Gresham College Lectures

Do We Need the Police?

June 07, 2023 Gresham College
Gresham College Lectures
Do We Need the Police?
Show Notes Transcript

Since the death of George Floyd in May 2020, some have asked whether we need a police force.

This lecture will examine the role and purpose of the police in our society. What do the police do? What is their historical and social context? Does the current system of policing work? If so, for who? Are all citizens in our society policed fairly? Should we defund the police? If there were no police what might replace them? Are the alternatives realistic?


A lecture by Leslie Thomas KC recorded on 25 May 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/police

Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/

Website:  https://gresham.ac.uk
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollege
Facebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollege
Instagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollege

Support the show

Three years ago to this very day, uh, a young black man died at the hands of the police in the States. His name was George Floyd, and this lecture is on the anniversary of George's death, and I deliberately planned it that way. The masters tools will never dismantle the master's house, Audrey Lord. So welcome. Welcome to the final lecture in this series, reimagining the Law, and we're gonna ask today whether we need the police. Can the police be reformed? Should they be abolished? My last lecture was closely related to this question, uh, that was on Do we need criminal law? This lecture will not seek to cover the same ground. In the last lecture, we looked at arguments for and against criminal law, and we engaged in the work of the abolitionist theorists such as Angela Davis and Maryanne Kaba. As I say, I won't be covering the same ground again. If you haven't seen my previous lecture, it's available on the Gresham College website. Instead. In this lecture, I'm going to be focusing on British policing in its historical context and comparative examples from around the world. I'm going to look at the movement to defund the police, which originated in the US And whether we can apply the same ideas to the United Kingdom. And finally, I'm going to be posing the question, do we need the police at all history of policing? First, we're gonna look at the history of British policing. People often say That policing, as we know it is less than two centuries old, and that is true in a sense. However, the picture is much more nuanced and complicated. At the end of the 18th century, the United Kingdom did not have a professional police force in the modern sense, but it was certainly not unpoliced. Here in London, for instance, the backbone of law enforcement consisted of parish constables and watchmen. Originally, householders were required to serve as watchmen on an unpaid basis by rotation or appointment. However, by 1800, most London parishes had salaried watchmen. There were also other law enforcement officials such as the City Marshall in the city of London, and the Bo Street runners established by Westminster Magistrate Henry Field in in 1749. By modern standards, this system was chaotic, patchy, and inefficient. The lack of a professional police force, however, does not mean that the criminal justice system then was less brutal than it is today. What the state lacked in capacity, it certainly made up in terms of brutality. At the turn of the 19th century, hundreds of offenses were punishable by death with public hangs being the usual method of execution. The purpose of this system was principally to protect, yes, you've guessed it, property and the privileges of the rich. Amidst the emergence of industrial capitalism, as Lizzie Seal states quote, the majority of capital offenses were property crimes, arguably entailing large scale criminalization of the labor. In poor capital, statutes often protected specific, limited property interests, such as an act passed in 1753 that prescribed hanging for stealing shipwreck goods. During the 18th century, the system of capitalist wage labor was established. This change meant that members of the labor import often had to steal in order to stay alive. Therefore, it was not necessarily possible to distinguish between the criminal population and the poor as being poor meant being criminal. The 18th century criminal law can be perceived as having an ideological function. It was administered by the ruling class, and its subjects were largely the labor in poor analysis of records of those who were executed on the gallows at Timben in London revealed that in addition to being from the lowest class, the hanged were often recent arrivals in London. There is also an overrepresentation of people who were not English, with Irish forming the largest non-English group. End of quote. You see, in the absence of an efficient system for detecting and punishing crime, the state had to rely on the deterrent effect of public executions in order to maintain control of the population terror. In other words, the criminal justice system was less efficient, but no more brutal than today. Admittedly, there are some features of the system which mitigated its harshness. Judges had the discretion to re reprieve the convicted juries could find the accused guilty of a lesser charge or acquit them. It was common for stolen goods to be undervalued at 39 shills in order to avoid the death penalty for goods. Over 40 shills, many cases were also settled within the