Fight drift towards police state

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been spitting out a particularly vile concoction of racism, dogma and repression recently.

Manchester Chief Constable James : Anderton has called for the abolition of police committees, the only official forum for local accountability of the police.

The Police Federation has placed half-page advertisements in the national press calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty (for citizens murdering police or prison officers, not for the police or prison officers murdering citizens!).

Illusory

The Met has released figures supposed to demonstrate an association between being black and being a mugger. They forgot to point out that it is titty times more likely for Asians to be attacked by a white man than vice versa, and thirty times more likely for West Indians; or that the crimes of street violence for which they gave figures are only 3% of all serious crimes; or that these igures are based on notoriously unreliable evidence.

Home Secretary William Whitelaw is under siege and is murmuring about legislation to increase police powers.

A renewed offensive against crime? But despite (or perhaps because of) tougher policing, the crime rates are going up.

Unreliable

• Police detection of criminals requires public support, and there is a large section of the 'public' from which the police are deliberately alienating themselves. Capital punishment has no impact on murder rates, except perhaps to provide an example of legalised murder.

In fact law and order is the illusory cloth with which attacks against the working class are disguised.

Anderton accuses police committees of being agencies of 'subversion' and 'demoralisation' , of harbouring an 'enemy within' and of designs to subject the police to the poiltical control of a 'one-party staté' Half the cost of policing is raised out of local rates. In return for this taxation, there is precious little representation.

The police committees are two-thirds elected repthird unelected magistrates. Their powers are very limited.

They are not permitted even to advise on operational decisions' ', and it is the Chief Constable who decides what is 'operational'. Anderton decided last summer that the decision to use gas canisters was operational.

Police committees can ask Chief Constables to make a report. But the Chief Constable can refuse.

When Manchester police committee asked Anderton to explain his 'over-reaction' in using hundreds of police in a military-style operation to break. the Laurence Scott picket line, Anderton refused, saying that he did it 'in the light of his experience' and that he 'had not come here to apologise.' Ask The committees can only ask the Home Secretary to call for the resignation of the Chief Constable.

They do not use even this limited power. The Labour leader of the Manchester police committet . did not Peter Kelly, said that he believe in sacking people for making stupid stateWhy, then, does Ander.ton want to abolish police committees?

Even if they cannot do much, they can still scrutinise and provide an official focus for public dissent.

They do not often do so. But when they do - as in Manchester and Liverpool, and surely in London if we had one - the cops cannot tolerate the challenge to their right to define and defend public order as they see fit.

If the police define the Laurence Scott pickets, for example, as disorderly and needing to be dealt with by force, then they do not want an official committee questioning their definition.

Anderton's attack does not come out of the blue. The rights of local authorities have been eroded ever since the 1964 Police Act replaced the old watch committees with the much weaker police committees. Equally significant has been the tremendous growth in the power of the police especially its largely unnoticed centralisation into fewer but larger police areas).

The beneficiaries of this process have been the Chief Constable - who emerged at the end of the 1970s as new local potentates - and the Home Office.

It is the clear duty of sucialists to protect existing scraps of democracy, alongside democrats, reformists, civil libertarians and even Callaghan when he comes to the defence of police committees. But it is also our task to expose their meagre limits and to fight for far more radical forms of popular accountability over the police: to move, in brief, from the defensive to the offensive.

The police are always the instrument of the ruling class. But the nature of this instrument is changing:

There is no inevitability in the drift toward a police state. It can only be realised through the defeat of the workers. We cannot allow this to happen.

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Socialist Organiser no. 78 March 25 1982 Page 10