Racial warfare and the biopolitics of policing

ABSTRACT In the years since the landmark Macpherson Report (1999) recognised London’s Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’, senior police officers and politicians in Britain have regularly reduced racism in policing to a problem of the past. This article examines police as a state institution where the politics of racism not only persist but do so coterminous with those of war. In doing so, I argue that policing is a biopolitical institution, that deploys racism as a formal strategy of war in vigorous defence of Euro-modernity. I show how the legacy of the Macpherson Report speaks to post-racial logic, which interacts with liberal myths about policing as non-martial to obscure the police’s racialised and militarised makeup. Challenging this hegemonic framing, I analyse how anti-black and anti-Muslim racisms share common ground, by producing racially coded populations as enemies of revered Euro-modern hallmarks like law and order and national security. I contend that this deeply embedded othering of race as anti-modern rationalises the police’s martial credentials, thus making militarised policing a racialised endeavour. As such, I illustrate how police regulates race through biopolitical strategies of securitisation, pre-emption and disposability, to reveal racial police warfare as foundational to everyday socio-political life in Britain.