When Britain’s police state is in your face

The police are no longer in the public eye. 

They are in the private sphere, but in a different way.

They no longer see the public as an enemy but an ally, an ally who will do what is in the best interest of the state. 

Today, the police are more powerful than ever before in the UK.

They are the military of the UK state.

They operate in a manner that has been pioneered by the US military and has become the norm in Europe. 

The public has become less safe, but the police have become more powerful, and the police now wield an array of repressive powers that threaten the lives of everyone who is not a member of the police. 

But the public are not the only ones being threatened by police power. 

In the past few years, Britain has experienced an unprecedented surge in police killings.

In March of last year, the Metropolitan Police recorded the highest number of deaths in its history. 

More than a thousand officers were shot in 2015 alone. 

Since then, the number of police officers killed by firearms has more than doubled, to 637. 

And in January, it was announced that the Metropolitan police will now be called the British Police. 

This is the result of a concerted campaign by the UK’s police forces to take over the public sphere, with police officers now acting as private security guards for the state, a process that has seen the privatisation of policing, the creation of new private companies to manage policing operations and the consolidation of police powers. 

According to the Guardian, this is not the first time that the British police have taken over the private sector, nor is it the first to do so. 

As a result of the Thatcherite privatisation policies of the 1980s, the private police industry has been one of the key engines of the rise of the private security industry. 

At the height of the cold war, police forces across Britain were run by the National Security Agency, with the British Security Industry Board (BSIB) acting as a front for the private intelligence firm Stratfor. 

It was the Stratfor that, along with its British counterpart, MI6, developed the so-called ‘Cold War Strategy’. 

Stratfor, as well as the CIA, provided British police with information on the political and social unrest of the 1960s, as the Black Panthers swept through the UK and the Vietnam War broke out. 

Statfor also provided police with intelligence on dissidents and anti-war activists, and was credited with helping to bring down the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa in the 1960, a crucial moment in the global struggle for liberation. 

Now, however, Stratfor has been sold to the British government by a consortium of private corporations and has been renamed the National Cyber Security Centre. 

British police officers are now contracted by private security firms to monitor the internet and monitor the movements of people on the streets. 

Police are trained to recognise signs of radicalisation and to act on them in real time. 

A new wave of austerity measures has resulted in police officers being given extra pay for the number and type of CCTV cameras they install, as part of a strategy to keep the public safe. 

However, in the process, these police officers have become increasingly reliant on private security companies for protection and protection is not only an issue for police, but for private security. 

There are also concerns that private security contractors have been using police forces as “human shields” to spy on activists, journalists and political opponents. 

What is needed is a public discussion about the role that the police and private security play in the state’s policing apparatus, and what role private security should play in policing. 

If the public wants to know the truth about the state of policing in Britain, they should not only demand the release of the bodies of police killed by police, they also have to demand the end of the privatised police service and the reinstatement of the National Police Commission. 

We must resist the new wave and push for an independent, democratic and accountable police service, one that works for the public rather than the private. 

[The author is a writer based in the United States and can be reached at @jimmyhobsonuk.] 

[1] The British government has already announced plans to privatise the Metropolitan Constabulary and the Met’s preferred private sector partner will be the private company NTS in a bid to increase its profits by £4 billion. 

 The Ministry of Defence is also planning to privatize the National Fire Service. 

‘The private sector has become a critical engine of the policing state’  J. M. Robinson, A History of British Police, Penguin Books, 2014, p. 571.