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Five years ago, an 8 minute 46 second video evidenced the public police execution of a Black man while he pleaded for his life, uttering the now achingly familiar cry, “I can’t breathe”. Despite what I recognise as our collective duty to bear witness, I could not watch George Floyd’s murder then, and still can’t now.
At the time, I was a politics teacher at a sixth form in Hackney, east London. It was lockdown, and all my students had seen the clip. They had an ability to digest violence in a way that is perhaps the refrain of youth, but for many—especially the Black boys—there was a more proximate and personal familiarity with police harassment that made the violence register as both spectacular and predictable.
Many at the time claimed that Black Lives Matter (BLM) was importing US issues into UK spaces, and that our policing history was entirely separate from the US experience, ignoring that the seeds of empire have a deep, perennial quality, and the US’ racism problem is one we shaped.
The 2020 protests may have been prompted by a US based murder, but the causes it spoke to were distinctly domestic and home-grown.
The deaths of Chris Kaba and Oladeji Omishore, who died within three months of one another in 2022 at the hands of London’s Metropolitan Police, are a painful reminder of this truth. So too are the countless statistics which highlight how disproportionately Black people are policed in this country, whether deaths in police custody, stop and search, or strip searches on young children like Child Q, who as a student in Hackney, could easily have been a student of mine.
The 2023 Casey Review followed a trend of government reports which found the police to be institutionally racist, and homophobic and misogynistic, which the Met’s Commissioner accepted minus the term “institutional”.
2023 also marked 30 years since Stephen Lawrence was murdered, after which UK policing was first labelled institutionally racist. BBC reports at the time highlighted the levels of police corruption involved in convicting his killers, most of whom still walk freely. I attended the memorial service to mark the 30th anniversary, alongside the Met Commissioner, who still denies the institutional nature of racism within UK policing.
It is not a stretch to say that confidence in UK policing has reached an all time low. Sarah Everard’s murder and the treatment of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry by police officers caused widespread mistrust amongst British people.
While conversations on defunding the police are smeared as ‘woke’ and associated with unhinged radicals, upcoming Runnymede Trust work shows that actually, a large proportion of British people support community based, policing alternatives — when they aren’t asked these questions in sensationalist ways.
There are alternative paths that can be taken, but in the past five years, successive governments have remained in a stale and repressive political space; they have imposed the most dangerous legislative agenda for people of colour in generations.
Taken together, legislation including the 2022 Police Crime Sentencing and Courts, Public Order Elections, and Nationality and Borders Acts, were introduced, which increase police powers and protections, reduce peoples’ right to protest, make it harder to vote, and threaten the security of peoples’ citizenship—all of which will impact people of colour disproportionately.
This trajectory shows no sign of slowing, as the Border and Security and Crime and Policing Bills goes through parliament. Just last week, our Prime Minister, who took the knee symbolically when in opposition in 2020, evoked Powellite rhetoric as he imagined an ‘island of strangers’ which he used to legitimise the continuation of decades of increasingly hostile immigration policies that target people of colour.
But it is important to remember that it is not just the spectacular forms of state violence that we need to challenge; in a horrible twist of fate, the “I can’t breathe” plea chimed with the alarmingly disproportionate way in which people of colour died from COVID in the UK during that first wave.
The ‘genetic predisposition’ explainer quickly gave way to the realisation that COVID was exposing deep racialised structural inequalities that meant certain people were dying at far greater rates because they worked frontline, ill-protected jobs and lived in overcrowded housing.
These facts were so startling, the mortal impacts of those inequalities so brutally clear, that it seemed there was no way to go back to ‘normal’ without some urgent redress of those inequalities.
As we stated in a recent health report, for many people of colour, the jobs that we do, the houses we live in and the wider environment we occupy, is literally killing us. And yet, we have discovered that when it comes to addressing racial inequalities, we are remarkably adept at forgetting.