This conversation with Adam Elliott-Cooper revolves around his work documenting the colonial genealogy of British policing (in Ireland, Trinidad, Malaya, and Kenya in particular) and the construction of the figure (collective or individual) of the suspect as a legitimization of this policing. We also talk about Black resistance to it, the crucial role of women activists, the paradigm embodied by the 2011 police murder of Mark Duggan and the massive revolts that followed, as well as the possibilities of solidarity.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: In your book Black Resistance to British Policing (2021), you establish a remarkable colonial genealogy between British policing in Trinidad, Ireland, Malaya, Kenya, and in Britain itself against colonial/post colonial migrants and their descendants. I am very attached to this methodology to understand this concept of the colonial continuum; could you please unpack this genealogy for us?
ADAM ELLIOTT-COOPER: The reason I think it’s important to consider colonial policing for Britain is because if we want to look at the history of British policing, one of the most important things to consider is that most of the history of British policing has not taken place on the British mainland, it’s taken place in across its colonies, on the African continent, across parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, Australia, Ireland, parts of the so called Middle East and, and the Caribbean… And by doing this, I think it can help us to better understand not only some of the forms of colonial practices, policies, and techniques that are deployed, which eventually come to be used on the British mainland.
For this, I also examine how discursively, the kinds of ideas, rationales, justifications, and forms of propaganda that are deployed are informed by colonial routes.
So let’s take the first one, the techniques. If we think about the decolonizing contexts in which these new policing tactics and policies are being deployed, it’s usually through the so-called states of emergency. For instance, the first chapter of the book looks at Trinidad during the workers movements of the 1930s, which were also anti-colonial struggles. Later, I examine the policing of armed uprisings in places like Malaya, Kenya and Ireland. In the context of Kenya, we have an armed uprising against an apartheid regime, in the context of Malaya, we have more of a guerrilla insurgency in the context of a rainforest environment and Ireland involves urban warfare. But in all of these contexts, we have a number of common policing tactics being deployed. The first is the identification of a suspect community. In Trinidad, it is the trade unions and trade unionists. In the context of Kenya, it is the Kikuyu ethnic group. In the context of Malaya, it is the people of Chinese Malay heritage, and of course, in the context of Ireland, it is the Catholic, Irish people. Once this suspect community is identified, the next policy that is deployed is a form of collective criminalisation. These generally include surveillance and monitoring techniques, such as checkpoints, searches in more in less invasive conditions, but they can also be forms of collective punishments. That could be mass violence being imposed on strikes in Trinidad or in the context of Malaya, that could be the so-called protection villages in which villages of people were surrounded with barbed wire, watchtowers, controlling everyone who comes in and out. Alternatively, they can be labor camps as there were in Kenya, where large numbers of people were either subject to hangings and other forms of corporal, capital punishment or simply worked to death.
The other thing that’s crucial about this approach of collective punishment is the identification of a specific category of crime, which these suspected communities purportedly engaged in. So in the context of Kenya, it is so-called “terrorism.” So there’s a counter-terror offensive against what they refer to as “terror gangs.” In the context of Malaya, they are “communist terrorists.” So rather than being gangs, and therefore inherently criminal, it is more a political subversion being attributed to the anti-colonial struggle. In the context of Trinidad, they were more likely to be associated with communism, because of the trade union movements, and again in Ireland, they were more likely to be associated with terrorism. So we see these categories of crime being imposed or projected upon this suspect community.
And finally, of course, it’s the importance of race as a rationalization of these processes of criminalization. The idea that there are specific racial traits or predispositions of African people, or of Southeast Asian people, or of the Irish, or of Caribbean people, which makes them predisposed to violence, subversion, or immorality in one way or another.
The last thing I’d like to say about it, which is distinctly British, is the importance or the aim of these counterinsurgency operations to not be ruled by violent force. Once the British are ruling by violence, they consider much of the battle to have already been lost. Britain is very proud of the fact that its police, according to them, police by consent. For the British (and maybe Gramsci can help us with this), governing by consent is a far more powerful way of policing a colonized population than policing by coercion. Sir Robert Thompson, who was a colonial bureaucrat in charge of the counterinsurgency operation in Malaya, made an illuminating observation when he was brought into Vietnam by the Americans as a consultant for their counterinsurgency operations. And he said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that “when a Vietnamese peasant has his cattle killed by the US forces, and he makes an official complaint, and receives compensation for the loss of his property, then I know we will be winning the war.” Consequently, for Thompson, a successful counterinsurgency requires the local population to consider the occupying power to be the legitimate avenues of justice. Not joining the insurgent anti-colonial movement when your livelihood is destroyed by the imperial power, but by in fact, going to the occupying power for justice, is a far greater source of power than sheer violent repression disciplining populations into submission. And so by ruling consent, creating the air of legitimacy, countries like Britain were able to establish for them far more effective colonial regimes for those which could only hold on to colonial power through violent force alone.
