January 2012

Knowing the other

On 16 January 2012 the Guardian revealed that the new commissioner of the metropolitan police Bernard Hogan-Howe intends to make officers of operation trident the 'spearhead' of a new police campaign against street gangs. The newspaper reported, moreover, that Hogan-Howe 'has solid political backing' for his envisaged war on gangs, because it is entirely in line with the 'security fight-back' David Cameron has called for in his speech on the riots on 15 August 2011. Apart from the fact that precisely those officers will take the lead in the envisaged 'war on gangs', who ran the operation that led to the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last August, which triggered the riots in the first place, this strategy amounts – at least to my mind – to fighting fire with oil. For the 'war on gangs' will for sure implicate an increase in those 'stop-and-search' operations among marginalised youths, which convinced the latter that last August was the right time to 'violate [the police] just like they violate us'.