[Militant No. 571, 3rd October 1981, p. 8-9]
By Lynn Walsh
The riots which erupted in Brixton, Toxteth and other cities in the summer of 1981 once again focused attention on the role of the police.
In particular, they highlighted the almost complete lack of accountability, and the need for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.
The explosion of anger on the streets arose from the terrible conditions faced by workers in the inner-city areas, especially black workers and youth: mass unemployment, rotten housing, inadequate education, health and social facilities etc.
But the street clashes also reflected widespread resentment and anger at the police which had built up over a period of years.
The labour movement, while defending workers‘ rights to defend their areas from attack, cannot support looting, arson and petrol-bombing as forms of protest. However, it has to be recognised that in almost every case the riots were sparked off by provocative police action.
In Brixton, as was soon revealed, there was the intensive ‘Swamp ’81’ operation, and a number of brutal arrests and raids. Similarly, in Toxteth a number of arbitrary, heavy-handed arrests sparked off the conflict.
These particular incidents, however, were only the tip of the iceberg.
In March 1979, Lambeth Labour council, completely dissatisfied with its lack of control over policing in the area, set up its own Working Party on Community/Police Relations. It concluded (in January 1980) that there was evidence of widespread racism by the police and that they were regarded, particularly by black people, as “an army of occupation.”
In London and other cities there has been growing anger at the racial bias of the police. The increasing number of “passport raids” has highlighted the police’s role in enforcing racialist immigration laws.
There is also anger over racial attacks. In the past five years 26 black people have been murdered, with only one or two arrests for these crimes. In the London area there were 2,426 violent attacks on Asians alone in 1980. Very few of these crimes were solved.
In Brixton and other areas of London there was also a strong reaction against the intervention of the Special Patrol Group. Few of the black youth or Labour activists could forget the SPG’s responsibility for the killing of Blair Peach after the anti-NF demonstration in Southall (23 April 1979).
Before the Brixton upheaval, the inquest on the Deptford fire had emphasised the inability and apparent reluctance of the police seriously to investigate this horrendous crime as a racialist attack.
Protest from Labour MPs and civil rights groups had also drawn attention to the scandal of deaths of suspects in police custody. Between January 1970 and June 1979, 245 people died in police custody, with the rate rising from seven a year to forty-eight a year.
It was the refusal of the Liverpool police chief, Kenneth Oxford, to reveal the contents of an internal inquiry into the death of Jimmy Kelly which brought about a head-on collision between the Labour councillors on the area police authority and the Chief Constable.
Oxford arrogantly expressed the attitude of hard-line police chiefs towards elected police committees. He attacked some councillors for their „vituperative, misinformed comments“, and reportedly told members of the police authority to “keep out of my force’s business.”
Liverpool councillors decided to set up a working party to look into the „role and responsibility“ of the police authority. After this reported in February 1980, Councillor Margaret Simey, a long-standing member of the authority, commented:
“I realise now that there is no hope of running a big modern police force on rules that are no more than a gentleman’s agreement” (Weekend World, ITV, 23 March 1980). “Mr Oxford does not seem to think the police committee is worth proper consideration, and the Tory majority do not seem to think that there is anything wrong with that” (Observer, 21 October 1979).
The clashes between Labour councillors and police chiefs in Lambeth (Brixton) and Liverpool (Toxteth) were early warnings of the explosions to come. The conflict over the role of the police authorities in these two key areas, as well as in West Yorkshire (where there was also a council enquiry in 1978) and Lewisham (where in 1980 the council threatened to withhold its contribution to the Metropolitan police), underlined the complete lack of democratic accountability as far as the police were concerned.
Yet the police were not always unaccountable to local authorities.
When, after the formation of the Metropolitan police in 1829, police forces were gradually created in the boroughs, they were under the control of „watch committees“ made up of council members, who appointed the constables, and their officers, and fixed their pay and controlled their work.
When the county councils were reformed in the 1880s, „standing joint committees“ were created, comprising of half county councillors and half local magistrates, with similar powers to the borough watch committees.
„The control of the watch committees was absolute,“ writes one historian of the police (T. A. Crichley, ‘History of the Police in England and Wales’). „In its hands lay the sole power to appoint, promote and punish men of all ranks, and it had powers of suspension and dismissal. The watch committee prescribed the regulations for the force, and subject to the approval of the town council determined the rates of pay.“
In some boroughs the chief police officer was required to report weekly to the watch committee. There was, however, continuous pressure from the government to establish stronger central control of the police; but this was resisted by local interests. Throughout the 19th century the Home Secretary’s main role was that of ensuring all areas recruited and maintained adequate police forces, which was carried out through the inspectors of constabulary.
This relationship was not just the product of administrative convenience. It reflected the balance of class forces, and the political relations flowing from them.
The borough councils were dominated by the industrial and commercial capitalist class. They paid for the police through the rates, and therefore they insisted they controlled the police. The industrial middle class were suspicious of central government, which they associated with extravagant and unnecessary expenditure, and which they feared would interfere in their affairs on behalf of the aristocratic oligarchy which dominated central government.
The propertied middle class which championed parliamentary government took it for granted that a body like the police, which potentially had enormous power, should be democratically controlled.
This, however, was in the era before the working class had become an independent political force. Even at the end of the 19th century only a small minority of workers had the vote.
When the great majority of working class men gained the vote in 1918 (all women in 1928) the property owning classes changed their tune. They were no longer concerned about the aristocratic oligarchy, which had been eclipsed by industrial capitalists, but they certainly feared the growing strength of the labour movement.
The end of the first world war in 1918 brought a massive radicalisation of the workers, with enormous struggles and strike battles. Labour councillors began to be elected in many towns and cities, with the emergence of a number of Labour-controlled councils.
