An apolitical police force? That’s false consciousness.

This week’s was an unusually encouraging edition of Question Time , with the audience and most of the panellists voicing lucid sentiments with rare frequency. The commentary on secularism, especially from Owen Jones, was refreshingly sensible. That’s not what I’ll be writing about here, though, since one of the earlier discussions involved the forthcoming election of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Humberside, a role for which John Prescott - who appeared on the programme – has already put himself forward.  

His fellow panellist Ken Clarke, known by Guardian readers (rather undeservedly in my view) as the likeable Tory, made the predictable objection that ‘straightforward party political exchanges’ ought to be kept out of policing; another of the speakers, Susan Kramer, had earlier stated ‘people have to have confidence and faith that there is no political colour in the police’. This post is dedicated to that sentiment, its presumption that Her Majesty’s Police are at present or were ever apolitical, and to casting some light on the basic falsehood of it.

Recent terminology has, I’m told, begun to cast policing as a ‘service’ rather than a ‘force’. The British left and the Labour Party in particular tends to buy into this portrayal: it’s typical that the current government’s cuts to frontline policing are mentioned by John Prescott, Andy Burnham or especially Ken Livingstone in the same breath as its austerity programme’s effects on the NHS , on (un)employment or on welfare for the jobless or disabled . The police are construed as an essential service to the needy, as when Livingstone rallied after lost August’s riots to have more of them on the streets. (I recently wrote about the political right doing this with the monarchy.) As such, Kramer’s and Clarke’s point becomes intuitive: we ought not to expect a politicised police force any more than we go to the NHS for moral or spiritual advice.

But the police aren’t public servants, protecting those in need. Like the god of the Jews, they are at times on the vulnerable’s side by sheer coincidence, and at other times aren’t . This much is anarchism 101.

You need only go back to 1829, when Robert Peel first formed the Met, to understand this. The introduction to the relevant act of parliament is as follows:

Whereas offences against property have of late increased in and near the metropolis ; and the local establishments of nightly watch and nightly police have been found inadequate to the prevention and detection of crime, by reason of the frequent unfitness of the individuals employed, the insufficiency of their number, the limited sphere of their authority, and their want of connection and co-operation with each other: And whereas it is expedient to substitute a new and more efficient system of police in lieu of such establishments of nightly watch and nightly police, within the limits herein-after mentioned, and to constitute an office of police, which, acting under the immediate authority of one of his Majesty’s principal secretaries of state, shall direct and control the whole of such new system of police within those limits[.]

Note the phrase, emboldened here, ‘offences against property’. In case it occurs to you by instinct that those offences – theft, defacement, destruction, sabotage – are at their worst when directed at the poor, allow me to emphasise: those at the base of the immediately pre-Victorian social pyramid most typically had no property, or at least very little. Certainly, none which would tend to attract thieves or vandals. If a crackdown on ‘offences against property’ could today be in aid of shopkeepers and small business owners, this certainly wasn’t the case at the police force’s inception; their work could never, then, have been compared as it is today with NHS medicine for the poorest people.

Quite the opposite. ‘What is noticeable about the peaks in crime’, the historian Richard Brown writes of the period , ‘is that they coincide with years marked by economic depression and political unrest. The correlation suggests that … Offenders were more likely to steal because of economic hardship. Peaks of committals coincided with the depths of economic depressions and suggest that some offenders stole to survive.’ He goes on:

Britain’s propertied classes felt themselves under attack from two directions.

1. From the potential of revolution exported from the continent. The French Revolution began in 1789. There was a further revolution in France in 1830. There were revolutions across other parts of Europe in 1830 and 1848. These created considerable fear that the same thing would happen in Britain. …

2. Secondly from the growing slums of urban Britain. As towns grew, and the slum areas expanded the middle classes felt that they were losing control of these inner-city areas.

The founding purposes of the police force, then, in a sentence? To protect the property of the wealthy from the desperate poor. Is this really, in Susan Kamer’s terms, so politically colourless?

It might be said that the most deprived people in 2012 are less desperate, though they may themselves tell you differently. But that would be missing the point. That the police’s first objective was enforcing private ownership makes them capitalist by nature. If today they also round up rapists or homophobes – and their potential as a remedy for these ills in principle could be debated – it’s because the rest of us have, over almost two centuries, been gradually convinced that only they as agents of the state can use violence on our behalf.

Never mind the archbishop-like interventions of chief constables in national politics just this year, the police are the antibodies of the capitalist state. Where dissent arises, they declare sterile areas ; where demonstrations are held, they establish containment ; where civil conflict arises against them, the area is deemed sick . (I should stress I’m hardly the first to refer to this language.) To anyone who’s witnessed the police in action, arbitrarily arresting bystanders or entering private spaces in search of banned substances, who’s watched them cover their numbers or charge on horseback into a crowd, the statement that they are or ever could be free of politics is an immediate absurdity.

The decrees of parliamentary government, political with a capital ‘p’, would mean nothing at all without police action to enforce them – directly via the truncheon in the case of criminal law, indirectly in the case of civil law via a financial system policing protects. To assume, as judging by their applause the audience on Question Time did, that the police force’s social and civic role has no political content at its core is a false consciousness much like saying the immune system has no physical effects. Each upholds a norm so familiar that we take it for granted, intuitively desensitised; only seeing batons used against schoolchildren did I first hesitate about the status quo the police protect, having held an apologetic capitalism for some time. Try to make a person ill, and you see what the immune system really does. Break the received social rules that they inforce, and you see the politics of the police in technicolor.

Alex Gabriel