Policing the Beats

“Police racism is not a system error. It is a default setting,” says Dr Lambros Fatsis, cultural criminologist at City St George’s, University of London.

Earlier this year, a report found Black children were eight times more likely to be strip-searched than white children.

A review of the Metropolitan Police found it to be structurally racist, with a report from the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board earlier this year finding its Police Race Action Plan wanting.

According to Dr Fatsis, police racism extends beyond stop-and-searches into the fabric of Black culture, as seen through the criminalisation of Black and Afrodiasporic music.

His new book Policing the beats explores how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day and reveals the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.

How music became criminalised

It is within his musical community that Dr Fatsis developed his cultural politics.

Alongside his academic life, Dr Fatsis is a lifelong vinyl-head and sound system fan, and deejays with the UK collective Boulevard System, playing reggae and dub.

These genres – and more modern ones, such as drill, which is a subgenre of rap – have evolved through Black and Afrodiasporic communities in the UK.

When UK drill music began booming in popularity in the 2010s, the rap subgenre was portrayed as a criminal enterprise in headline media.

His love of the music, and a serious of high-profile cases in which rap lyrics were used against drill music artists in court cases pushed him into activism in this area.

He joined Art Not Evidence, a group campaigning to make it illegal for music lyrics to be used as evidence in courtrooms, on the basis that it criminalises an art form.

His new book is a continuation of that campaigning, and he launched it at Rarekind Records in his home city of Brighton.

He describes Rarekind Records as “a record shop that does not just sell round discs of plastic, but is a live library of ideas that offer a sound education.”

“I couldn't feel more humbled, honoured, grateful and elated than casting my mind back to my book launch event Rarekind Records,” he said. “It's in places like this that my aesthetic formation, cultural politics and ethical conscience was shaped.”

The history of the police as imperial militias

Dr Lambros’ book argues that the issue of racism in policing stretches back to its origins. He said:

Rather than a system error, racism has always been a default setting in British policing, which is why a different conversation about policing is desperately needed.

Britain’s imperial legacy looms large: the Met police was modelled on militias that patrolled, captured and controlled enslaved people in Britain’s colonies.

In modern times, research has shown repeatedly that neither stop-and-search, nor strip-search stop crime. Instead, they produce racialised harm.

No amount of proposed reforms, anti-racist training, race action plans, or community-engagement initiatives can fix this.

All of the above have already been tried and failed as they do not address what policing actually is and does.

Policing is not a crime-fighting institution, it is an order maintenance one and the order maintains is marked by hierarchies of race, class and gender.

To truly protect young Black people, we need to move away from discussions about police leadership and instead talk about policing itself as a problem.

This requires us to focus on how to reduce violence and social harm away from policing, prioritising social investment over punitive enforcement. A recent report by the Runnymede Trust found that the public strongly supports this.