community in order to avoid reaching the courts. Execution rates also differed significantly in different parts of the country. The system relied on the harshness of punishment rather than the certainty of punishment to maintain control. This was the context of a grossly unequal political system. Until the Great Reform Act of 1832, the House of Commons was profoundly unrepresented unrepresentative of the population. Some unpopulated places called the Rotten Burs had representation in parliament, while many large industrial towns did not. The franchise veed from place to place, but in most PA places, only property own owning men could vote. Although the 1832 Act rationalized the system, and to some extent, extent, it remained the case that the franchise was linked to property, property ownership, meaning that working class men could not vote, women of course did not have the right to vote either. And when the ruling class needed to suppress a potential uprising, they acted with yes, you've guessed it. Brutality. A key event was the infamous Peter Lou massacre in 1819, where 60,000 working class people gathered in St. Peters field in Manchester to protest for universal suffrage. Manchester's, uh, magistrates responded by ordering out the cavalry who charged the, at the peaceful protestors, killing 18 people and wounding hundreds more. It was against this backdrop that Sir Robert Peele established the Metropolitan Police in 1829, which gave London a centralized professional police force. For the first time, some boroughs required were, were required to establish police forces by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. And the county Justice of the Peace were empowered to do so by the County Police Act of 1839. And finally, the county and Borough Police Act of 1856 required the creation of police forces in all counties, the professionalization of police. In co coincided with the reform of the criminal law and the end of the bloody code, the number of capital crimes dropped by 1861. There were only five capital crimes, murder, treason, espionage, arson, and the royal dockyards and piracy with violence. Public executions were abolished in 1868 with a more effective system of law enforcement. The ruling class had less need to resort to graphic public brutality in order to maintain control. Thus far. You might think that the creation of the police was an improvement, but the truth is more complicated. There's a lot of myth making about peel's creation of modern policing. People often idealize and romanticize the traditional unarmed British police, especially in contrast to the paramilitary police forces found in the US and in continental Europe. Many authors cite nine peon principles, which are supposed to embody the idea of policing by consent, which were supposed in fact, however, uh, it was Susan Lentz and Robert Charles who have shown that the Paleon principles are largely an invention of 20 20th century textbook authors and the advent of policing involved an expansion of control and surveillance of the working class. As con con Woodman writes, quote, as new police forces were rolled out across the provincial areas towards the middle of the century, heavy working class resistant attempted to halt the expansion police were described as Blue Devils, a hoard of blue locus and mass gatherings, pamphlet and anti-police rights greeted their arrival. He quotes Robert Destor. A great deal of the bitterness against New police was a consequence of the fact that they were placed among the working classes to monitor all phases of working class life, trade, union activity, drinking, gambling, sports, as well as political activity. In short, the end of the bloody code and the advent of modern policing simply exchange one form of social control for another. As Michael, uh, for couplet put it in his land bar book, discipline and Punishment. The effectiveness of punishment is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visual intensity. It is the, it is the certainty that the punishment and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime, brutality of punishment has been replaced with certainty of punishment. It's also important to note that while the police in Great Britain have traditionally been unarmed, the UK exported a paramilitary model of polic into its colonial territories. The Royal Irish Consta created in 1822 was a armed paramilitary force. The police forces established to con maintain control and su and suppress dissent in the British colonies would generally modeled on the Royal Irish ary. But way of comparison, I want to say a little bit about the history of policing in the United States, which is often held up. As a comparison, the early American colonies inherited the English system of local Ries and constables and watchmen. The first modern municipal police department was created in Boston in 1838, and by the 1880s, all major US cities had municipal police forces in place. However, in the American south, an earlier form of organized policing was the slave Patrol. The first slave patrol was created by the Carolina Colonies in 1704. And as Gary Potter writes, slave patrols had three primary functions, one to chase down, apprehend and return to their owners runaway slaves. Two, to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts. And three, to maintain a form of discipline for slave workers who were subject to summary justice outside the law if they violated any plantation rules. Slave patrols are an important part of early