While the Black Lives Matter movement pushed this topic towards the forefront of public debate in Wales during 2020, the issue of race and the justice system has been a topic of great controversy and soul searching for as long as I can remember.
While a lot of the focus here tends to be on the United States – which has a long and bloody history of police brutality and racism going hand in hand with each other – it’s worth considering what’s happening here in more detail.
For several decades, the criminal justice system in England and Wales has been accused of institutional (aka. systemic) racism.
Overt racism – verbal abuse, derogatory racial terms, physical assaults, negative stereotyping – is more obvious and less sophisticated. It can be called out.
Institutional racism is more covert and perhaps more supressive (from the point of view of those who believe they’re being supressed) because entire social systems, conventions and laws are seen as being designed to disadvantage people of colour in a way that makes it difficult to argue against.
For example, the use of stop-and-search (aka. “sus”) powers by the police can be legitimately argued to be a means to prevent gang or knife crime, but may disproportionately be applied to young black men. During the peak of The War on Terror, you could probably make the same argument about young Asian men and anti-terror laws. There comes a point where it crosses the line from crime prevention to racial profiling (perhaps even harassment) but that line is blurred.
One incident which started to shift attitudes towards institutional racism in the justice system was the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Subsequent inquiries concluded that the Metropolitan Police failed to recognise the racist motivations behind the murder. The inquiries also revealed a culture of stereotyping and unconscious bias amongst police officers which may have impeded the investigation6.
The very clear racist beliefs of the accused (stuff I can’t repeat here for reasons of taste) and their known history of violence seemingly played no part in the evidence-gathering7. The murderers weren’t convicted until 2012.
So the overt racism by the murderers went hand-in-hand with the institutional racism of the justice system. You would assume they were miles apart, yet they were both equally bad. The result was a family having to wait nearly twenty years for their son’s murderers to be brought to justice because their son was black.
While it was a turning point of sorts, it wasn’t enough. During the 2010s, several high-profile killings of people of colour in the United States by the police and armed civilians resulted in the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, the movement went global following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In the United States, the Black Lives Matter movement does at least have a goal focused on policing reform – though they seemingly can’t agree on a single way forward. Proposals range from outright abolition of policing, through to budget cuts (to reverse the militarisation of American policing) or redirecting investment in social and community services.
Elsewhere, including Wales, while disproportionate police violence against people of colour does still happen, Black Lives Matter has become a catch-all anti-racism message – the most visible outlet being athletes “taking the knee”. It’s also prompted a long-overdue review of the UK’s (and Wales’) colonial history and public commemorations to those who benefited from colonialism and slavery.
6. Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, (February 1999). Chapter Six, Racism, p41-57.
7. Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, (February 1999). Chapter Seven, The Five Accused, p60-63.
