Institutional Racism and Militarised Policing: Examining the Wars on ‘Gang’ Crime and ‘Terrorism’

Abstract

This thesis analyses how institutional racism and militarisation work together to determine the police’s ongoing wars on ‘gang’ crime and ‘terrorism.’ In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report’s (1999) recognition of London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist,’ senior officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. Yet, local (and global) anti-racist resistance demonstrates that racism remains a relation of domination between police and racialised populations. While academic work has considered the systematic character of police racism, and police power as a modality of war, the relationship between institutional racism and militarised policing has not been examined extensively. Thus, this project synthesises both debates through an analysis of key anti-gang and counter-terrorism policies in Britain, to show how the police’s militarised credentials are rationalised through race, and how racism is a formal strategy of police warfare. I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, where racism and militarisation operate in tandem to oversee the intensified regulation of racially coded communities in Britain. My analysis shows that post-race logic works to evasively institutionalise black youth as the primary perpetrators of collective criminality, and Muslims as the main embodiments of mass death and destruction. As such, institutional racism in anti-gang and counter-terrorism policing is shown to be difficult to discern, yet profound, plural and relational. This is because it manoeuvres the deceptive capacities of the post-racial, to obscure the construction of both black and Muslim communities as antithetical to the core tenets of Euro-modernity, namely law and order and national security. I contend that this multifaceted, formalised and fabricated production of racially coded populations as anti-modern enemy figures rests on notions of threat, immanency and inhumanity, which rationalises the police’s power to wage everyday domestic war through a coterminous biopolitics of securitisation and disposability. Thus, I conclude by calling for an anti-racism that together scrutinises the politics of racism, commits to collective struggle, seeks to demilitarise, and envisages and builds towards radical socio-political transformation.