US police in history, although it's probably overstate the case to say as some people do, that US policing evolved from slave patrols. Nonetheless, US policing in northern cities like its UK counterpart was deeply entwined with the development of industrial capitalism and was a method for the ruling class to control working, class, protest and dissent Gary Potter Wrights maintaining a stable and disciplined workforce for developing the system of factory production and ensuring a safe and tranquil community for the conduct of commerce required an organized system of social control. The development, the developing profit based system of production, antagonized social tensions of in the community. Inequality was increasing rapidly the exploitation of worker through long hours, dangerous working conditions and low pay was endemic, and the dominance of local governments by economic elites was creating political unrest. The only effective political strategy available to exploited workers was what economic elites referred to as writing, which was actually a primitive form of what could, what would become union strikes by employees against employers. The modern police force not only provided an organized centralized body of men, and they were all men legally authorized to use force to maintain order. It also provided the illusion that this order was being maintained under the rule of law, not at the whim of those with economic power. Overall, we can see that modern professional policing in the US and in the UK developed alongside industrial capitalism as a means for controlling the working classes, protecting property of the wealthy and the suppression of popular descent. At the same time, we shouldn't pretend that the status quo was better. The UK and the US may not have had professional police forces before the 19th century, but they certainly had law enforcement and that law enforcement was often more brutal than today. I want to turn to policing and race. So far I've talked about policing in the context of class and capitalism. Now we're gonna look at race police racism is most often discussed in the context of the us, but there is no doubt that in the UK Our police have a race problem too. I've talked about this at considerable length in some of my previous lectures, so I'm only gonna provide a brief summary here. In the sixties and seventies, the British police enjoyed a cozy image exemplified by the popular perception of the friendly Bobby on the beat and television program, such as Dixon of.green. But for black people, the reality was rather different. This is illustrated by one of the most shameful instances in British police in history. The killing of the Nigerian homeless man, David Awa by leads police officers in 1969. By 1990, there was greater public awareness that the police had erased problem. This was confirmed in the landmark McPherson inquiry into the Metropolitan Police's response and handling of the death of Stephen Lawrence. The inquiries report published in 1999 famously labeled the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist. Now we know that there have been massive race respiratories in all aspect of UK policing in as recently as 2020 to 2021, black people with three times more likely than white people to be arrested. Black people were vastly more likely to be stopped and searched than white people with 7.5 stop and searches for every thousand white people and 52.6 for every 1000 black people. As Barras Casey's recent review, fat has found there is a deep seated cultural problem with the Metropolitan police as regards race. She found that the Met falls far short as be of being representative of black, Asian and minority ethnic people. She found that there was systemic racial bias in the misconduct system with black officers being 81% more likely. Let me repeat that, 81% more likely than their white counterparts to be subject to misconduct. She also found and highlighted the under protection of areas of London with higher black and minority ethnic communities, despite the police being more active in these areas, and she highlighted over policing and disproportionate use of powers against black, Asian, and other minority ethnic people, including deaths in custody. In the pursuit of a subject during an arrest, 46% of black officers and staff surveyed reported personally experiencing racism whilst at work. Let me just <laugh> just, just pause and think about that figure. Nearly half of all black officers reported experiencing racism whilst at work. Let that sink in for a force which still struggles even today to accept that it has a race problem. Casey reports a particularly disturbing instant of over racism. Let me recount it for you, quote, A black female officer was with Amore senior officer, when they intercepted a white female member of the public buying drugs from a black person. The senior officer called the white woman an n lover, a slag, a dirty woman. The black female officer was left feeling that she wanted to resign. This was all done in front of her. Quote. I've been told to shut up and get back in your caravan. Quote, in my first ever briefing on police street duties, I was told to get out of there, give a few gypsies warnings. Race was not the only area where Casey found problems with the Metropolitan police. She highlighted cultural issues such as too much hubris and too much little humility, defensiveness and denial, and a culture of not speaking up, Ignoring racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other