“The PCSC bill has led to this country being an even more hostile place to live and grow up as a Gypsy or Traveller. It was never good to begin with. How many more of our children do we have to lose before their parents and before their time?” - @GRTSocialists on Twitter

“I don’t know what I’ll do next time I’m in crisis” - Mental Health Service User, via @StopSimmh on Instagram

“(It was) like being raped by the state” - “Jacqui”

This current generation is reckoning with the constant abuse of their world, daily. From sexism to racism, ableism to homophobia, classism and other breeds of violence; people are seeking real justice for the pain these things create. Who’s responsible? Where can we act, concretely, against this? Towards something better?

For many people, their first answer has always been (against) the police. This piece aims to highlight three areas where that is true, and three movements against them they can support and join.

I want to talk about how the police uphold what David Harvey & Ruth Wilson Gilmore call “Organised Abandonment”. Similar to austerity, this is the process where a state or corporate body cuts costs by abandoning unprofitable people. The police enforce this, by collecting the abandoned and criminalising them.

The police state is notoriously hard to dismantle. It takes huge movements to do so, the creation of dual power. That is, powerful social movements counterbalancing, and eventually abolishing, the state. I present three moments in this state in its current form, and the countermovements against them.

#SPYCOPS

On the 1st of March 2021, the “Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021” passed. It allowed the “authorisation of criminal conduct” for police spies in the UK. All of a sudden, across the country, officers undercover in environmental organisations, trade unions, left-wing parties, racial justice movements and the like, were given a license to kill. Priti Patel and the home office pushed it through; Keir Starmer, former chief prosecutor and leader of the Labour Party, ordered his MPs to abstain (and most of them did). The house of lords tried to pass three amendments, to disallow the most serious crimes (torture, murder, rape), to disallow the use of children, and preventing immunity. All of these amendments were rejected, and the bill was passed as it was.

Bob Lambert had an intimate relationship with hunt saboteur “Jacqui” in the 80s, had a child with her, then left. Jim Pickford did the same thing with another woman, this time marrying her. Mark Kennedy had an intimate relationship with Kate Wilson in 2003; seven years later, she found out he’d been married with kids. All three of these men were undercover police, expressly urged to have sexual relations with female activists as a way in by their higher-ups. All of them had sexual relations with several other female activists whilst undercover. One of Mark Kennedy’s survivors had intimate pictures of herself on a police database. Jacqui said her experience was “like being raped by the state.” This is not just a set of individual circumstances, but a culture of sexist violence. Activists are calling this institutional sexism, and rightly so. 

5 of the known police spies infiltrated far-right groups. The rest, some 134 spies, were all focused on left-wing organisations, including 22 spies in animal rights groups, 21 in environmental groups, 24 in anarchist groups… the list goes on, including anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, and trade union groups. Clearly, this espionage was not concerned with preventing threat to life. Combat 18 was a far-right militant group which nail-bombed diverse communities in Brixton, Bangladeshi neighbourhoods, and gay bars in 1999 alone. One police spy is said to have been involved with them; more police spies were assigned to the grieving family of Stephen Lawrence.

To understand the nature of present police espionage operations, we must look at these two pieces of evidence. One is the insidious nature of how it has operated in the past; the other is the new powers they are being given in the present. Perhaps the most daunting part of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021 is what it tells us about police spying right now (a subject we, by its very nature, know very little about). It shows the police intend to do more of what we have seen before, and intend to do it legally this time, and with Priti Patel and Keir Starmer in their pocket, this has not been hard to achieve.  

#STOPSIMS

“Serenity Integrated Mentoring” (SIM) is a joint project of police and NHS England. Spearheaded by the independent group “High Intensity Network,” they take some of the most vulnerable patients in England and place a police officer at a key position on their mental health team. SIM operates on a behaviourist principle that suicide attempts, major self harm episodes etc. are done for attention, and should be passively responded to, if at all, which they believe disincentivises. Officers place emphasis on individual responsibility for managing the crisis they are in. Their mentoring informs, infiltrates, and in many instances dominates police constabularies, mental health agencies, and importantly, NHS bodies across the country. This creates what they call a “community of practice” around SIMs methods and beliefs throughout the UK network of crisis-care providers.

It is a coup of the crisis care system in England by the police; a new chapter in a long history of police-psychiatrist-NHS collaboration and symbiosis. SIM behaviourist psychiatry informed, for instance, Surrey Constabulary. When responding to a person in crisis, their officers took them home rather than to A&E, on the assumption they were simply attention seeking. They subsequently overdosed and were then admitted to A&E. SIMs “community of practice” is crafting a deadly culture of neglect.

“Serenity” for who? Perhaps for the police and psychiatrists who are worried by increasing costs to their services by “High Intensity Users”, but not for the users themselves. The StomSIM Coalition are a group of organised service users and their organisations & allies, dedicated to halting SIMs rollout across England. They have importantly pointed out that the police, in SIM’s own words, are there for their capacity as a “coercive” interventionist. They are there to either use physical/legal violence, or to do near nothing, in response to a crisis. Their presence, often, criminalises mental health crises. Officers are there, in the HIN’s own words, to “prevent ‘disease from becoming disorder’.” What this has meant is a flurry of reports of service users being threatened with prison, Community Behaviour Orders, and general hostility across the country from the NHS and the officers now embedded within it. It is the violent enforcement of abandonment; services run dry are now turning to the police to evict service users from their practices. 

