BY PAUL T HORGAN
Examining the Ethnic Disparities in Policing and Public Disorder Responses in the UK
The complaints that there is two-tier policing in this country, as a result of the different police responses to protests triggered by the Southport murders when considered against the rioting at Rochdale police station in the wake of deliberately edited video showing police violence at Manchester Airport, or indeed to civil disorder following a local authority removing children from their parents, are wrong for numerous reasons.
There has been ethnic-based two-tier policing in the UK for at least two decades and probably longer.
Consider the following thought experiment. About two years ago, before the October 7 atrocities, there was an Islamist demonstration caused by another incidence of violence between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. A car was seen to be driven around Jewish areas of London with a Palestinian flag on its bonnet with a loudspeaker amplifying anti-Semitic verbal abuse from one of the occupants. These people were duly arrested after a public outcry, but the case was dropped, apparently due to lack of evidence as it apparently could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt as to who was in the car at the time and thus who committed the offences. However, imagine if the car was not being driven by Islamists, but instead by white supremacists, and the flag in the bonnet was a swastika. It is highly likely that the outcome would have been vastly different. The perpetrators would now be behind bars after a determined police investigation. Same crime, different perpetrators, but probably with different outcome.
Here is another example. Black teenage boys are several times more likely to be murdered in London and elsewhere than their white counterparts. This is largely because of drug-based gang activity, and the members of these gangs tend to be black adolescents. Each gang seems to have its own territory, and if a person from one gang is seen in another’s territory then there will be violence. The deaths are largely caused by knife crime, and there will be many more instances of knife wounds compared to deaths. Yet, again, imagine if the perpetrators of this territorial restriction and implied curfews were swastika-wearing white skinheads. The official approach would be considerably stronger, and there would be far more widespread media coverage. At the moment the knifings are just seen as part of the daily churn, which says rather too much about the media, even that of the left. Black politicians are quiet in a way they would not be if the ethnic identity of the attackers was different.
Moving away from thought experiments, consider the disparity between the public, media, and official responses between the murders of 14-year-old Corey Junior Davis of Forest Gate, and that of 17-year-old Jodie Chesney, a few stops up the Elizabeth line at Harold Wood. Davis was a black teenager who had been groomed into a gang lifestyle. In September 2017 he was blasted to death in broad daylight by shotguns wielded by the occupants of a metallic grey Range Rover that had been stolen previously from Balham and then driven through arguably the European city with the most intensive array of surveillance cameras. His murderers remain at large to this day. Did it make front page news? Was there a public outcry? There was when Jodie Chesney was murdered by a stab in the back in March 2019. It was front-page news and the consequent intense police investigation rapidly produced a result as her killers, who were from a drug gang and had mistakenly targeted her, were behind bars and serving life sentences before the end of the year.
No black politician has ever pointed out this disparity to a lasting extent, but also no mainstream media commentator has ever pointed out the silence of politicians such as David Lammy or Diane Abbott on this topic. The reason for this is that these elected politicians are seen as being representatives of their community, and opening up the discussion could reveal inconvenient truths about the communities for whom they claim to speak that could not, in the case of Lammy, be shouted away.
But there is also another reason for the apparent two-tier response to recent public disorders. Civil disorder by ethnic minority groups can be contained and managed by the state apparatus, through subsidies, outreach, and greater representation. The disorder may create enclaves and no-go areas with varying degrees of permanence, cause public institutions to alter their stances on historic topics and create new rules, but there will be little more. There is no risk of bringing down the state or being perceived by officialdom as having the potential to do so. This is not the case with disorders caused by those officially described as “far-right thugs”, as these are part of the ethnic majority. So, the reaction of the state is motivated by fear. This does not mean that the thugs have a reasonable argument to justify what they are doing.
The mass murder that prompted the current disorder is not a jihadist attack, but there had been jihadist attacks that conformed to the same pattern, and the public was ready to believe this was another jihadist murder. There have been mass stabbings by jihadists on London Bridge and its environs, and there had been mass murder by a suicide-bomb wielding jihadist (of British birth, just like the Southport murderer) of young girls at a music concert venue. This mass murder also follows on from a mass murder knife attack in Nottingham last year that prompted an emergency security meeting chaired by the then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when it was initially believed to be a jihadist attack. So even the highest elements of the state are capable of misinterpreting events.