discrimin discriminatory acts or dismissing them as oh, that's just banter. Victims of crime such as rape, stalking, and domestic abuse described p poor communication by metropolitan police officers, officers being inattentive and lacking empathy and officers using victim blaming language. Let's turn to and look at policing and political dissent. Another function of the UK police throughout Hi, their history has been the repression of political dissent. Now this is a vast topic and we only have time to touch upon it briefly. Special Branch originally named the special Irish branch, emerged within the Metropolitan Police in the 1880s to combat political dissent politic, um, particularly on the left as Conor Woodman highlights in hi. In the early 20th century anti-Colonial Indians, the independent Labor Party syndicates, Bolsheviks all fell under the branches broadening range and gays, while suffragettes were a major preoccupation with the branch. Another key target was anti-war activism. During the First World War in 1968, the operational squad, the special operational squad w, was founded within the special branch's response to the anti-Vietnam War protests of that year. It was later renamed the Special demonstration squad. Over the next four decades, the special demonstration squad engaged in extensive undercover operations with undercover officers, assuming false identities including the identities of dead children, ill full iin, left wing activist groups, and in some cases forming sexual relationships with members of activist groups. These matters are currently the subject of the on ongoing undercover policing inquiry into the spike ops. More recently, in response to a wave of climate protests, parliament has controversially criminalized some of the protest related activities and has expanded police powers to crack down on protests. The recently enacted Public Order Act 2023 criminalizes certain actions associated with protests such as locking on. You may have seen the headlines recently with the, uh, recent coronation, the arrest of Graham Smith, the c e o of the re of Republic and other anti monarchy protestors on the day of the coronation. So we see, we can see that there are fundamental problems with UK policing. Policing grew up alongside capitalism, and it has often served the function of protecting the ruling classes against the threats to its power, such as left wing political dissent. The police are also institutionally racist, misogynist, and homophobic. Black people and other minority groups often have little trust or confidence in the police, and they have good reason for that. That brings us on to the core question. Can the police be reformed or should they be abolished? If the former, what kind of reform and if the latter, what should replace them? Community policing? One concept that often comes up in discussions of police reform is community policing. This concept means different things to different people, but it is often touted as the antithesis of militarized policing. This is often associated with a romanticized image of friendly neighborhood police officers who know the people in their, on their beat, who are part of the community they serve, rather than a hostile occupying force. In fact, some advocates of police reform in the United States point to the British police as a superior example. After all, police in the UK, except in Northern Ireland, are mostly unarmed and they kill significantly fewer people than their American counterparts. But as we've seen, the traditional cozy image of the British Bobby on the beat is simplistic and misleading, and the UK police have massive problems too. Can we find any better examples of community policing? One example that is sometimes touted as a positive example is Japan with its traditional system of the Caban or neighborhood police box, which operates like a mini police station in each neighborhood. But the truth is not so simple. In 2000, Kris oldest and Frank Leishman showed that quote, once placed in its proper historical context, the Kaban can be seen more clearly as a primarily an agency of surveillance rather than one concerned with more social service and argue that international regard for the Kaban had more to do with nostalgia than critical evaluation of the evidence. They show that the Japanese police culture was not as different from Western culture Or western police culture as commonly assumed. Les Man built on this in 2007, highlighting that in a 2004 survey, only 23% of respondents reported that they were satisfied with the police in service provided by the Kaban. While 85% neither knew the names nor recognized the faces of local officers. Unlike the British police, the Japanese police shouldn't be romanticized. Japan famously has an exceptionally high conviction rate, much of which is secured on the basis of confessions, and there is evidence that police and prosecutors pressure suspects into falsely confess into crimes. There Are good reasons to be skeptical about the idea of community policing. Alex Vitali in his landmark book, the End of Policing, highlights some difficulties with the narrative of police p community policing. He says that we cannot expect the police to be significantly more friendly than they are given their current role in society. When their job is to criminalize all disorderly behavior and fund local government through mass massive ticketing ticket writing campaigns, their interaction with the public in high crime areas will at least be gruff