#KILLTHEBILL

Finally, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. It criminalises the right to protest, criminalises trespass, establishes “secure schools” to further criminalise children, and expands stop and search. This will mean many things. It means the almost complete criminalisation of GRT (G*psy, Roma, Traveller) community lifestyles. GRT communities attempting to settle on land without consent of the landlord can have their vehicles impounded, 3 months prison or a £2,500 fine placed upon them, as well as a criminal record. With active traveller sites in the UK dwindling, this means a severe lack of places for travellers to live. 

Not only that, but also unhoused communities, ramblers, and squatters are being criminalised. It is creating a world where “stepping off a public path could lead to a criminal sentence.” It is a move, from the home office, to enhance the sovereignty of private property; an unhoused person sleeping in a doorway could be sent to prison. Only 8% of UK land is publicly owned, and half of UK land is owned by 1% of its population. We are being made strangers in our own streets, cities and countryside. For all of us, this is a severe loss, and for many groups, this is a form of social and ethnic cleansing. 

It criminalises protest. It introduces a new category, the “one-person protest”, “a protest which, at any one time, is carried on by one person in a public place.” An individual making “noise” deemed “disruptive” or that may have a “relevant impact” on the people around them, is liable for arrest and prosecution. The street preacher, the leafleter, the musician, anyone outside making a loud enough noise that could be interpreted as disruptive, is liable to legal action.

This also applies to groupings of people. Any noise which “may result in serious disruption” (emphasis mine) to people/organisations in the vicinity. It also criminalises people if they “ought to have known” they were causing an offence, rather than actually “know”. This means even if they haven’t been made aware (or indeed, aren’t aware) they are causing an offence, they can still be liable for arrest. Criminal sanctions for organisers of illegal demonstrations have risen from 3 months prison time to a potential 11 months prison time.

No More Exclusions are an abolitionist group with a focus on education & racial disparities in exclusions. They have raised that the Bill intends to make the running of “secure schools” a “charitable activity”, which in turn leaves it largely tax exempt. Whilst none of these so-called “secure schools” exist currently, Medway STC, “marked to become England’s first secure school”, is a prime example of what kind of institution these ‘schools’ are being born out of. An OFSTED report found there were “two incidents per day when force was used against the incarcerated youth at the site.”

The bill also widens stop and search powers, at a time when young black men are 28x more likely to be stopped and searched by the police in London. In the first lockdown alone, the equivalent of over a quarter of all black men in London were stopped and searched in less than three months. A large statistic, especially considering most people stayed indoors during this time.

WHAT NOW?

As the UK’s social security net withers, it is the police, the courts and the prisons that lie in wait to catch those who fall through. This is the police state’s role in the organised abandonment of the people’s assets. They replace doctors, educators, social workers; they arrest, criminalise, and brutalise communities in crisis, as their support networks are stripped away, from travellers and young black men to the mentally ill. This is what organised abandonment looks like. When abandoning a plethora of vulnerable people, a government needs a pack of dogs to throw them to. And when people rise against this, the police need the power to violently infiltrate, dismantle, disempower, and when all else fails, forcibly silence movements. 

Chief Superintendent Paul Griffiths said the police are preparing for “a more volatile and agitated society” as the UK emerges from lockdown. He said “economic difficulties can lead to a ‘rise in crime and disorder’,” that as capital burns society to proliferate itself, the police, courts, and prisons must brutally mitigate the fallout. The police do not put out the fires of the modern world, but fan the flames, and incarcerate, defile, and abuse the firefighters.

The police are embedded within the legislature. They hold the conservative and labour parties by the neck. It is only the people that paused the PCSC bill from advancing; and only the organised people can topple it. It is only the collective organising of mental health service users and allies, moving through the StopSim Coalition and elsewhere, that the NHS has been pressured to place SIM under review across the country. Only the organised service users and their accomplices can abolish it completely. 

I believe the police when they tell us who they are. When they say they want the power to murder, sexually abuse, socially and ethnically cleanse, I wholeheartedly believe they want to use it. In light of this, we must be the “volatile and agitated society”! Not wait to be treated as such through their new legislative toys. Organised abandonment requires organisation, and beyond the ivory tower of the treasury and private sector, the organisations in charge of enforcing it are the police, prisons and courts. If you have not already, it is time to look beyond these places as sites of justice. They are grand, grand houses of violence and neglect. 

There is hope, and in many ways we are pushing back. I urge you to join and support collective action, organisations, and movements against these contemporary moments in the police state. The StopSim Coalition, Police Spies Out of Lives, and local Kill the Bill coalitions/orgs are good places to start. Or start your own group, org, affinity group; get a group of like minded and like-willed friends together, and make something happen. More to the point, be safe, and do not believe you are powerless, and do not sit alone and weep for the world.