it’s something that we’ve been denied in the UK. There have been at least 1,784 deaths at the hands of the police in England and Wales since 1990, considerably more if we include deaths in prisons and at our borders. But if we step back and examine how the justice system in Britain operates, it’s clear that prosecuting individuals helps to produce racial inequalities rather than solve them.
British politicians have long regarded racism as a distinctly American issue, implicitly playing down comparable problems such as the disproportionate use of force that Black people experience at the hands of UK police, or the reality that while Britain’s prison population has soared, Black people in England and Wales have been incarcerated at the same or a higher proportional rate as African Americans in the US. In the midst of the BLM protests last summer, two Black men were tasered in north London. One was a pensioner standing on the stairs at his home (in an official statement, the Met said no indication of misconduct was identified). The other was a young man who was left paralysed from the chest down after being tasered while climbing over a wall. The taser, a weapon police claim should only be used when an officer is in danger, is deployed with alacrity, particularly against Black people.
Meanwhile, Britain’s prison population has nearly doubled over the past two decades. According to the 2017 Lammy report, 25% of Britain’s prisoners are categorised as BAME (this figure jumps to 40% for those in youth prisons). The sustained harm that prisoners experience can have long-term physical and mental effects. Deaths by suicide are more than eight times more common inside prisons, and on release former inmates endure relatively high rates of joblessness, homelessness, mental health problems and a greater likelihood of rearrest and imprisonment.
Crucially, these forms of “justice” do little to either improve public safety or transform the lives of those who have been imprisoned for committing harm. Many have pointed out that since 1971 Britain has not convicted a single officer for any of the deaths that have occurred at police hands. But such convictions would vindicate the very system that leads to these deaths in the first place. If incarcerating ordinary working-class Black people doesn’t improve public safety, then why would convicting individual police officers make a difference? Prison is not the answer to meting out justice, which is precisely why the Black Lives Matter movement did not demand that Derek Chauvin be put on trial.
Instead, the most decisive demands that Black Lives Matter have made are to defund the police and prison system and spend these resources on communities where public services and opportunities have been destroyed. Community-led youth, mental health and domestic violence services are often best positioned to improve public safety. Investment in these services can make people less likely to come into contact with the police and prison system in the first place, while also reducing the likelihood of vulnerable people being harmed or harming others.
But rather than engage with these demands, which are gaining popular support in Britain, the government has instead gone on the offensive. It has published a recent report denying institutional racism exists, and even proposed legislation that will criminalise protesters while expanding police powers.
The protests of summer 2020, as well as the people who gathered this year to protest over the death of Sarah Everard and the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, brought together people from a wide range of backgrounds. Police and prison violence has shown itself to be a problem that can’t be solved through self-regulation; the criminal justice system cannot put itself on trial. Despite what the government may think, the harm caused by police, prison and border systems is both a racist and a British problem. The outcome of the Chauvin trial, despite its political cheerleaders, reaffirms the necessity of finding alternatives to the criminal justice system as we know it.
Adam Elliott-Cooper is a research associate in sociology at the University of Greenwich. He sits on the board of The Monitoring Group