3 - From Overseer to Officer: A Brief History of British Policing through Afro-Diasporic Music Culture

Summary

Introduction

In the aftermath of the 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests, renewed calls to decolonize university curricula and abolish the police became hot topics within UK academia. This is certainly not the first time that such debates have captured the criminological imagination. The sheer energy of such mass mobilizations, however, compels criminologists to think decolonization and police abolition anew; as inextricably intertwined demands that ought to be brought together. Alas, discussing decolonization and police abolition in the same breath reveals a dearth of criminological literature on the links between colonialism and policing and a profound lack of non-Eurocentric approaches to knowledge production. In an attempt to address such a lacuna in the ‘white’ mainstream criminological canon, this chapter narrates a brief history of British policing by excavating its colonial roots and unearthing Black or Afro-diasporic musicS as an undermined resource for decolonial scholarship. Drawing on the policing of UK drill music as a contemporary example that illustrates historical continuities in how ‘race’ is policed through the policing of Black music(s), British policing will be reintroduced as colonially configured and therefore racist by design – if not by default (Owusu-Bempah, 2017; Elliot-Cooper, 2021; Chowdhury in Duff, 2021: 85– 94; Fatsis, 2021a, 2021b; Fatsis and Lamb, 2021). Black music, therefore, features here as an instrument of scholarship with which to trace the origins of British policing in the colonial militias that patrolled, captured and controlled the enslaved through suppressing their cultural expression (Fatsis, 2021b: 35– 37). Documenting or ‘phonograph[ing]’ (Moten, 2003: 68) the history of policing Black forms of creative expression, however, doesn't just help us place British policing in its proper historical – that is to say, imperial-colonial context (Brogden, 1987; Emsley, 2014; Elliott-Cooper, 2021; esp 23– 30; Chowdhury in Duff, 2021; Fatsis and Lamb, 2021: 23– 8). It also enables us to embrace Black music as a decolonial ‘Black method’ (McKittrick, 2021: 5, 9, 41), which disrupts and subverts modes of knowledge production that reproduce (neo)colonial(ist) ways of seeing, thinking about, acting towards and being in the world.