With trouble on the streets, think it’s worth talking about the number of people who are going on social media in support of the police and who are angry at their treatment
I can understand their viewpoint. They have probably never had serious interaction with the police, certainly not in confrontational situations. If you’re white, middle-class and live in a ‘good’ neighbourhood, the police are a positive force
Officers see you as ‘good people.’ You are generally no trouble to them. But not everyone has your advantages
I was a teenager in Liverpool 3 in the late 1970s. At this time a book came out called Spike Island by James McClure, the crime writer. He spent a year with Liverpool police’s A division, who covered our area. It was warts and all real-life writing
A phrase in it stuck in my memory. On patrol round ours, McClure asked the officer he was with about the people who lived on his beat. “Dickheads and gobshites,” was the reply. And that’s what they thought of us
Policing was extremely heavy-handed. Stop/search all the time. Rough treatment. I’ll bet none of the officers lived in the area they patrolled. They despised us, it seemed, and we despised them. How many policemen now live in areas with a significant black population?
Even in the late 1970s, I remember talking to my mates and the conversation went along the lines of ‘if they’re like this with us, what’s Liverpool 8 like?’ We call Toxteth, the centre of the black community. L8
If we were lowlife to them round ours – and I can’t remember a black person in the couple of square miles between the river, Scotland Road, Tithebarn Street and Boundary Street – how must police have acted in the L8?
A good indication is that L8 rioted in 1981. They were pushed way further than us. The treatment of the black community was appalling. And still is
And it was bad enough for us. A personal story about the sort of treatment you’d get. I went away to college but I’d come home most weekends to go the match. It was a shortish walk from Lime Street to home. I had bags. One Friday a plainclothes pair in unmarked car pulled me
They searched my bags and found law books. They loved that. They threw all my clothes and books on the floor. Every time I got that train over the next few weeks they went through the same routine. They were having fun. I wasn’t. I was well up for hitting back at the bastards
Going to play Sunday league football – at 9am and carrying a sports bag – you’d frequently get stopped and searched. What the hell did police think we were doing at that time on Sunday? They knew. They were just making a point and pushing us around
When you’ve been treated like that you have a small insight into the way black people – young men, especially – suffer. Most can’t imagine their experience. But they are not lying. We need to hold the police to higher standards than they are being held to at the moment
Another thing that occurs to me is the Miners’ Strike. We did a few benefits for it and I went on a number of picket lines, mostly in Yorkshire. Miners had been brought up to believe they were the backbone of Britain – rightly
They were shocked beyond belief by the way the police treated them. Thatcher calling them the ‘enemy within’ undermined their sense of self. The violence the authorities brought against them left them bewildered
The Miners were a rugged group but they never imagined that the police would turn on them in the way they did. I’ll bet some of those who experienced that ugly year in the 80s nod their heads when they hear about how the black community get treated.
For too many in this country black people will always be the enemy within. It's a daily issue for them
So I go back to the ‘gobshites and dickheads’ quote. The group mentality of police forces sees minority communities who live in poverty as a danger. They make sweeping generalisations about entire areas. A black face becomes dangerous. It’s dehumanising.
And a similar dynamic takes place at protests. The democratic right to protest doesn’t matter. The ‘mob’ becomes the enemy. What happened in Whitehall today reminded me of the Poll Tax demonstration, more commonly known as the Poll Tax Riot
The introduction of the cavalry escalated things in 1990. Aggressive behaviour by police makes peaceful demonstrators angry and confrontational. It takes the self-policing element away from crowds
Instead of knee-jerk support for the authorities because they’ve always been OK with you, try and understand what other people have gone through. Think about structural racism and whether the policing we are seeing is appropriate or making things worse
It is really obvious that black people are frequently treated differently by the forces of law and order. If you can’t see that, you’re undoubtedly a racist.
Black Lives Matter. The everyday treatment of minorities by the authorities is crucial, too. ‘No justice, no peace’ should be everyone’s motto.