LL: In this idea of the colonial continuum, I’m also attached to this idea of colonial administrators and military officers navigating it, and learning from the various geographies where they deploy a counterrevolutionary strategy. This is something you do very well in your book too. In addition to Robert Thompson, who had responsibilities in Malaya, and North Viet Nam, I also learned about Kenneth Newman and Frank Kitson. Personally, I’m also thinking about Charles Tegart who was born in a settler family in Ireland in Derry, and who was later the Chief of the colonial Calcutta police and ended up designing about 70 forts in mandatory Palestine to provide a colonial defense against Palestinian insurgents… But of course, you don’t use these personalities to explain individual trajectories, but rather colonial systems. Could you tell us about that?
AEC: Yes, as you rightly mentioned, we see a lot of colonial careering among people like Frank Kitson, going from certain colonial outposts as a low level officer, learning about the frontline of counterinsurgency and then finally rising to a significant level, claiming to mastermind the death camps of Kenya, in the 1950s and early 1960s. I think there are two things that are really interesting about this around what we might call “the boomerang effect.” The first is that, very often, these kinds of colonial forms of rationale and tactics come back to Britain via, of course, its oldest colony: Ireland. And we see this following a number of urban uprisings in Britain in 1980. In 1980, there are two big urban rebellions in multiethnic working class conurbations in Britain: in Bristol, in the south of England, and in Nottingham, in the East Midlands of England. It’s following these rebellions in 1980 that the British government enlist the consultancy of two British colonial police forces, the Hong Kong British police and the Royal Ulster constabulary of the north of Ireland, and they are invited to help the British police deal with these black populations. So we see the British in quite an illustrative way, frame and consider these black populations to be colonial subjects even if they are indeed British citizens living on the British mainland in 1980.
In 1981, we see a further spread of urban rebellions following a number of different police tactics and operations, including Operation Swamp, which is a massive stop and search operation in places like Brixton, in South London and Toxteth in Liverpool, and in a number of other cities. Following these uprisings, we see a number of tactics taken from Ireland, and used on the British mainland for the first time. This includes the use of forms of poison gas, particularly CS spray and pepper spray being used in Toxteth in Liverpool and Merseyside in Manchester both in the north of England. During these rebellions in 1981, we see another tactic used in order to disperse crowds: armored vehicles are driven at crowds of demonstrators and this ends up killing a young person in Manchester. It’s after these rebellions that we see the British really increase their concerns in an explicit way and that they bring in a new head of the Metropolitan Police: a man, as you mentioned, sir Kenneth Newman, who cuts his teeth in British Mandate Palestine as a lower level colonial police officer, but gained his knighthood and became a sir, being responsible for handing over power from the British army to the royal Ulster Constabulary, the British run police force in the north of Ireland. And he was considered therefore qualified to deal with black communities and the urban rebellions and protests that they had been engaged in in 1981. And it’s in 1985, that we see more rebellions both in Tottenham in North London and in Brixton, in South London. The raid on the home of a mother in South London, in which armed police knock the door down. A woman called Cherry Groce comes down the stairs in her nightclothes, and she’s shot by the police and paralyzed. And a few days later, the police raid the home of a man called Floyd Jarrett, who they have arrested, his mother is at home, and she dies during the raid on her home. Following these brutal attacks against two black mothers, we see this another set of uprisings and as a response we see baton rounds, or rubber bullets being brought to the scene of a protest for the first time on the British mainland.
And we see more and more forms of militarized policing, armored vehicles, as well as armored police officers, riot gears, all of these types of things, which again, had been used in contexts like Hong Kong, and Ireland, but were yet to be used on the British mainland until these black rebellions in the 1980s.
And the final thing, of course, that we see coming round to Britain, which is really important, as well, is, of course, the identification of the suspects, communities, and the attached categories of crime associated with them. So we see the idea of gangs, not terror gangs, necessarily, as they were called, in Kenya, but certainly the language of gangs being used to justify this type of policing, we see the specter of the mugger being borrowed from the streets of New York and Los Angeles being applied to working-class black communities in urban areas in Britain, which enables the police to justify to the public and in many ways rationalize to themselves the requirements for new forms of policing, new forms of tactics, or new to the British mainland anyway, in order to deal with these black populations.
