Over-policing and vulnerability in minority communities

I will talk about ideas of racial hierarchy, and how hierarchy as a structure influences the institutions involved with policing in the UK today. I wish to make comparisons between how different minority communities are overpoliced based on certain parts of their identity and where different parts of their identity would fall on the hierarchy.

I will do this by establishing what the racial hierarchy is within the UK. I will link this with the idea of white supremacy to build an appropriate picture about who is deemed the 'norm' under Britishness based on race, religion, nationality, and culture. Within this I will be able to talk about how different groups - based on different parts of their identity - are able to 'assimilate' and therefore have different tools of policing used against them. By understanding the racial hierarchy, I will be able to understand how this impacts vulnerability within these communities. By establishing what the hierarchy is, we can visualise how the perception of someone's identities can impact them, and the likelihood of those communities wanting to access services based on historical policing of those communities, and their ability to 'assimilate' within the identity of 'Britishness'.

An important policy that highlights this hierarchy in policing is the PREVENT part of the government's strategy on counterterrorism - CONTEST. The Prevent workstream is relevant given that its framework placed responsibility for tackling extremism to all public sector workers, rather than just the police. This has led to over-policing of Muslim communities, with the Muslim Council of Britain releasing a report on the impact of Prevent. Within this project, I will draw comparisons between how Prevent is used disproportionately towards Muslims, and how it is ineffectively used against any forms of extremism. I will look at how this impacts the vulnerability of Muslim communities, and how this relates to the perception of Muslims within Britain and how their positionality within the hierarchy impacts their identity.

One of the more challenging aspects of my proposal will be collating data from a whole range of communities to accurately represent my basis of a racial hierarchy. This would therefore involve ensuring that within each community I spoke to a few people to accurately represent their positionality, but also to authentically represent their identity. It may also be an opportunity to talk about other aspects of a person's identity and how this intersectionality relates to a person's racial identity - with a focus on how this impacts their likelihood to be overpoliced. An example of this would be talking about how gender impacts a person's racial identity and makes them more vulnerable to more aggressive forms of force. However, this might make the project too wide as a concept and take away from the overall goal of illustrating the hierarchy.

There will also be a challenge in ensuring I speak with, and collect data from, the right number of communities to give an accurate representation of our society's demographics and ensure the hierarchy I intend to illustrate will be accurate. This can be challenging in deciding how specific communities will be when defining them under the hierarchy, and while I intend to be specific, this may take time away from the further comparison part of the project. An example of this would be using the term Black to describe cultural homogeneity of communities that identify as Afro-Caribbean, African, etc, rather than defining them through ethnicity and expanding on differences. Additionally, in terms of presenting a hierarchy that also includes, nationality, culture, and religion, there will be challenges in terms of presenting the intersectionality of these four characteristics and how this may benefit or disadvantage someone consequently.