and distant and at worse, hostile and abusive. Pause in there, we have to acknowledge that Vitale's comment about police funding and local government through the writing of tickets is in applicable to the uk, but his wider point has considerable force. If the role of the police is to criminalize teenagers for smoking cannabis or to criminalize homeless people for stealing from shops, they are always going to be, and they're always going to have an adversarial relationship with many parts of the community. Vitali also rightly problems the notion of community, the notion of community pointing out that community meetings tend to be populated by homeowners, business owners and landlords, while renters, the homeless and immigrants are really represented. He concludes that community policing does not empower communities in meaningful ways. It expands police power, but does nothing to reduce the burden of over-policing on people of color and the poor. It is time to invest in communities instead defunding the police. You see, that brings me onto another idea that has gained support in recent years, and that is associated with the Black Lives Matter movement defunding the police. This is a concept that originated in the US American activists call in to defund. The police want to reduce funding for police departments and reallocate resources to other programs such as housing, employment, healthcare, and education. The scope of the demands varies. Some activists are only calling for modest reductions in police funding, while others are calling for radical, uh, um, disinvestment from policing with a view to eventually abolishing the police advocates of police. Defunding point out there was a little, there is little relationship between police activity and crime rates. In fact, when New York police officers held a work slowdown in late 2014 and early 2015, reports of major crime actually dropped. One idea commonly proposed by advocates of police defund, is to send health or social workers instead of police to deal with non-criminal emergency calls. For example, in the US city of Albuquerque, that has recently created a new department called the Community Safety Department, which has now 54 full-time crisis responders who respond to emergency calls related to mental health and homelessness. The movement to defund the police has learned a lot of lessons and has a lot of lessons for the uk Here in the uk. Years of austerity under the conservative government since 2010, have severely damaged our social services and starved them of resources. It's absolutely true that investing in council housing, education, healthcare jobs in homelessness would do a lot more than spending money on police. It's also true that better mental health crisis response services would save a lot of lives. As I've mentioned in previous lectures, I've represented many families of people killed by the police experiencing mental health crisis, where the last thing that they want needed was policing as opposed to mental health care. However, one complicating factor from a UK perspective is that the UK budgetary picture is significantly different. US defunding advocates point out to a bloated municipal police budgets which consume an outsized share of city resources. For example, the people's budget in LA movement points that 46% of the city of Los Angeles's unrestricted general fund is allocated to the Los Angeles police. Uh, department activists can therefore make a strong argument that city governments are prioritizing the wrong things. By contrast, in the UK we have a more centralized system of government and police funding is not determined by local authorities. It's therefore central government and not local government whose budgets priorities are an issue. And in that context, police funding is a small fraction of public spending. Overall, the UK police fund was 17 billion pounds in the financial year ending to March, 2023. Now, that might sound like a big number, but it's a small fraction of the 1.1 trillion of the total public sector spending in the same year. Even if we reallocated all of that 17 billion to housing, education, healthcare and jobs, it wouldn't come close to addressing some of the problems we face. And unlike the us the police in the UK have not been exempted from austerity. The Casey Review found that the metropolitan police spending levels were now some 700 million pounds lower in real terms than a decade ago. That doesn't necessarily mean we shouldn't defund the police, but it does mean that defunding the police won't fix the systemic underlying, underlying problems from years of underfunding of social services. Let's look at policing in non-capitalist societies. Thus far, we've looked at the role that police in plays in capitalist societies. As we've seen policing in the US and in in the UK grew up alongside industrial capitalism, and it's always served the interests of the ruling class. Unsurprisingly, police abolitionist are usually also critics of capitalism. However, a complicating factor is that policing is not limited to capitalist societies. Non-capitalist societies are also typically have policing in some form. Let's start by looking at the best known socialist state, the Soviet Union. In 1917. Shortly before coming to power, Len called for the replacement of the police with proletarian militia composed of all able bodied adults. However, in actual reality, the Soviet militia ended up not as a mass of citizens, a citizen's militia, but a professional police force. And