The Ecology of Transformation

In August 2013, the construction site of a police firearms training centre at Black Rock Quarry in Portishead was set ablaze. The £16 million addition to Britain’s police industrial complex was to include firing ranges, interactive target systems, fake houses (presumably to ‘practice’ raids) and an abseil training area, and would have been used by Avon and Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire police forces. The arson attack was claimed by an organization called the Informal Anarchist Federation (IAF), whose provocative communique insisted: ‘It put smiles on our faces to realise how easy it was to enter their gun club and leave a fuck you signature right in the belly of the beast.’ The fire burnt for 13 days, and required a special pump from Wales to deliver extra water to quell the flames. While there can be no doubt that the police ploughed tremendous resources into the investigation, no one was ever charged or convicted over the attack. Despite serving a tremendous economic blow to the policing regime and its rapid militarization, the impact on the political culture was extremely muted. It sparked little public conversation about the role and nature of policing, garnered minimal press attention, and even among activists deeply embedded in movements against the carceral state, it is rarely discussed. Though what was left after the fire had to be demolished, funded by the public purse as benefits were cut and women’s centres shuttered, the training centre—firing ranges and abseil ropes galore—was built and opened just two years later. The memory of this event seemed to burn out as soon as the flames were quelled. Over the last ten years, I have thought often about this event and its strange disappearance from popular or activist consciousness. Reading Abolition. Feminism. Now. I found a new language through which to make sense of that which appears to be lost or forgotten. This new collaborative effort by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners and Beth Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now., Penguin, 2021, 272 pp., £10.99 paperback ISBN: 9780241543740