The last thing we need is more police

I was listening to a podcast last week called Commons People, which is a UK politics and current affairs podcast. On last week’s episode, they had a number of guests on to speak about the issue of Sarah Everard’s murder and what could be done to prevent this happening to women in the future. Violence against women (and not just women who look like Sarah Everard, it is important to add), as the events of the last few weeks and most of modern history up to now have shown, is an issue that we urgently need to combat. What one of the politicians who appeared on the podcast suggested was needed, however, struck me as out of touch with the mood of the current moment, and frankly a bit tone deaf. She repeatedly emphasised that, to ensure the safety of women, the nation needs more police on the streets.

I am by no means an expert on these issues, but I am a woman who has been and felt threatened by misogynistic violence; it is something that all women are taught implicitly as they grow up – this constant threat is something we learn to live with. And, in my opinion, simply having more police on the streets will neither make me feel safer nor eliminate male violence towards women.

This is not the time to be presenting the police as a solution. From the high-profile acknowledgement of police prejudice and brutality towards Black people, to the violence instigated by police at Black Lives Matter protests, to the new policing bill currently moving its way through government (which will grant police more power against peaceful protestors and veers dangerously towards totalitarian control), to the murder of a young woman by a police officer, recent events have shown that the police are not some elevated class of person as we have always been led to believe. This was the year that we became disillusioned by the police's ability to 'protect and serve'. We learned what we had always known deep down: that the police are real people with the same internalised racism and misogyny as the rest of society. Not only this, but they are real people who have been handed a power complex which places them, in their eyes, above reproach.

I’m not saying that we should immediately banish all police, or that every police officer is inherently a bad person, but we need to move away from our reliance on them to resolve problems that go much deeper, and are much more complex, than our ideas of ‘law and order’. Putting more police on the streets in the hope of solving male violence is like repeatedly placing empty buckets under an overflowing bath instead of turning the tap off. It isn’t a solution, nor should it be seen as one.

We need to go to the root cause of systemic violence. We need to overhaul sex education and PSHE in schools, to equip children with the tools they need to move through the world without hurting others, to teach them about consent and respect. We need to acknowledge and deconstruct the cultures of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that permeate our workplaces and our communities. We need to invest in community groups and projects to help young people find a sense of purpose and allow them to be creative and express themselves, no matter their background. We need to invest in affordable mental health services which don’t have months-long waiting lists. We need to believe assault survivors and actually convict rapists, then we need to provide survivors with the resources they need to go on with their lives. We need to provide people who have been incarcerated with the resources and services they need to become a functioning member of society again, to provide them with hope, not further marginalisation, to ensure that they don’t reoffend.

I could go on, but my point is that offering the police as a solution to society’s problems is, in my opinion, like putting a plaster over a cut but not doing anything to remove the sharp surface that caused it. We need to invest in services and resources for real people and real communities, not already-powerful institutions which more often than not create further conflict and violence.