Blood on Their Hands: Why We Must Dismantle Policing, not Rebuild Trust
When Sarah Everard’s body was found, social media exploded with guidance of how to have the right conversations about gendered violence. Infographics on how men can be better allies or on how we can change rape culture tore through Instagram. It was clear that more attention was paid to discussing “male privilege” than to the fact that the police officer guarding the search scenes for Sarah was taken off duty for sharing an ‘offensive’ WhatsApp image. More allyship tick lists were around than reports that Sarah’s murderer, Wayne Couzens, only 72 hours before the murder, was linked to an allegation of indecent exposure. The vehicle involved was identified, enough information to link him to the scene, yet the reasons this investigation was not concluded “remain unclear”.
Our discussions of violence against women are simply incomplete unless they can account for the structural violence of policing, the prison-industrial-complex, border regimes, and every other carceral system that the state enforces. Indeed, in the same vein as structural misogyny, the violence of policing, prisons and detention centres is so normalised that it often isn’t thought of as violence at all. Policing exists to keep the wrong kind of women off the streets, right? Prisons keep those incompatible with the British nation state locked away, and detention centres and deportations are an important line to maintain the deserving and the undeserving. We can trace these justifications through the lives that have been lost, from Joy Gardner, Jean Charles de Menezes, Sarah Reed, Annabelle Landsburg, and the countless others. If we are to experience safety as a nation, we are told, we must expect some will lose their lives.
In the midst of mass feelings of panic, fear and loss, we were, and still are, encouraged to view Wayne Couzens as an ex-police officer, off-duty, and a man entirely exceptional from the good guys who keep us safe. In order to address the institutional misogyny within its ranks, and to rebuild women’s trust in the Met police, 650 new police officers are to be deployed within busy public spaces to protect women. According to research published in the Guardian, one woman reports a serving police officer for domestic or sexual violence per week. Between 2012 and 2018, 562 Metropolitan police officers were accused of sexual assault, and only 43 of those faced disciplinary proceedings. This means that one in every 18 Met police officers with sexual assault allegations against them are subject to formal action. So, all this does is cordon off yet another arena of women’s life. This enclosure dismantles much of the work done by feminism in the past – it fits neatly into the idea that individual women are responsible for the harm done to them. After all, they stepped out into a public space. This fits neatly into the rhetoric of North Yorkshire police commissioner Philip Allott, who remarked that women need to be streetwise about when they can and cannot be arrested, following this with the claim that Sarah Everard “should never have been arrested and submitted to that”.
Lola Olufemi explains that feminism as we know it now, as is acceptable in the media, as it holds in the liberal imagination, lowers the stakes. We can see this in the idea that 650 new police officers is the best decision moving forward from Sarah Everard’s murder. We’re supposed to accept that public space is inherently threatening to women. Why should we accept the inevitability of violence that stems from this institution? 650 police officers accounts for 650 new points of risk for women.
Oppression is not a competitive arena, and when it is treated as one, we are all losers. Nonetheless, the fact that Wayne Couzens’s sentencing has gained such widespread coverage and increasing scrutiny for the MET Police cannot help but evoke feelings of resentment from those who have always had to ask who will protect them from the police. Advice from the Met for worried women included waving down a bus if one feels threatened by a male police officer. Or resisting arrest, or simply running away.
These accounts suffer from historical amnesia. In 2007, Jean Charles de Menezes was killed after passing through Stockwell Tube gates with his Oyster card, but his “Mongolian eyes” were enough for officers to prove his criminality. For this, the Met, authorised by Cressida Dick at the time, fabricated a story of how de Menezes jumped the gates and ran, actions for which on their account he deserved to be shot seven times in the head. de Menezes did not run, did not aggravate officers, he simply made his way to work. But as a Brazilian immigrant, this was a death sentence. Not only does this advice to resist or to run count for nothing for working class women, homeless women, Gypsy and Roma women, Black and immigrant women (the list goes on), it fails to consider that the Police, Crime, Sentencing Bill increases the minimum sentence for assaulting a police officer to two years, with no regard for the context of the assault. This is an offence that accounts for 17% of total offences leading to custodial sentencing for Black young women aged 18-24. It is true that Sarah’s death has caused many more people to question who the police protect, but it should never have taken this long.
