In August 2011 following two nights of conflict on the streets of Liverpool 8, 200 residents met with the police and local Labour councillors. There was a substantial degree of anger and the community was in no mood to listen to patronising and ineffectual responses by the local councillors, police and Police Authority. It became clear in a few short minutes that people were going to have their say and that the foundations of the conflict on the streets today were exactly the same as they were in 1981.
“Nothing has changed except you can’t use the N word anymore”
“From the 70s, 80s and 2000s the same thing is going on and nothing is ever done. In the 70s you made promises, but you can’t even understand that there is nothing to do here, nowhere to go and now we have the cuts!” Serious concerns were expressed about the lack of youth services and recent drastic cuts to youth workers and legal services and concerns were also raised about the closure of the local JET service (providing support, career advice and job searches). Institutionalised discrimination has caused the high levels of unemployment in the area, “most people in this room are unemployed”, and the historic absence of black representation in the city centre banks, offices and stores blatantly continues in the new Liverpool One complex. People expressed scepticism about promises being made frustration about the total neglect in the area that has gone on for decades was clear. Others revealed that housing strategy meetings were a farce where if you spoke up and raised concerns you were immediately shot down and deemed a subversive. The councilors made it clear that the council put profit and business before the needs of the community, “We have to get the best price”, plainly showing that their wringing of hands and having to make “heartbreaking cuts” were nothing but empty words and rhetoric.
Liverpool 8 Voices
“I am twenty-five years old and I experience what my parents experienced. I feel very vexed with you”. “Young people have been criminalized in his area for decades – they are put in vans and given a beating, I kid you not, I’ve been there thirty years ago. They are marginalised, criminalized and sectioned off, beaten up and written off! If you do nothing we will protect our kids. At the end of the day I don’t tell them to fight but I feel helpless. Over section 301 and section 602, you are enforcing it far more in this area.” (Community Worker).
The attitude of the police was described as “disgusting” by a local woman and this was loudly endorsed by everyone in the room. She raised serious questions about an incident when 8 police raided their home, her daughter pleaded with police that there was a new born baby in their home, but they responded saying “Whatever!” Police attitudes to the community were described as being abusive with excessive force being used. “50 came though my door, 4 pinned me to the floor, handcuffed me, My 10 year old daughter was in the room, I pleaded for them to go easy on her. They wrested her to the floor and handcuffed her”. (40 year old male).
He went on to explain that the Police claimed to be looking for drugs, so he protested to them that he had never been in trouble and had no record. They found nothing but paracetamol! He explained that he went through the complaints procedure and then, “I went to the IPCC and it was all upheld, they said they made a mistake!”
There were many accounts of police harassment and abuse revealing just the tip of an iceberg.
A young refugee talked about an incident when he was stopped on his way to work, adding that another officer in a car shouted “search him!” Clearly distressed and upset by this experience he asked the police officer, “Is it a crime to be black?” Another young man talked about his experience with friends being beaten by the police in the back of a van when they were being dispersed for no reason. Others talked about being stopped and searched four and five times a night and never receiving the stop and search slips which should include the officers identity and an explanation about why, where and when you have been stopped. The high level of stop and search continues to be a daily humiliation and degradation for people especially young black males who are being stopped by young white police officers. Stop and search has institutionalised racial profiling into policing practice by police officers who have lawful discretion to apply their own prejudices in order to assess who is deemed suspicious and worthy of stopping.
The Area Commander insisted that they had made progress and enhanced community relations because of equality training within the police force. His denial of discriminatory
police behaviour provoked further anger with the community, “you can’t train people not to be racist!” said an older female resident.
The politicians and the police defend a system that is the root cause of the injustice and attacks that have led to the uprisings and as stated by many people this was nothing compared to what will happen in the future, “that was the calm before the storm”.
In an attempt to ameliorate the feelings of the community the Area Commander ended up revealing that their aim was to protect the properties and businesses in Liverpool One and that is why they contained the situation in Liverpool 8 hence revealing the lie of so-called ‘community’ policing, the reality is that is the protection of private property is at the heart of policing.
National responses ignore the voice of the youth
Nationally ‘moral’ outrage has been expressed by the media and all politicians to the youth who rose up just as happened in 1981 – ‘rioters’, ‘yobs’, ‘thugs’, ‘looters’ and ‘arsonists’, so as to depoliticise and criminalise the uprising, the young people and the working class and thus justify an escalation of militarised control with water cannon, rubber bullets and mass incarcerations.
