The British backdrop
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| British Police in Central London |
In the Book Abolition Revolution, the authors aim to teach one main message on the reality of policing in Britain. The police is an 'institution of state violence' which disproportionately harms working class and minority communities. This materialises in Britain in the over policing of predominantly poorer communities seen most clearly in London. One of the most commonly cited examples is the conscious choice of police to focus on Notting Hill Carnival as a recipient of police funding with the Metropolitan Police spending £11 million on their operation in 2023. This was supported in 2025 using live facial recognition software, a live blog and a mass stop and search operation. Comparatively, events attended by middle class, predominantly white young individuals have been described as a law free zone where the use of class A drugs go unpunished. The wild disparity in the use of police power can be attributed to a few different reasons but is seen most clearly in the makeup of police power and authority. A sociology lecturer at my local university by the name of Remi Joseph-Salisbury examined the way in which, specifically, young black men, regardless of class are more likely to have negative experiences with the police force compared to any other demographic. His report on what he described as ‘racialised policing’ was a true eye-opener against the threat of excessive police power. Numerous examples were outlined of numerous phony or aggressive searches, stops and treatment from the police against people of minority backgrounds. These were all conducted after an increase in their power from the Conservative government which has sadly continued after Covid under Rishi Sunak and even under the current Labour government under Keir Starmer and new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.
BBC Panorama in Charing Cross
The Met Police were branded as an 'institutionally racist, misogynist and homophobic' in the 2023 Baroness Casey review, something we saw to full effect in a recent BBC documentary. In a fantastic piece of investigative journalism, the BBC went undercover at Charing Cross Station in London unveiling horrific levels of misogyny and racism. Views shared by the officers were predominantly opposed to ethnic minorities in the capital whilst also glorifying the use of violence against civilians. The most memorable example was the police taking in an autistic teenager who’d ran away from care. The reasonable alternative would be some kind of mental health support or an inquest of the failure of our SEND programmes, instead the boy was put in a cell. To add insult to injury he threw a pillow at an officer, only to find himself forcefully restrained by an army of officers who crowded his cell, pinned him to the floor and tied his feet and arms for multiple hours. This links nicely back to the LSE motion at the start of the post. The broken windows approach encourages aggressive policing, cracking down on minor infringements in the name of preventing larger ones further down the line. Comparatively, transformative policing looks to focus on rehabilitation and tackling the root causes of crime. Perhaps the main issue for debaters on the government side was attempting to reconcile with and justify the claim that aggressive policing in the manner of that displayed at Charing Cross would do anything rather than cause an apathy against the state and its most weaponised institution, the Metropolitan Police.
There are two main alternatives, police abolition and transformative justice. Police abolition is something with a strong historical foundation and a present and active base in the United States, which grew in support after the killing of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. Fundamentally abolitionists, aim to bring about a world where the police either don’t exist through changes in legislation or becomes unnecessary and effectively withers away. The obvious concern is how would crimes be punished in a police less state, however Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean’s response was quite simple – police don’t solve crimes in the status quo. Currently in Britain we are currently at a stage where petty crimes and even rape go unpunished. In 2022 under 1% of reported rapes resulted in a conviction in England and Wales, effectively creating no deterrent against crime. The alternative proposed by abolitionists is the dispersing of police funding to community initiatives to tackle the causes of crime, primarily poor education. The main reason why crime happens in poorer communities is due to a lack or poor-quality education. This is generally seen by areas with grammar schools and private schools having higher house prices, signifying higher levels of wealth compared to areas without them. When students leave these lower quality schools there is a significantly harder chance of acquiring wealth due to being made to compete with privately educated or grammar-educated students who have a larger amount of human capital accumulated over the years in the higher quality of education. At the point at which an individual struggles to acquire wealth through ordinary means the alternative is shown to them as crime. A narrative pushed through media organisations, music and in some cases, their surroundings. The way to tackling this, from the abolitionists perspective is to use funds otherwise spent on policing and give it back to the community through the funding of schools as well as other initiatives such as youth clubs or education schemes to strengthen societal bonds as well as increase the human capital of individuals from poorer backgrounds. However, crime still occurs in a police or police less world. The abolitionist position on punishment is somewhat weaker with the claim being that a community led justice approach would be comparatively safer and more effective than traditional police. This is stemmed from the idea of a society before police where locals decided on punishments with the deterrent being created through shame from those around you and reproach from those at the top of your specific societal hierarchy. This deterrent is based upon the mischaracterisation of what modern societies tend to look like. In reality, families aren’t living in close contact with each other in a system of communal living. Increased movement towards metropolitan areas have meant people are living on top of each other in flats and apartments, isolated from the lives of those around them. This analysis basically mitigates any of the deterrent the abolition view of community led justice due to what we describe as a community no longer existing.
Transformative Justice
The middle ground is transformative justice and is probably the view I most align with for the time being. It’s clear for many that abolition would be ineffective at creating a deterrent against large- or small-scale offences leading to the state failing in its duty to protect its citizens from organised crime or petty offences. Transformative justice still creates the deterrent but has the police in a significantly more relaxed role compared to what we’re seeing in Starmer’s Britain. The aim of the police and our justice system as a whole is rehabilitation of offenders to ensure that crime is adequately punished as well as a deterred in the future. This would also involve some level of rolling back of police funding which could potentially be used by the state to fund the same initiatives that abolitionists would push for but with the police being used to positively interact with civilians rather than in the aggressive manner in which they’re currently being used.
To conclude, the question of abolitionism will continue in Britain as long as the police have a presence in British life. I see this as quite a positive thing to happen as any movement looking for any kind of reform to modern policing is going to be one with the concerns of ordinary people at heart. However, the abolitionist utopia is simply non-existent in the majority of our western liberal democracies and hence, is unworkable in the current state of our societies.