LL: Throughout the book, you examine a certain amount of police murders of black people in Britain. One of them can arguably act as a paradigm, which is the murder of Mark Duggan on August 4, 2011. It led to massive revolts in Tottenham, in other places of London, and in England at large. Can you tell us how it was significant in this history of black resistance to British policing?
AEC: Yes, I would say there were three high profile deaths at the hands of police that year. The first was a reggae artist called Smiley Culture, who died during a raid on his home in February. A few months later, a man called Kingsley Burrell died at the hands of police in Birmingham in the West Midlands. He died of asphyxiation in circumstances not dissimilar to that of George Floyd in 2020. Both of these led to large, black-led protests in London and Birmingham, and a fair degree of media coverage. So there was already a significant amount of mobilization and organizing taking place in response to these deaths. Then in August of 2011, Mark Duggan was traveling in a taxi. The police forced a hard stop on the taxi, forcing it to pull over. Duggan got out of the car and the police shot him dead. Now, rather than the Police telling his family that their loved one had been killed, they instead wrote a police press statement, releasing it to journalists claiming that there was a shootout between them and Mark Duggan. What eventually transpired was that the police officer who had been shot (and who was unharmed) had accidentally been shot by one of his own colleagues. Mark Duggan’s body however, was found with no gun next to him, but by this time, the police’s version had already spread across the media. His family and the community hadn’t been visited by a police officer and they found out by watching on the News that their loved one had been killed. And so they went to the police station and had a protest at the station, which the police ignored. Unsurprisingly, this protest escalated into a series of rebellions which began in Tottenham, then across London, and then across the whole of England for four days in August of that year.
What I’m really interested in is the state’s response to these rebellions: a massive increase in stops, searches, raids on people’s homes, and instances of brutality.
And the justification for this, according to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, was the necessity for what he referred to as an all out war on gangs and gang culture. And this language of gangs, as I mentioned, had been used in the colonies such as the “communist gangs” of Malaya, the “terror gangs” of Kenya. Now we’re seeing this being used in the British context in a far more prolific way, bolstered by its US iterations. Identifying Mark Duggan as a gangster (police and the press referred to him as one of the 48 most dangerous gangsters in Europe) despite the fact that he had no violent criminal record, further justified the violent tactics used to repress the rebellions and the communities that were implicated in them.
Consequently, a number of defense campaigns arose out of this, such as the Tottenham Defence Campaign. They sought to defend these communities from the raids on people’s homes, from the arrests, from the cases of brutality, and other forms of racist state violence. And so I was interested in how, before these rebellions, you had these big marches and big mobilizations, and in the aftermath of these rebellions, you have these community organizing defense campaigns emerging. One of the things I wanted to argue is that we cannot think about these violent uprisings as being distinct and separate from these “peaceful” forms of protest and organizing. Rather, we should understand these resistive tactics against the police as being a continuum, which can go all the way from very low profile, organizing in communities to help people whose homes have been raided or have experienced police brutality, through all of these rebellions that take place, as well as the often large scale, but relatively peaceful protests and mobilizations which are considered to be more organized, and understand that these are all forms of black resistance to British policing. They all play different and important roles in challenging the legitimacy of state violence, and help us to understand the different ways in which people respond to these forms of violence, but also how change can occur as a result of them.
LL: Going further in this question of resistance, one thing that was clearly very important for you to describe in the book is the resistance led by black women. Could you tell us about it, as well as how your own methodology has been influenced by feminist epistemologies and activism. This is particularly important as both in Britain and in France, when a black man is killed by the police, women often lead the way but they’re almost always assigned to an identity of “Mother of…” or “Sister of…” How do we steer away from this?
AEC: Yeah, that’s a really good set of questions. As I’m sure many readers would know, many of the spokespeople or campaigners challenging black deaths at the hands of the police, the people who are grieving, are often mothers, sisters, widows, and other women who are loved ones. And of course there is a tactical approach to this, which is quite clear: black protest is seen as inherently criminal, violent and therefore illegitimate. So playing up to a certain respectability politics, that of a grieving mother or grieving family member, helps to counter that. But one of the things I wanted to do in the book is speak to the women who are involved in these campaigns and ask them about this, and asked them to consider the gendered nature of resistance beyond normative gender roles.