Politicians from all parties have adopted an extremely reactionary response. The number of arrests and convictions is alarming and completely disproportionate to normal practice. Thousands of young people have been imprisoned on remand and shocking and outrageous sentences are being meted out in an attempt to suppress the political might of the youth. The longest so far has been a four year prison sentence given to two young men (20 and 22 years of age) with no previous criminal record, for posting messages “encouraging riot” on Facebook as a joke, at a location where there was no riot! The prison population has now exploded to 86,821, the highest in western Europe.
Furthermore Cameron has brought in from the US William Bratton, “the architect of zero-tolerance policing across the world such as New York City to Mexico City and Caracas”3 in order to provide a voice in support of his plans to transform the Criminal Justice System and increase the powers of the state so that they can “implement and use the welfare system as an outpost”4 of the CJS, as with the plans to evict the families of “rioters” from public housing and cut off their welfare support.
The long term use of these powers will not be confined to the youth uprisings but they will be used against the working class at a time when deeper and harsher cuts and austerity measures will seriously cut the standard of living and create civil unrest and an increase in mass mobilisations of opposition.
Defective blame theory
As previously stated the political response has been to deny any connection between the “riots” and police harassment and intimidation, cuts, austerity measures or poverty and an ‘official discourse’ has been resurrected that creates and blames an ‘underclass’ in society. An ‘underclass’ who come from broken families where a culture of dependency exists with no moral barometers to guide behaviour. Cameron said, “I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad, where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the streets for their father figures, filled with rage and anger.”
Cameron has clung onto the rightwing theories of American Charles Murray from the late 1980s who blames the individual for their own poverty. Murray’s research focused on single mothers and was based on innuendo, assertion and anecdote and this theory is revived during various stages of economic downturn to gain legitimacy for attacks on welfare and cuts in services. Cameron has borrowed this defective theory in order to blame the ‘welfare system’ for creating a culture of rights without responsibilities and communities without control in order to popularize and implement cuts in welfare spending and militarised control.
Anti-youth culture
The emergence of anti-youth policies began in the post-war period when unemployment became a persistent feature of capitalism with young and Black people being overly-represented in this ‘surplus population’. This has led to the creation of stereotypes of ‘dangerous classes’ to enable policies of control and repression. The previous Labour government expanded the powers of repression targeting young people under the Anti Social Behaviour Act and also lowered the age of criminal responsibility, which led to staggering number of young people being imprisoned in England, far more than in any other western European country. An anti-youth culture has developed in this country because of a fear of the political force that young people can develop.
Stand by young people and our communities
The crimes of the politicians, bankers, police, and media remain unaccounted for and unpunished, their wealth increases and their powers are extended as opposed to the despicable and outrageously disproportionate draconian response to the revolt of the youth which is a demonstration of the fear that the ruling class has of the working class as well as the hatred they feel towards the working class.
“We have a political culture which has been manipulated by Rupert Murdoch and the press. We’ve got a feral elite of politicians, press, police and banks running the whole system. And there’s so much anger right across society—not just in these kids. This is not the end of rebellion, it is the beginning.”5
A Liverpool 8 resident said, “Enough is enough and we will no-longer stand-by while our young people and communities are marginalised and criminalised. As a community we have a duty to support young people.” We must put pressure on the organisations of the working class to defend those subject to these exemplary penalties and like the youth we must take to the streets to demand their freedom and oppose the excesses of state power on our
streets and in the courts.
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1 Section 30 of the Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003 allows a senior police officer to give authorisation for officers to issue dispersal orders in areas where he has reasonable grounds for believing that any members of the public have been intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed as a result of the presence of behaviour of groups of two or more person and if anti-social behaviour is a significant and persistent problem in the area.
2 Section 60 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, gives police the right to search people in a defined area at a specific time when they believe, with good reason, that: there is the possibility of serious violence; or that a person is carrying a dangerous object or offensive weapon; or that an incident involving serious violence has taken place and a dangerous instrument or offensive weapon used in the incident is being carried in the locality. This law has to be authorised by a senior officer and is used mainly to tackle football hooliganism and gang fights.
3 Rachel Herzing http://www.irr.org. uk/2011/august/bj000015.html
4 Jon Burnett http://www.irr.org. uk/2011/august/bj000014.html
5 A Sivanandan Institute of Race Relations.