this distinction in name did not even exist in other eastern block countries, which simply called their police forces police, such as the East German vols pity. Of course, many people on the left would not regard the Soviet Unions a true example of socialism. So let's move on from that example. Look at two better examples of non-capitalist societies. First, the autonomous administrations of North and East Syria, known as the rva Rojava have a de decentralized political system known as the Democratic conf federalism, in which the basic unit of government is a self-governing commune comprising between a few dozen to over a hundred households. All residents are entitled to participate in the, in the communal governance, and the Rojava have been praised for its justice system. In particular, the peace and consensus committees, which are neighborhood committees that resolve disputes on the basis of consensus. All of this might sound good and it is, but Rojava had not abolished the police. It's has a police force known as the as well as a formal court system and the prison system. In 2014, human rights watch accused of a jarvin, authorities of arbitrary arrests, abuse in detentions due process violations, unsolved disappearances and killings. Whatever the truth of those matters, there can be no doubt that the Raja has police and prisons. Another example we can draw upon is the movement. Since 1994, zk uprising of the indigenous peoples, they've built an autonomous system of self-government in, uh, parts of the Mexican state of the, uh, chias organizing radically democratic autonomous municipalities which function independently of the Mexican government. Now, I'm gonna quote an art, uh, uh, uh, an article by Anna rere Bri in Open Democracy at some length, describing how the Z Easter justice system works. The zapper star justice system has gained trust and legitimacy even beyond the movement supporters. It's free of charge conducted in indigenous languages and is known to be less corrupt or partial compared to governmental institutions of justice. But more importantly, it adopts a restorative rather than a punitive approach in places, an emphasis on the need to find a compromise that satisfies all parties rooted in the community. The system comprises consists of three levels. The first level consists issues among the its supporters, such as gossip, theft, drunkenness, and or domestic disputes. Such cases are resolved by elected authorities or if necessary by the communal assembly based on customary practice. When resolving conflicts, authorities largely function as mediators proposing solutions to the parties involved. If unresolved cases got to the next municipal level where they are dealt with by an elected honor or justice commission. Sentences most of the time involve community service or a fine jail sentences normally do not exceed several days. As Melissa Forbis explains, community jail is usually just a lock locked room where a partial open door so people can stop by and chat and pass food. Since the perpetrator off has to borrow money for a fine, uh, by his or her family members, the latter also involved and their pressure helps to prevent further transgression. Women related and domestic issues are addressed by women on the commission. Mariana Mora provides an telling illustration of the movement's approach to punishment, documenting the case in which the Zests issued a year-long community service sentence for a robbery. Those found guilty were allowed an alternative service with work on their own cornfield so that their families did not have to share in the punishment. The commission explained their decision as follows. Quote, we thought that if we simply put them in jail, those who really suffer are the family members. The guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their family are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive. End of quote, the highest level of the justice system than that of the J B G deals with cases that are primarily involved non zappas or other local political organizations, usually in disputes over land as well as local government authorities. Non zappas seek out the autonomous justice system, not only when they have disputes with members of the Zappa communities, but also when they experience unjust treatment by government officials in which the Zappas may decide to accompany the claimants to the public office and argue on their behalf. While zapper is to still have police. It is quite distinct from how we are used to think thinking of it. They are neither armed, uniformed, nor professional. Similar to other authorities, police are elected by their community. They're not remunerated and do not serve this function permanently. E every community has its own police. While higher administrative levels, those of MUN municipalities and regions do not decentralize and de professionalize police thus serve and are under control of the community that elects them. End of quote, Rajan Zappa. Communities offer examples, do they not, of a more decentralized, democratic and community based approach to police and security. But would this solve the problem with policing in our, our society? A skeptic might respond that decentralizing and, uh, democratizing policing isn't necessarily a panacea in our own society. We know that local communities are capable of being just as racist, a central government, and it doesn't take a great leap of imagination to envision an elected community police in an all white suburban neighborhood