Police Lure Fails

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The police are very upset that their £25,000 publicity campaign, launched last October, to recruit more black people into the force has been a one hundred per cent failure - it has not attracted a single applicant!

There are only 39 West Indians in the Metropolitan Police in London out of a total force of 21,000.

Worse, for the police, according to Scotland Yard's "Community Relations" branch there is: "a growing tendency for young West Indians in London to combine against police officers when they are arresting a black person"

Black youth in London's ghetto areas like Brixton are under absolutely no illusions about the role of the police. Blacks have never experienced anything but outright hostility and a high level of harassment from 'the Pigs'.

The police in large American cities like Chicago long ago abandoned 'police methods' in favour of "military methods' against black people in the ghettos.

The basic assumption of 'police' work is that all citizens are law abiding unless proved otherwise, and are even potential assistants to the police in their task of "law enforcement'.

• A military occupation force makes the opposite assumption - all citizens are potential enemies. Therefore the military tactic is not just to track down individual offenders but to subdue the population at large through a generalised 'show of force' •Such a strategy involves plenty of random raids, searches, and arrests to produce a general fear of the authorities on the part of everyone.

Arrests are made often not so much to catch law-breakers as to serve a warning to the rest of the population - therefore it is not so important whether or not the individual arrested actually committed an offence or not!

This strategy is used . of course by the police and military in Northern Ireland. It is known in the trade by American police as "intensive patrolling". course completely frustrates all the publicity eriorts of the 'nice policemen' of the Community Relations Branch to persuade blacks that joining the police force is very like becoming a social worker.

No conscious black worker will join an organisation whose job he well knows is to terrorise the black community.

It would be a mistake to see tactics like dozens of police with vicious dogs bursting into black homes "in search of drugs" or the mass police beatings of black youth as in the recent Carib Club incident in West London, just as a product of racial prejudice on the part. of police officers, though prejudice is undoubtedly widespread.

The police are, and were con-