Defund, dismantle, disband: challenging racist policing after the Black Lives Matter movement

It is estimated that more than 600 people are killed by law enforcement each year in the United States. On 25 May 2020, when an officer placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was far from the last death, but it was already one too many. In response, a mass civil rights movement exploded. Matt Clement’s No Justice No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change is a very timely review of the role of the police in society in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. The book is a collection of articles from different disciplines that set out where policing, police racism and the resistance to it stand today.

The first service the book provides is to underline the character and scale of the Black Lives Matter movement following Floyd’s death: “Protests, lasting days, and in some cities even weeks, occurred in all 50 US states. In Minneapolis, people burned a police precinct to the ground and people created George Floyd Square”.1 It is believed that “approximately 15 to 26 million people in the US demonstrated in the summer of 2020 alone”. This struggle was “rooted in an abolitionist politic”, often demanding the reduction of police budget and the wholesale closure of police departments.2 An unprecedented 2,000 towns across the US saw Black Lives Matter protests, including places such as Delhi, a small town in rural New York State; although some 90 percent of Delhi’s population is white, 700 people lined the Main Street to protest and took the knee in solidarity with the other demonstrations around the country.

The strength of the movement led to some immediate concessions. Between 2022 and 2023, at least 30 US states brought in one or more ­state-wide legislative policing reforms to ensure “greater policy uniformity within each jurisdiction”.3 The new laws in 25 of these states addressed at least one of the three areas directly related to the circumstances of Floyd’s killing: the use of force by police, the duty of officers to intervene in instances of police ­misconduct, and policies related to law enforcement misconduct reporting. The issue of reporting was particularly pertinent because, prior to killing Floyd, police officer Derek Chauvin had been the ­subject of 22 misconduct complaints and internal investigations.

“Defunding the police”—a popular slogan within the movement—has been more than an empty demand; more than 20 major US cities reduced their police budgets, which is an unprecedented trend. In early 2021, the US House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which ­contained provisions prohibiting police from using choke-holds that restrict breathing and holds that pressure the carotid arteries, thus severely limiting the flow of blood to the brain.

Veteran activists from the black civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s commented on the greater diversity of the 2020 uprisings, and the ­protests even went international, spreading to 60 countries across the globe. Brian Richardson’s chapter in this collection, entitled “Why Defund the Police?”, describes how over 200,000 people protested in Britain, including in Bristol, where the statue of slave owner Edward Colston was dumped in the River Avon. He shows how these protests were more than just a reaction to Floyd’s death and a show of solidarity with those on the streets in the US; instead, they also spoke to the long-standing injustice of racist policing in Britain. Richardson traces this history through the trial of the so-called Mangrove Nine in 1971, the Brixton riots in 1981, the police mishandling of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the brutal backlash to the riots in English cities in 2011, which followed police officers shooting dead a 29 year old black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, North London.

Ken Olende’s contribution, “Policing the Crisis: The Criminalisation of Racial Minorities”, identifies the important studies of racist ideology that have emerged to analyse this history of racialised policing, particularly Stuart Hall’s famous 1978 book, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Hall draws on the arguments of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: “In relatively advanced capitalist states social norms are maintained from day to day not by direct coercion, but through ideas which are accepted by the majority, becoming ‘hegemonic’ or simply seen as ‘common sense’”.4 Hall’s thesis ­identified a moral panic around black muggers created by the police, media and judiciary. The cases he identified in the early 1970s were prosecuted by Detective Sargeant Derek Ridgewell’s British Transport Police anti-mugging squad. Interestingly, in recent years, a string of convictions ­connected to Ridgewell’s habitual framing of black men have been quashed by the Court of Appeal, proving Hall’s thesis some 50 years on.

Ken Fero, documentary maker and director of the Migrant Media production company, provides an important chapter on the importance of independent film in capturing injustice and challenging the established narratives created after deaths at the hands of the police. In the face of this vital work the Tories have continued with their established position. The report of the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, led by educational consultant Tony Sewell and published in 2021, intended to “change the narrative so we stop the sense of ­victimisation and discrimination” surrounding racial issues. Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence and an anti-racist campaigner ever since her son’s murder, warned that the report risked pushing back the fight against racism “20 years or more”.5 It is ­difficult to see how the government’s welcoming of the Sewell Report fits with its acknowledgment of the 2017 Lammy Review, which found significant evidence of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system, and the Casey Review into ­policing following the appalling murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer, which found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic.

The book also offers a series of chapters highlighting the international nature of the issues with police, describing struggles against oppressive policing in ­different countries across the world, including Nigeria, Mexico and Greece.

Clement’s book has brought together very important analyses that can help us better understand how “the police’s role of controlling society in the interests of those at its summit is resulting in actions that ever-broader sections of the population…are starting to resent and actively oppose”.6

Matt Foot is a criminal defence solicitor, specialising in representing protesters and victims of miscarriage of justice. He is the author, alongside Morag Livingstone, of Charged: How the Police Try to Suppress Protest (Verso, 2022).

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