Consider that women in Yarls Wood Immigration Centre are brought there in the middle of the night, and upon arrival in their cell, from the windows there are no houses in sight. ‘Roll call’ takes place every day, with women often burst in on whilst getting dressed or whilst naked. Between 2013 and 2015, there were six allegations of sexual assault, sexual abuse is reported regularly by the detainees, and a Channel 4 investigation found that officers referred to the women as “animals”. A banner once hung from a cell’s window, reading ‘Yarl’s Wood Officers in relationships with vulnerable detainees’. Those detained include victims of sex trafficking, those with severe mental health problems, and pregnant women. This is a horribly familiar trajectory. Women, extracted from their homes, families and friends, from both private and public spheres in the dead of night, in interaction with an officer who assaults and abuses them in an event that so often ends in a life cut short. Sarah’s story belongs to a continuum of structural state violence, inseparable from and embedded within the extractive nature of patriarchal and racist oppression.
Couzens has been found to have exchanged misogynistic, homophobic, and racist messages within a WhatsApp Group, the other members of which are still on duty. Half of police staff have reported sexualised jokes being repeatedly told at work, with a fifth experiencing “inappropriate staring” and “leering”. If an institution is created to protect private property, to enforce the colonial regime of the British Empire, and banish those that are surplus to racial capitalism into cells, then why are we surprised when those who sign up to it act in alignment with the violence that the everyday maintenance of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy and capitalism necessitates?
In her book Feminist International, Veronica Gago writes of the perpetrator of gendered violence, “he is not sick, he is a healthy son of the patriarchy”. The same can be said for the institution of the police. Wayne Couzens does not deviate from the inherent violence of policing. To exceptionalise his behaviour is to do a grave disservice to those who have died in police custody, those caught up in the racist system of stop and search, trapped in the cells of immigrant detention centres, the sex workers thrown out on the street, and those who are made to suffer every day by the state’s gatekeepers.
What worth does feminism have if it cannot act as a path to bridging our differences and connecting our struggles? When Audre Lorde said that no woman is free until every woman is free, regardless of how different her shackles are to one’s own, she perhaps wasn’t thinking so literally as is the case in this article. Yet, it is the same apparatus that killed Sarah Everard as enables the routine abuse of immigrant women and that enforces state-sanctioned premature death both on the streets and in jails. If women are to exist elsewhere than the minefield of systemic patriarchal state violence, then our full might must be pushed against carceral systems in all their manifestations. The challenge that must follow this latest show of violence is not how to rebuild women’s trust in the police, but how we build trust in each other, and strip the death-making institution of its hold over us.
A moment of mourning is also a moment for transformation. Opposition to the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts bill built an incredibly diverse coalition of interests. From the Gypsy and Roma community, workers and tenants’ unions, feminist groups like Sisters Uncut, and environmental activists. This too should be a moment in which we realise that there is no way in which carceral systems might contribute to our individual and collective wellbeing. Women are losing faith in the police, and with that loss comes a void, one littered with questions. Reeling from the death of another sister and fearful of our safety, how is it that we will keep each other safe? Thankfully, Sisters Uncut are making it clear, policing as an institution is fundamentally at odds with the safety of women. With that recognition, they have announced a series of police intervention training sessions and have launched a nationwide network of CopWatch patrols which anyone can sign up to.
Why would we ask for anything less than the ability for all women to exist loudly and vividly in public spaces? Let us not sell ourselves short, a world without violence against women is one without the Met Police force. To all those that left notes, flowers and candles at Sarah’s vigil, that flame mustn’t die out. Set it alight in your communities, building lifeways for all women to exist outside of patriarchal state violence. Let us warm ourselves under the flame that promises the possibility of safety in the world that comes next.