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From coronavirus to policing, we can tackle racism by going local

To win public trust and effectively solve problems, institutions should be close to the communities they serve

Donna Hall,Simon Kaye
Friday 19 June 2020 16:28 BST
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Black Lives Matter billboard unveiled in London

There are two terrible crises playing out right now. One is a global pandemic: a new, deadly virus that puts our most vulnerable people in danger. The other is the spectre of institutional racism, which also, as we have been tragically reminded by recent events, can have lethal consequences. What these crises have in common is how they reveal the limitations and untrustworthiness of systems that concentrate power rather than distributing it.

To win public trust and effectively solve problems, institutions should be close to the communities they serve. This is as true for tackling a health crisis as it is for ensuring an accountable police force. From mobilising volunteers to orchestrating the test-and-trace system, the UK’s top-down, centre-knows-best approach has been the razor wire running through every aspect of its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We mustn’t let this centralist bias further worsen the relationship between public and police, as has already happened in the US.

The UK’s struggle with the Covid-19 pandemic has been a showcase of the risks of over-centralisation. Any chance of moving quickly to set up a track-and-trace system was made impossible by the centre’s unwillingness to involve local hospitals and private partners in the effort. The centralised approach to mobilising and coordinating the thousands of citizen volunteers in the UK via the “GoodSAM” app has failed to capitalise on this critical resource, while local communities themselves have been busily and spontaneously solving their own problems with voluntary mutual aid groups. And – with case rates varying enormously from region to region – the centre seems to be intent on placing responsibility for local lockdowns in the hands of councils without any commensurate increase in powers and resources.

At first glance, the tragic scenes of police brutality playing out in the US, with footage of violent confrontations between public and law enforcement, seem like a separate issue. But the deterioration of trust in policing has a relationship with these same centralist tendencies. Just as the centre in the UK has struggled to relinquish control to fight the pandemic, the concerted effort in the US to consolidate local police departments into larger and more distant organisations in the name of efficiency has had a negative impact on the relationship between those departments and the communities they must police. This is why the core demand in the current wave of protests is to radically alter the policing system – and there are some signs that the calls for a more community-centric approach may finally be getting results in Minnesota.

Importantly, it is ethnic minority communities that are hardest hit by bad, one-size-fits-all decisions in both pandemic response and policing reform. We now know that BAME communities are more at risk from Covid-19 than others, just as we know that by many measures these communities experience the worse outcomes and have lower trust in law enforcement. It is telling that, even in the UK, BAME people are 10 per cent less likely than others to trust the police.

There are no easy solutions to these deep institutional problems. Apart from, perhaps, sweeping and fundamental reform of the way our institutions think and work. This is where some have begun to find inspiration and tentative hope in the work of Elinor Ostrom, a political economist who became the first female winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009.

As early as the 1970s, Ostrom argued against the “efficiencies” of consolidating the police into larger forces. Her research showed how this led to a deterioration in the relationship between the police and the public. In a neighbourhood-based model, cops work in the areas where they live – so of course they are more likely to understand them better and react in more informal and nuanced ways. Instead of dragging a young person off to jail, they might decide to drag them home to their parents. These sorts of judgement calls and informal relationships mean that localised police demonstrably enjoy a higher level of support from the populations that they serve. By contrast, a remote and centralised force has been a contributing factor to the crisis playing out in the US today.

Since trust in policing among minorities is also at risk in the UK, Ostrom would surely recommend that here, too, the regular calls to consolidate UK forces should be resisted. Instead, we should look for opportunities to make policing more granular, local, and accountable – building up community policing that is more representative of, and responsive to, the specific conditions in each place.

Ostrom can also teach us something about the handling of the pandemic crisis. Greater resilience, more agile responses, and more tailored measures would all have been beneficial for the struggle against this virus. Instead of consolidating responsibility and power and trying to manage every aspect of the response, the UK should have immediately looked for ways to take advantage of the distributed, context-specific expertise that exists throughout the country – in the form of local councils, emergency services, GP surgeries and community groups. A more regionally specific approach to lockdowns could have helped to harness the amazing growth of community volunteerism and mutual aid in our communities. Moreover, it would have allowed communities – notably BAME communities – to have a greater chance of shaping services including to their own needs, wants and strengths.

To improve the relationship between public and police, we must embed resilience and mobilised communities at the heart of the coming recovery. If we want to create a future that’s genuinely inclusive, it is time to learn Ostrom’s most fundamental lesson: bigger isn’t always better – in fact it’s usually worse.

Donna Hall OBE is chair and Simon Kaye is senior policy researcher at the New Local Government Network

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