Cop out: why the Casey review won’t change anything

Harvey Brown argues that the latest expose of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Met is part of a vicious and expensive cycle of reviews and reoffending, which can only be broken by defunding the police entirely.

CN: discussion of sexual assault, police violence

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We didn’t need the Louise Casey review’s diagnosis of ‘institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia’ to know that the Metropolitan police has blood on its hands. As the review itself recognises, Casey’s findings are nothing new to the communities subjected to racist stop-and-searches, afraid to walk the streets, or targeted and harassed by police forces in the UK. 217 people died after police-encounters in England and Wales last year alone. Headlines pass, inquiries conclude, but the trauma of police violence lingers in communities across the UK.

We’re told that things are changing, though. ‘I don’t think we will see another person like [convicted rapist and murderer Wayne Couzens or convicted rapist David Carrick] in the police’, says Ken Marsh, chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation. The Met’s ‘determination to sort this issue out’ is exemplified by the 800 Met police officers currently under investigation for sexual assault and domestic abuse, according to Met chief Mark Rowley, who echoes Marsh’s optimism. Even Casey is convinced that the Met can ‘regain’ the public’s trust through structural, procedural and cultural reforms. Rowley, while refusing to accept the label ‘institutional’, has agreed that ‘This is about an organisation that needs to become determinedly anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-homophobic’, agreeing that it must ‘return’ to policing by consent.

What does this mean? There’s a popular cultural and political image of a community copper, like the butcher or the baker: a reassuring presence who keeps the streets safe and helps your granny cross the road. It’s an image the Casey report likes too: ‘community engagement’ and ‘Londoners’ voices’ are key to returning to a time when the public image of the Met was a bloke in a hat on the corner, and not a killer hiding in plain sight. This golden age of policing, of course, never existed.

Police officers have never been accountable to communities. They enforce the law, and are therefore never ‘impartial’, despite what their ‘code of ethics’ may suggest. They are accountable to the British state, which has itself consistently demonstrated an institutional commitment to ‘racism, misogyny and homophobia’. Robert Peel set up the Met police in the wake of the 1819 Peterloo massacre as a more accountable method of social control than the armed militia which massacred working-class protestors. Crucially, the Met had the same function as its predecessor, albeit with the word consent tagged on the end. ‘Bobbies’ aren’t just full-time members of the community dedicated to ‘community welfare and existence’, as Peel spun it, they’re the defensive arm of governments. The police will never be impartial, then. They must still enforce the same racist laws, defend the same violent institutions, and protect property at the expense of human life. 

To say that if policing had a different shape, name or set of people smiling on bus-stop posters it would serve a different social function is nothing more than a Notes-app apology for ongoing state violence. It’s at best naive and at worst deceitful to hand institutional diagnoses back to the same institution and ask it to correct itself. The Casey review is not a moment of reckoning, it’s just a review: a survey of police violence at this point in time, which the police can use to police themselves a little differently, if they want. 20 years ago, the MacPherson inquiry labelled the Met ‘institutionally racist’, two years ago an independent inquiry found the Met to be ‘institutionally corrupt’. And yet, as it urges the Met to accept the labels of previous reviews, the Casey review supposes that this same institution can and will change.

If they are implemented, the review’s recommendations are ultimately just another excuse to pump more money into an institution which creates harm - in the review’s words - institutionally. The UK police budget is already £17.2 billion annually. Both Labour and the Tories intend to scale this up. In a time of increasing socioeconomic, political, and environmental crises, it is growing increasingly difficult to pretend that the police do anything to keep society safe. Arriving after a crime has happened, failing to solve 19 out of every 20 burglaries and violent offences in England and Wales, and nearly 99 in every 100 reported rapes - even police-commissioners are starting to admit that improving social infrastructure and reducing poverty is the most important crime prevention strategy.

Cops are not trained to deal with the complex causes of ‘crime’, having been taught either a ‘warrior’ mentality - that you are the ‘thin blue line’ between order and chaos - or that of the ‘rescuer’ - the heroic, implied-male duty-responder who can save their community from harm while maintaining patriarchal power. It is no wonder, as Casey points out, that Met officers are 82% white and 71% male, when the role not only sanctions violence, but promotes individualistic, masculine easy-fixes to the intersecting problems which enmesh society. Policing creates a category of ‘criminals’ - often racialised - to prevent critical inquiry and action into why we have a society in which some do harm to others. When Casey talks about the transformation of policing culture, her analysis rests on the assumption that the macho-istic, violent culture of policing is separate to policing’s social function, rather than ultimately essential to the Peelian principles she valorises. 

As abolitionists have pointed out for decades, police and prisons perpetuate harms, and excuse other forms of violence for which there is no justice under capitalism: environmental degradation, slum housing, gatekept healthcare, police violence itself. The police will always reoffend, no matter how many reviews with which you indulge them, because that is what they can do and what they were designed to do. 

So instead of endless conversations - facilitated by a Baroness - about whether the Met is fit for purpose, let’s instead use this moment to support those calling for defunding the police entirely. Let’s imagine a world in which money is not sunk into endless reviews and police technologies, and instead directed towards healthcare for everyone, education which is not policed, youth services, dignified and secure housing, counselling which is accessible and free for all, nutritious food production, safe-passage and welcome for migrants. In other words, a world that is safe for queer people, people of colour and all those currently targeted by racist, misogynistic and homophobic institutions like the police. A world without such institutions is a world in which we can all flourish.