Violence, race and the State in Britain

Adam Elliott-Cooper (2012-12-06)

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Following the August 2011 unrest in cities and towns across England, the British government’s response was emphatic criminalisation and pathologising of those involved, as well as a punitive state response.
THE STATE AS A PERPETRATOR OF VIOLENCE 

However, far less attention is paid to the way in which criminalized violence is affected in state violence. Kaplan and Huntington go into great detail about the violence of Africans and Arabs, but rarely mention the violence of western states.Through its control of the police, army and prison systems, the state is able to hold an almost complete monopoly on violence. When this monopoly is challenged, it becomes fierce in its reaction. A well-documented example of this is the harsh sentencing which followed the August 2011 English civil unrest. This saw 3,927 people arrested and draconian sentences handed out, including [http://tinyurl.com/blsglcg] six months in prison for stealing a bottle of water and four years for creating a Facebook event. What is in fact occurring is not the government protecting the public from violent unrest, but the recapturing of its monopoly of violence, which was challenged by those engaged in the revolts of August 2011. This kind of reactionary policy-making, is coupled with shallow political sound bites: ‘British jobs for British workers’ or appealing to the ‘law-abiding majority’, making use of identity politics which praises ‘British values’ such ‘tolerance’. But this identity politics often exploits class and racialised elements of fear, marginalising working class and post-colonial communities from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. This is echoed by Huntington and Kaplan through their essentialisation of race; and the state’s employment of disproportionate levels of force. It can also be recognized in the levels of police Stop and Searches[http://tinyurl.com/bvrmoes], lengths of sentences[http://tinyurl.com/cswd63v] and number of deaths in police custody [http://tinyurl.com/bwz3vp5] of Black individuals. Consequently, revolts become more likely in spaces where these sections of the population experience the most intense forms of state violence, such as Tottenham in 2011 or Brixton in 1981. Significantly, when revolts spread to other parts of England, even if the majority of violence is then carried out by white individuals [http://tinyurl.com/buw9cvx], government and media portrayals are skewed toward Black violence, and, by extension, so is the collective memory. This form of identity politics limits the functioning of democracy as the genuine grievances of the electorate become rarely articulated and seldom addressed. The corporate press further cements this process, and the financing of political parties by private interests, mean that policy reflects their interests, far more than it reflects the interests of the electorate.
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