brutalizing a homeless black man or driving travelers from a particular area. And another disadvantage of a deep professionalized justice system is that it makes it much more difficult to achieve certainty and predictability. In liberal democracies, we tend to prize the rule of law and due process. We want to have certainty about what the law is so that we can order our affairs accordingly. We want the law to be enforced consistently and even handedly, and we want procedural rights to be observed when a person is arrested, charged, and convicted. All of these things would be more difficult to achieve in a radically decentralized and de professionalized system. So let me come to some conclusions. We have seen that policing is often oppressive. We have seen that policing in the US and the UK grew up alongside industrial capitalism and that it serves the interests of the ruling class. We have seen that the police are often used to repress political dissent and that they are often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. So now it's time to answer the question, do we need the police before we reach any conclusions? Let's us also remember to consider the role of that technology plays in modern policing. Body cameras aimed at increasing accountability to concern concerning things like facial recognition and the potential invasion of privacy. Technology's impact on policing is a complex topic and would warrant a lecture, a whole lecture on its own. Maybe I might come back to that at some future point. But returning to the issue at hand, an obvious response to the question is if we abolished the police right now and put nothing in their place, the power vacuum would probably be filled with self-appointed vigilantes and private security forces, which would commit worse abuses than the police do. Now, with less oversight and less accountability, if we abolish abolish the police, we would abolish the state's mono monopoly on violence and the rule of law would be set to n To be fair, it has to be acknowledged that most abolitionists don't have such a simplistic approach in this lecture. We haven't had time to get into the ideas of the theorists, but we looked at them in the last lecture. Abolitionists don't simply want to abolish the police while keeping everything else the same as it is now. They generally want a broader transform transformation of society in an anti-capitalist direction. They want greater investment in empowering communities to solve their own problems. They want to give communities resources they need such as healthcare, jobs, housing and education. And as I've highlighted in the last lecture, they've developed alternative forms of conflict resolution, which don't rely on collaboration with the state such as transformative justice. All the same though, in my view, which many people may disagree with, is that ab abolishing the police entirely probably isn't realistic or a desirable goal. It's difficult to see how any kind of polity could sustain itself without some monopoly on violence. And that means having some kind of police, as we've seen even radically democratic anti-capitalist, um, societies such as the Raja or the Zappas communities or the chias have some kind of policing. The basic notion of the rule of law, the idea that we should all be able to know what the law is to order our affairs accordingly requires some degree of centralized power. It requires a legislator, a judiciary that in turn requires someone to enforce the laws made by the legislation and judgments handed down by the judiciary. That doesn't mean though, that abolitionists ideas should be dismissed. Abolitionists are absolutely correct that the way to reduce crime and conflict in our communities is not through more policing or harsher punishments, but through reducing poverty and inequality and empowering communities economically and socially, we can think of many policy ideas that could achieve this goal. First, we need to invest in people for an universal, perhaps basic income, rent control, massive council house housing programs, free childcare, higher education, a properly funded NHS system. Second, we need to end homelessness by abolishing priority need, and intentionally ho homelessness tests by giving counsel's a legal duty to house every homeless person. Third, we need to reduce the impact of criminalization on our communities by legalizing certain drugs, decriminalizing certain activities such as begging rough sleeping, reforming sentencing to reduce the number of people who are sent to prisons, getting rid of rid of overweening police in powers such as suspicion of stops and searches. We should repeal the latest spate of anti-process laws. All of these measures the abolitionists and the reformists ought to agree on, and they would do far more good than investing in policing. I started with a quote, let me end with one power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did it never will. Frederick Douglas. Thank you. Thank you very much, professor Thomas. Um, we have a couple of minutes for questions, gentlemen, in the blue t-shirt at the back. If you could just wait for the mic to reach you. Go ahead. In, in Northern Ireland, when the R e C NE was converted into the police services in Northern Ireland, it took a whole pattern commission to drive through radical change. Whilst the, the Casey review was, was great in in highlighting the problems, did she, did she, um, lay out a process or a, a way of, um, reforming the metropolitan police? Did