The Voice spoke with Dr Adam Elliot-Cooper, who is also part of Black Lives Matter UK about why he thinks popular police reform ideas are not what our community needs, and why he passionately believes in defunding the police.

Do we need more black police?

Some reformers think hiring police officers from diverse backgrounds will solve the regular problems that black communities in Britain have with the police force.

London mayor Sadiq Khan announced last year that 40% of all new recruits to the Met should be from ethnic minority backgrounds.

This would help bring police representation in line with London’s population, where 40% of people come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

However, Adam mentions that the New York and Los Angeles police departments have high numbers of black police officers across the ranks. Black people make up 21.7% of the New York City population, and police representation is not far behind at 15% according to The City, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, digital news platform.

The Los Angeles Police Department is 9% black and according to 2019 U.S. Census data, LA’s population is around 8.9% black.  

Despite this, they still have problems which he described as “far worse” in relation to race and racial violence. For example in September 2020, two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shot and killed cyclist Dijon Kizzee after they attempted to stop him for allegedly violating vehicle codes. 

“If we look at policing in South Africa where most police officers are African or black, or if we look at the End Sars movements in Nigeria, we can see that having a police force that looks like the people that they’re policing certainly isn’t a silver bullet and it may in fact create an illusion of progress,” he explains.

“What we instead need to do, is think about way that we as a society, can rely less on the police as an institution.”

A public health policing approach

When knife crime was always in the headlines, we saw a strong emphasis on the need for a “public health approach.”

This would mean that police would focus on preventing crime. To do this, they would work with local authorities and health and social care professionals to identify vulnerable individuals and provide them with support.

For people like Adam, this kind of approach still gives the police too much power.

The worry is that services that are not supposed to punish people, like mental health, youth and housing will be controlled by police authorities instead.

“I think, in a country like England, that’s really problematic,” he explained.

Adam favours an approach that puts power in the hands of community groups that are working to tackle the causes of crime, and address inequalities.

He points out that a lot of these organisations do not have enough funding.

Defunding the police

Defund the police has become a popular slogan that has been in and out of news headlines and online debates since the protests that took place after George Floyd was murdered by US police last year. But what does it actually mean? 

Adam told The Voice: “It’s the societies, which have fewer inequalities, which are the safest.”

As he explains it, defunding the police is not really about policing at all. It’s about spending the money for policing on better social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources.

Activists point out that a lot of crime happens because people’s basic needs like these are not met.

Adam says that criminals are not “morally degenerate human beings.” More often than not, they are people who are trying to live in difficult circumstances.

According to the Institute of Psychiatry, psychosis, personality disorder, anxiety/depressive disorders and drug and alcohol dependence are overrepresented in UK prison populations.

Those in prison are also more likely to have grown up in care and more likely to be unemployed according to the same report.

If we defund the police, then what?

“A lot of us are already doing defunding the police work already. We just don’t really know it,” says Adam.

“Those who work in anything that supports society such as youth services, creating a good education system, great mental health services, those providing secure employment, they’re eroding our reliance on institutions of violence.”

Defunding the police means funding community organisations and projects that identify and address the factors that cause people to come into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place. 

“A vision of a world in which police and prisons can be abolished is such a powerful revolutionary vision, it’s sparked by those instances of police brutality and racism, but its solution incorporates a re-imagining of every aspect of the social world.”

Join us tomorrow (February 23) on Facebook Live, where The Voice is hosting a discussion on policing and the black community.