The Southport atrocity resembles a machete attack in July 1996 by a paranoid schizophrenic Horrett Campbell of an infants school in Wolverhampton during a Teddy Bear’s picnic event. In that case there were numerous people badly injured, but no fatalities. There was limited public outcry – despite Campbell’s ethnicity, unlike today – as this was seen for what it was, the work of a madman and ethnicity was not seen as a factor. The authorities were not regarded as being to blame for such a madman not being in a mental institution, despite the government policy of ‘care in the community’ for the mentally ill. For decades, there had been ‘water-tower’ hospitals catering for the mentally-ill, but this infrastructure was replaced by a process with more nuance as medical science progressed. It is perhaps indicative of the changes in our society that a murderous attack by an apparent lunatic from an ethnic minority is now politicised with strong cultural overtones.
Four months prior to the Wolverhampton attack, there had been the Dunblane massacre, when paedophile Thomas Hamilton went on a murder spree with a legally-owned handgun as he felt the authorities were starting to clamp down on his recreational activities, which included running some kind of boys’ clubs where he seemed to be usually the only adult present. This was not the first outrage by a legal owner of a firearm. Michael Ryan had rampaged through Hungerford in 1987 using handguns and semi-automatic rifles to murder 17 people. In both cases, laws were changed to ban the legal ownership of these kind of guns. To date, criminal owners of illegal firearms have not committed mass murders of random victims.
And this perhaps highlights the difference and the rise in public concern. Unlike after Hungerford and Dunblane (the latter after a change of government), the government and authorities are helpless to prevent such attacks like the one at Southport in the future. It is not possible to ban knives in the way guns were banned after legal owners could no longer be trusted as individuals to behave responsibly. Home-made bombs, like the ones used in London in 2005 and Manchester in 2017 are already illegal, but the materials used in their construction cannot be restricted by law in a reasonable fashion. Thus the only way to prevent attacks is that the potential perpetrators have a change of heart. However there is no evidence that such a change of heart is forthcoming. In fact the jihadist rhetoric is getting worse, certainly since the protests mounted in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel. These seem to have given jihadists around the world a new sense of confidence. And the response of the authorities have demonstrated their impotence.
The British authorities are being seen as helpless and useless, and sometimes even regarded as being in cahoots with the Islamists, and they seem to not be able to dispel this perception. And this may be why there has been the public disorder. The population also feels helpless in the face of the mass murders, and the authorities are not seen as addressing it, but instead just picking up the pieces and appealing for calm in the face of despair, and little more. As to what else the authorities could reasonably do, this is a matter for debate. The problem is that for many years the authorities have refused to debate the issue in a way that is acceptable to the public. The issue therefore is not the atrocity, but the refusal to debate issues properly, and this refusal is what is being used by the thugs.
The Labour Party in particular and socialists in general regard the basic unit of population not as being the individual or family, but the class and the community, and this has always been the case. Using Labour’s own perception, the perpetrators of mass murders seem to come from certain communities, and the victims mainly from others, but there is no way that concerns arising from this perception can be ever expressed without denunciation directed towards those that express concern. And if the only official and media response to any need for a proper debate regarding public safety is denunciation, respect for authority and institutions will naturally diminish as the state is seen as failing in its primary duty of public protection.
It is only slightly under six years since Labour was openly supporting a form of Islamism from its leadership down to the membership. For years Labour courted the Islamist vote, but the October 7 attacks made this impossible to continue to do without alienating the wider voting population in a way that Jeremy Corbyn caused to happen.
Rather than tiers, the authorities have graduated responses based on the level of threat. But this is not the level of threat to the public. Instead it is the level of threat to the survival of the state. Less than 100 people have been murdered in the UK as a consequence of jihadist attacks since the start of the century. Compare this to the 3,000 people killed during the thirty years of the Troubles emanating from Ireland. Rather than trivialise the atrocity in Southport and the murderous activities of jihadists on UK soil, this places it in proportion to past challenges facing the public and the state. The problem is that the public now fear that the state is no longer up to the challenge in a way that they never did when the IRA was at its height. There is no indication that this will change if all the government does is to issue directed threats.
The incoming Labour government has had the shortest honeymoon period of any government that has received such a large majority. Its problem is that its ideology means that it is unable to be a proper part of the debate arising from the atrocities that have blighted this country for two decades, but is instead talking tough. The tough talking is a reasonable response to what seems a strong threat to the survival of the state, but not to general public concern regarding increasingly regular knife massacres. However, there has to be a debate, and avoiding it will not be to anyone’s benefit, certainly not to the state’s.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.