The attempt of the state to take control of the police out of the hands of local government and concentrate it centrally was also made more urgent by the police strikes of 1918 and 1919.
After the strikes, the Desborough Committee was set up to overhaul the whole police structure, and many of its recommendations were adopted. One recommendation was that the power of appointment, promotion and discipline should be transferred from the watch committees to Chief Constables.
This, however, was still resisted in Parliament, and the powers remained formally in the hands of watch committees until 1964.
However, in one way and another the powers of Chief Constables were considerably strengthened. So too was the „informal“ central influence exerted by the Home Office (and the Scottish Office), especially as central government now provided half the cost of maintaining local forces.
The element of democratic control through the watch committees was slowly but surely strangled. The last vestiges of accountability, moreover, were allowed to disappear largely without opposition from the labour movement, controlled in that period by the right-wing leadership.
The 1960 Royal Commission on the Police concluded that the main problem of police accountability was controlling Chief Constables. They „should be subject to more effective supervision,“ said the report – but this was to be done by making Chief Constables more accountable to central government, not to local watch committees.
The Royal Commission’s recommendations were put into effect by the 1964 Police Act (and the Police (Scotland) Act, 1967).
Borough watch committees and county standing joint committees were replaced by police authorities, made up of two thirds councillors and one third magistrates. Local authorities still paid for half of the cost of the forces, but their Chief Constables, backed up by the Home Office, quickly established the principle that „operational questions“ were outside police committees‘ scope.
In practice, the 1964 Act institutionalised and legalised the situation established after 1945. The new police committees are not even committees of the local councils, but independent statutory bodies. This effectively divorces them from council control. In some authorities, like Liverpool, the councillors are not even allowed to ask questions on the police authority.
In theory, the police authorities appoint the Chief Constable and can dismiss the Chief Constable „in the interests of police efficiency.“ But these powers are strictly subject to the Home Secretary’s agreement.
In theory, the police committees can question the Chief Constable on his annual reports, or ask him for special reports. In practice this is very difficult. Most Chief Constables‘ annual reports give very little information on policing methods, and they particularly avoid the most contentious areas of policing.
The police chiefs and Tories invariably reject all calls for accountability as sinister socialist moves to undermine “the fight against crime.”
Contrary to Tory mythology, however, Marxists are not opposed to the police taking action to catch criminals and to protect people’s personal safety and personal property. Working-class people are naturally concerned about crime, and especially alarmed about increasing violence.
But what are the police chief’s real priorities?
Speaking on ‘Question Time’ (BBC 1, 16 October 1979) Anderton said: “I think that from the police point of view my task in the future … that basic crime as such – theft, burglary, even violent crime – will not be the predominant police feature. What will be the matter of greatest concern to me will be the covert and ultimately overt attempt to overthrow democracy, to subvert the authority of the state, and, in fact, to involve themselves in acts of sedition designed to destroy our parliamentary system and the democratic government in this country.”
Clearly for Anderton the defence of ‘law and order’ is not really the same thing as catching criminals.
Overcoming crime, for socialists, means fundamentally the eradication of the social conditions which produce crime. But within the present society, democratic accountability of the police, far from undermining “the fight against crime”, would remove the obstacles created by an undemocratic, unaccountable and increasingly repressive police force.
The police chiefs are vehemently opposed to any public enquiry and to any form of democratic accountability.
Even the ‘liberal’ Alderson opposes any democratisation of the police. But the new breed of hard-line police chiefs, like McNee and Anderton, regard Alderson’s ideas as quaintly old fashioned. “Community policing” may be all right for rural areas like Devon and Cornwall, they say, but are totally inapplicable to the present-day urban areas.
These developments make it clear that the „iron fist“ thinking of the Andertons reflects the new perspective of the strategists of the ruling class themselves.
They have recognised that the relative social peace of the post-war period ended with the ebbing of the economic boom. They see that the coming period, with the continued catastrophic decline of British capitalism and the inevitable erosion of living standards, will be one of head-on conflict with the working class. They have therefore discarded the old ‚liberal‘, ‚democratic‘ face of the British ruling class and instead are presenting a brutal, repressive visage.
These developments, particularly with the perspective of the Andertons, make it vitally important for the labour movement to campaign for the democratisation of the police.
If the working class is to preserve the economic gains and the democratic rights that it has wrested from the capitalists in the past, it must carry through the socialist transformation of society. Past gains cannot be preserved indefinitely within the rotten framework of a crisis-ridden capitalism.
In transforming society, it is utopian to think that the existing apparatus of the capitalist state can be taken over and adapted by the working class. In a fundamental change of society, all the existing institutions of the state will be shattered and replaced by new organs of power under the democratic control of the working class.
The campaign for this should go hand in hand with the battle to extend democratic control over the existing state institutions. In the case of the police, a lead has been given by the Greater London Labour Party, which included in its last GLC election manifesto proposals for democratisation of the Metropolitan police.
The key elements of a programme for the democratisation of the police must be:
● The police must be returned to the authority of local government police committees, with powers like those of the original watch committees. The local police committees should have the power to appoint and dismiss Chief Constables and senior officers. They should be responsible not only for the police’s physical resources but for „operational questions“, i.e. day-to-day policing policies.
● The police committees should ensure a genuinely independent complaints procedure under the complaints board composed of democratically elected representatives. They should ensure that the appropriate disciplinary procedures are implemented.
● The police committees should ensure that any racist elements or fascist sympathisers within the police are weeded out of the force.
● The abolition of the Special Patrol Group and other similar units.
● The abolition of the Special Branch and the destruction of political files and computer records not connected with criminal investigations.
● The right of the police to an independent, democratic trade union organisation to defend their interests as workers.
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