‘Dutty Babylon’: policing Black communities and the politics of resistance

Abstract

The tensions that currently exist between the police and black communities are not recent phenomena. Since the 1950s, successive generations of black people in Britain have felt under protected as victims and over policed as suspects. Although it can be argued that the apparent over policing of black communities can be justified as a response to the disproportionate involvement of black males in particular forms of criminality, what cannot be ignored is that racism, whether institutional or that of individual officers, has played a central role in shaping the relationship that black people have with the police.