Unsurprisingly, everyone had a different perspective. Some of the women I spoke to talked about how they always understood black motherhood as being a form of collective resistance. It wasn’t simply about defending your own nuclear family structure, but practicing a politics of care, which is radical and collective. Some of them recounted histories of chattel slavery in which enslaved mothers would engage in forms of resistance to be able to maintain relationships with not only their own children, but other children who were enslaved. They talked a lot about how the campaigns they were involved in which were made up of the family and friends of those who have been killed, understood notions of motherhood and sisterhood beyond the nuclear family, and then about caring for all of the people within your community, and particularly those that which that you organize with.
Crucially, for many of the women I spoke to, they identified both as a grieving family member, but also as anti-state and very often anti-imperialist activists. They wanted to challenge the idea that the black family was this chaotic degenerate place where people were not properly cared for, which is, of course, an enduring racial stereotype, which goes back centuries through colonial discourses. But they also wanted to dismantle the existing notions of family as only constituting the nuclear family. They instead think about a broader conception of family that brings in notions of community, draws on collective campaigns, thinks about how this language of sisterhood or motherhood or whatever it might be, beyond those narrow conceptions of the normative family. Of course, the answers are never “perfect,” and often embody these gendered roles of caring, gender roles are fluid and messy.
What is clear from these conversations is that this kind of activism does not simply reproduce heteronormative forms of gendered caring, but instead provides openings for transcending them.
LL: I would like to end on solidarity at various scales, the scale of Britain itself, and the scale of the world that we already mobilized talking about the British colonial empire, and more particularly Trinidad, Ireland, Malaya, Kenya, Hong Kong, Palestine… At a European scale, we can also observe how there may have been more links created between the antiracist movements in Britain and in France in the 1980s than they are today. In your opinion, what lessons can we learn from the history of transnational anti-colonial solidarities for our present?
AEC: Yes, I think you’re completely right in the fact that during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the channels of communication between anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements across borders were far more coherent and well established. We see this in magazines like Race Today or newspapers, like The Black Voice, where they have reports of strikes in the Philippines or Namibia, protests in Rhodesia and Nicaragua, or rebellions among peasants in India written about by contributors from across the world. I wouldn’t say that there are as many direct links today. But I think that’s partly because in the 1960s and 1970s, there was far more coherence in the world of anti-imperialism. You had movements in Southern Africa, for instance, where you had these clearly articulated anti-imperial campaigns that activists could build links of solidarity with. I think the coherence that you had back then isn’t necessarily as widespread today, as it was then, we can think about Palestine and a few other contexts. But certainly, it’s more complex in somewhere like South Africa, for instance, where you have trade unions and a number of social movements, but not the same kind of coherent racial violence and racial capitalism, as perhaps you had during the period of apartheid. So I think it’s far more difficult to build those links of solidarity, but we are seeing it in a number of ways.
We saw it shortly after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, with the ENDSARS movement against the security forces in Nigeria, which brutalize working class people, and you had big mobilizations in Britain, outside the Nigerian embassy and the BBC, led by people of the Nigerian and other parts of the West African diaspora, demanding that these particular parts of the police are dissolved. Crucially, they were also drawing the link between British forms of neocolonial policing, the fact that the British police provide consultancy, training and equipment for police forces in its former colonies across the African continent, in places in the Caribbean, and elsewhere Thinking about those neocolonial connections provides important fuel for movements, illuminating the material basis for maintaining and hopefully developing these potential links of solidarity across different parts of the world.
I think the other place in which we’re seeing potential links, of course of solidarity is all through channels in Europe and thinking about forms of migrant solidarity, and how Fortress Europe, even if Britain ostensibly isn’t part of it, any more than it has its own nationalist fortress, necessitates a transnational solidarity. We have to cross borders if we’re going to engage in no borders work. And we’re continually seeing, of course, a far closer relationship between the border regime and the more formalized police operations that are raiding the businesses where undocumented people are suspected of working, in the homes and places of residences in which they’re suspected of residing.
Thinking about how we can solidify these kinds of forms of resistance transnationally has been fundamental to these movements. And I know there’s a lot of back and forth of black groups that are going into places like Calais, where migrants were attempting to cross the sea border there that are working with French groups as well, working against those borders. And so we’re seeing transnational solidarity across I guess, different black groups in Europe, but inside it, of course, of people arriving in Europe from the Global South, fleeing climate, catastrophe, economic underdevelopment, imperial-fueled violence, and other drivers of movements for these people as well. I think these fights against neocolonial connections through policing, as well as movements against borders are some of the two most coherent ways we’re seeing the possibilities of transnational solidarity in today. ■