The aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the United States in late May, which triggered the rebirth of the global Black Lives Matter movement, has also seen the return in popularity of a fairly ugly blend of two words – ‘cop’ and ‘propaganda’ – that, together, describe efforts to sway public opinion in support of the police and distract attention away from negative stories or publicity.

The Metropolitan Police has itself become very adept over the years at promoting stories that seek to show it in a favourable light. That’s why “copaganda” was the word I thought of immediately, when reading the interview with Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Tucker in the pilot issue of Newham Voices.

Tucker says he wants to “get our story over to everyone in the community” but he paints such an imaginative picture of the realities of policing that it is difficult to know where exactly to begin unpicking it, so lets start with the Black Lives Matter protests.

Far from “challenging the police’s thinking”, the oppressive response of the Metropolitan Police to the demonstrations in London has been entirely predictable.

The Newham-based Network for Police Monitoring, spent the summer gathering testimony from people who took part in the protests. What we heard was evidence of the excessive use of force, the targeting of Black protesters, the kettling of people for hours on end and a failure to protect their right to assemble from violence from far right counter-demonstrators.

Recruitment “a red herring

One demand the Black Lives Matter movement has never made is for more black officers, something Tucker is nevertheless keen to promote as a solution to frustration and anger against the police. However, this has been around as a way of solving institutionalised racism in the Met even before the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into racist policing over two decades ago and has always been a red herring.

In a recent article for the Guardian in mid October, the former superintendent Leroy Logan admitted how little has changed in London in the 30 years he was in the force. Logan wrote something similar five years ago too and yet still clings to the same fanciful idea that more black people choosing police work as a career will fix the problem.

The obvious question for both Logan and Tucker is – if it could fix anything, then why hasn’t it? Perhaps because it has the ‘copaganda’ benefit of pushing meaningful change to some distant point in the future. In practice, anyone joining the Met still has to knuckle down and accept the entrenched, macho and often toxic culture of the organisation they are now members of, if they want to survive.

If, however, like many of Leroy Logan’s fellow Black Police Association members, they raise concerns about racism within the force, there is ample evidence that this can damage promotion prospects or lead to unexpected disciplinary charges. Every workforce survey shows more than twice as many Black or minority officers in England and Wales face dismissal for misconduct than their White counterparts.

Rather than Black and minority recruitment, what Black Lives Matter protesters are instead demanding is radical change, including alternatives to more officers – but like every senior representative of the Met, all Tucker can offer is more of the same and nowhere is that more true than in the use of police stop and search powers.

“We have to explain it better”, says Tucker, but how does he explain that for the period from April to September 2020, Newham had the highest number of stops and searches searches in London: a total of 10,440? Only around 9% led to arrests and 80% led to no further action. By far the largest proportion of these – over two thirds – were searches for drugs over this six month period.

This incudes the period of the first coronavirus lockdown. Throughout April and well into May, when I was out cycling every evening after work, delivering books for Newham Bookshop, the streets were very quiet. Schools were closed and those able to work from home were venturing out mainly for shopping or our state-sanctioned hour of exercise a day. Somehow, however, this also coincided with significantly greater use of stop and search powers in April and a peak in May in Newham than there were at the same point in 2019.

Anecdotally, I heard time and again from parents whose children were talking about a huge increase in often arbitrary searches, almost always justified on a dubious suspicion of drug possession. Often, young people were immediately handcuffed before they were searched.

So who was getting stopped? Overwhelmingly young men, aged between 15 and 24, with the disproportionality figures in Newham speaking for themselves: in April there were 10.8 searches for drugs per 100,000 of the population who are Black men, compared to 6.1 for White men and 4.4 for Asian men. In May, this leapt to 16.6 for Black men compared to 9.1 for White men and 8.2 for Asian men. Right up to September, young Black men were proportionately more likely to find themselves targeted in particular for drugs-related searches.

Tucker says he wants an end to the ‘us and them’ mentality and the combative public narrative over policing, but in reality, it’s the policing itself that is combative, not the criticisms.

It’s at a time like this that I really wish the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), which spent 35 years documenting and resisting racist and oppressive police, but that was forced to close because of a lack of funds and exhausted campaigners back in 2015, was still with us. I was involved in NMP for 25 years and the work it undertook is now needed more than ever.

I would applaud, if it should ever happened, the emergence of new generation of young local campaigners getting organised to challenge racial profiling on the streets and the stereotypical copaganda that “chaotic family circumstances” inevitably explains why Newham’s Black communities are criminalised as either gang members or drug dealers.

The Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) is currently working on a guide for community groups on “How To Set Up A Police Monitoring Group”

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