myAIPMPolice should prioritise negotiation over routine force to win back trust
AIPM Global Professor Mike Hough | The Conversation
As a young researcher in 1979, I was out on patrol with two Strathclyde constables in a rough Glasgow housing estate. We drew up alongside half-a-dozen teenagers, who were sitting chatting on a wall – doing nothing illegal whatsoever. One officer told them, “move along, lads”, and they grudgingly shuffled off. When I asked why he had done this, he said: “It’s just what we do.” What they were actually doing was demonstrating that they controlled the streets.
Fast-forward to 2020. The Black Lives Matter movement in the US and protests on this side of the Atlantic have shown how tensions between the police and parts of the community are unresolved and, in some cases, simmering. Black Lives Matter erupted in the US in response to a tragic and seemingly unending series of police killings of black suspects. How American police continue to commit such outrages is a question that remains unanswered.
But this problem is not uniquely American. In the UK, ethnic minority groups are over-represented in deaths in police custody and black suspects are heavily over-represented in stop-and-searches. There were four stop-and-searches for every 1,000 white people last year, compared with 38 for every 1,000 black people.
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Police should prioritise negotiation over routine force to win back trust, Mike Hough, The Conversation, 2020