Articles about policing, political or otherwise

Well, I would say that essentially there are two different elements to policing.

The main one which is an issue for us is the very reason for their foundation - the violent maintenance of class rule. The Bow Street runners (the first police) were founded to break up demonstrations of workers and the poor with clubs, whereas previously the Army used swords, and especially after the Peterloo massacre everyone went nuts about it.

For this reason, the police were universally hated. The first member of the public who murdered a police officer got off as the jury found it to be "justifiable homicide".

So basically the police had to take on some forms of socially useful duties, in order for people to accept them, and not recognise them as essentially the violent attack dogs of the rich. Now that class struggle is at a low ebb, they don't often have to perform their violent role oppressing the working class (like they did during the miners strike), so it can be difficult for some people to see what their actual social function is.

That said, of course they do perform useful social functions, such as locking up paedos, etc. I wouldn't say that sort of policing is "political" necessarily, unless you mean that paedophilia being illegal (or pub fights being illegal) is a political issue, which I suppose you could say, but I'm not sure what the political utility of this argument would be.

Anyway, just a few thoughts off the top of my head…

I remember in a previous thread around this subject, someone recommended a pamphlet on the police by the SWP as being pretty good, but I can't remember the name

Sorry to make a third post about this, but I was thinking that if you mean that all policing is political, in that what they focus on is driven by a political agenda, then I agree completely. For example, they expend a lot of resources dealing with crime carried out by poor people, but comparatively little attempting to tackle things like corporate or environmental crimes. And of course they spend millions infiltrating environmentalist anarchist groups for intelligence and destructive purposes, but of course they don't attempt to infiltrate banks for insider trading or fraud, or infiltrate private waste management companies to tackle unsafe disposal of waste, etc

Steven:

I think we should be careful how we phrase this. Pedophilia is a desire which cannot be freely acted upon without doing harm to children. Paedos are people who have this desire, and that is problematic. But people having desires - even desires that, if acted upon are hamrful - are not, as such, criminals to be locked up as long as they don't put the desire into harmful practice. It is child molesters, child abusers, child rapists, - not paedos as such - that commit crimes. The crime is in the acting upon the desire, NOT in the desire as such, however sad and problematic such desires are. We should avoid stereotyping a whole category of people simply for having problematic desires. These people should be prevented to act upon these desires, but as long as they succeed in not acting out their desires, these people should not be stigmatized as criminals. There has been more than enough moral panic already.

Yeah, fair enough - but of course being a paedophile isn't a crime. Only people who have acted on it can get locked up, I wasn't saying people should be jailed for thought crime!

I'm not some one who often uses situationist terms, but I think there is a large extent to which policing is a 'spectacular' activity. Policing is a pretty inefficient way to cut most crime, after all (I imagine it would be an efficient way of cutting highly centralised crimes like really large scale pollution or financial abuses though, if they ever tried), but is a very effective way of shaping thinking about deviance, authority and so on. The best thing police do for most workers in their lives is issue one of those reports so you can claim insurance when your stuff is stolen.

Is it this book that you were thinking of, Steven?

CRIME, CLASS AND CORRUPTION: POLITICS OF THE POLICE by Audrey Farrell.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/CRIME-CLASS-CORRUPTION-POLITICS-POLICE/dp/B000S9HQC8

I don't think the above is right. This implies the opposite;

The Runners were set up to deal with increasing crime in the growing cities and expanding economy. Though they were on occasion used against workers;

...but the Runners' small numbers would've been generally ineffective against workers' demonstrations of the time; eg, Peterloo was 50,000.

Their initial work was;

whoops, I wonder where I got that from then… I'd better do some more reading around this when I get a chance

voliá:

Yeah I think its important to hammer it home that the police are always political, especially at protests.

Also about the anti-cuts police 'union', you know they played a video of the student protest to Theresa May backed by the Keiser Chiefs 'I Predict A Riot'? I would have cut all their funding just for playing such a shite song

http://www.struggle.ws/rbr/rbr6/crime.html

word!

Also of course, they are not opposed to cuts in general but only cuts to themselves

Sorry if this is a bit late but this is a really good article regarding why the modern police force was created (i.e. for social control and to protect the ruling classes).

The Demand For Order And The Birth Of Modern Policing

I have nothing burning to add to your list, but that article nearly burnt my eyes out....

Although the police might face similar cuts to the rest of us and when they complain they may use similar language they have also explicitly cited unrest due to cuts as a reason that they shouldn't be cut.

To be honest, I think the argument about whether they are technically workers or not is irrelevant.

What matters for us is not the working class in itself, but the working class for itself. I.e. the working class fighting in its own interest.

The working class in itself may contain police, soldiers killing other workers, racists, rapists, etc, so this isn't something we glorify as such.

Police are certainly not part of the working class fighting in its own interest (the exact opposite in fact) - and they only can be when they refuse their roles and mutiny or quit, like soldiers for example. Except of course history shows that police are very unlikely to have the sort of mutinies or "switching sides" that has happened quite often with the Armed Forces.

Similar discussion in Manchester here.

Joseph I read the title to that piece and I couldn't bare to read on. The police joining an anarcho-syndaclist union, what planet is he on!

As for that Max guy, I see the point he is trying to make but they are dripping in naivety.

thing is, i'd be delighted if we were being approached by rank-and-file coppers who wanted to organise industrial action, as it would be a sign the state was losing control of its repressive apparatus. we may even put such coppers in touch with one another, maybe even encourage them to form an independent network etc, and - assuming they were anarcho-syndicalists and so critical of their own social role - conceivably even support industrial actions (if they were against say, routine arming of the police, or new repressive powers, or something else of that ilk). but there's an obvious conflict of interest between being a copper and being a revolutionary union activist, and in any case this is an entirely hypothetical problem as i can't see any cops approaching anarchists for organising help any time soon.