she consider radical change like splitting it up into a different services or is, uh, the police board that was announced the other day, is that all we're gonna get? Well, what Casey does, Casey sets out a, a series of criteria, very similar criteria that, uh, McPherson set out. In fact, uh, it, it it's quite, um, frightening when you look at what the, the recommendations that McPherson made and the same similar recommendations years later, that case is made. Is it enough? No. Um, but the real problem is, um, particularly with metropolitan police, they don't even, they, they're not even prepared to recognize the knowledge that they've got a problem. You can't hit a target that you're not prepared to look at. So I don't know. I, I, I think certainly more radical reform is needed. Uh, I'm not sure if Casey's re um, suggestions go far enough. That's where I come from on that Artificial intelligence, will that be of some service to the police to get a, a better form of policing? Well, you, you know, um, I, I mentioned, um, talking about, uh, um, perhaps doing electron, um, cameras and that, but artificial intelligence and where it's going is unbelievable. Um, and how that might impact in terms of policing decisions is scary. I just don't know. Right. Uh, um, we've seen, um, you know, with the mass introduction of artificial intelligence since with the introduction of chat G P T in November, and we've seen this change in just a few months. Who knows? Um, you know, when, when that power is unleashed in terms of policing, um, decisions policing com, you know, all the intelligence from the computers. I, I, I think you've raised a really good question. I stand here today in 2023. I don't have a clue, um, where it's gonna go, but what I, what I do know is the question you pose is a fantastic question because I can tell you this now. Artificial intelligence is not just gonna touch you, you know, um, small areas of our life, it's gonna touch every year of our life, and policing is gonna be a big part of that as well. Uh, and I wouldn't be surprised, it would not surprise me if there were, um, um, policing programs right now as we speak, using artificial intelligence in ways that we, we, we haven't even, um, conceived of. Because oftentimes that is done secretly behind the scenes before, before it's introduced. I feel like, um, between the two of us, we, this is probably a challenge for me as it, and, and you as law for us to do a lecture on this next year <laugh>. So, um, but perhaps I could follow on from that, if that's okay. We've, you've mentioned briefly, um, vigilantes and privatization of policing, thinking about the increasing use of technology, but also some of the shifting of the burden of responsibility for online safety, cyber crime investigation, private cctv and shopping centers, et cetera. Um, where do you think that trend is going? I think, um, it's going to increase. I think, you know, we are the most, um, surveyed society on this planet in the uk. We've, we've got more, um, security cameras, um, than anywhere else on, on the planet. And that's just going to increase. And I think that, um, what will happen is <laugh>, we are, we, we're, we're, there's going to be, I think a kind of technological privatization of certain policing functions because it's just gonna be easier, you know, um, the, the eyes in the sky. I, I'll give you an example. I did, um, I did a police shooting a few years back and, um, about 10 years ago, and I didn't have the, the knowledge then that I do now about the cameras that they had developed in terms of the drones that were being used to survey, um, crime in real time. Now, that was 10 years ago, and I was blown away when I discovered what they were doing 10 years ago. You, you, you just need to think how has the technology changed in 10 years? How has the camera technology changed in 10 years? You know, it blows my mind. It feels very similar to some of the questions that we've touched on. I'm plugging the IT lectures. I'm sorry, but please, you'll watch those as well.<laugh>. Um, it, when we've been talking about securing messaging and end-to-end encryption and some of those debates that you might have heard this week, in fact, in the news about access to communications data, it's been fueling policing for the last few years. It's been fueling policing for the last few years, and where, where it's going is there's gonna be an even greater erosion of our, um, privacy. I mean, I mean, see if we just, you know, this is your area and I, and I don't mean to, um, tread on your toes, but, but in terms of policing, if you think about all of our data and, and you know, being able to clay all that data instantaneously and use that in, in terms of policing, um, who knows where we are gonna go in terms of every keystroke that you've ever made on a computer, being able to recreate your thoughts and have, you know, um, a, a minority report. You've seen the film minority report type thing whereby we have, um, um, certain predictabilities in terms of what you might do. I wouldn't be surprised if that's on the cards. They won't surprise me. So in order to, to quote the former prime minister, in order to have to find the needle in the haystack, you have to have a jolly, large haystack. Yeah. And probably some artificial intelligence actually. Um, so unfortunately we've run out of time, so it only remains for me to thank Professor Leslie Thomas KC for an incredibly thought provoking and challenging talk. Thank you very much, professor Thomas.