TRASHFUTURE - Met Police Given “Two Thumbs Up” by Met Police (feat. Leslie Kern)

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

We sat down with Leslie Kern (@LellyK)--feminist geographer, academic, and author of Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World--to discuss what it means that "a feminist city is a police free city," in the wake of a slew of misogynistic, racist, and otherwise generally brutal actions attributed to London's finest. First, though, we take a look with some satisfaction at Deliveroo's shoddy IPO performance. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

So Riley, did you know that you were operating a restaurant in Glasgow? You know, I have many diverse business interests up and down the country, so I'm sure none of the menu items will come as a surprise to me. I was going to order food and this small plates restaurant showed up and I looked at the menu and was like, this is the most Riley selection of food and especially wine I've heard in my life. The menu begins with a wine selection, which begins with a 25 pound Blau Frankisch from Bourgenland and the description of this says that it shows bright minerality and great

texture through the layers of juicy plum, black raspberry and savoury herbs. Yeah, well that's typical for a Blau Frankisch. Describe to me a non savoury herb. Going through like two pages of wine list here, I then find that you could get, for instance, oysters with a shallot mignonnette. Yeah, little mignonnette. Have you ever had oysters delivered? It's always weird.

Leeks cooked over embers in a romesco sauce, leek oil and chardonnay vinaigrette with smoked almonds. What they do is they deliver the shells and they deliver the oysters out of the shells in a little saltwater bath and you have to then replace the oyster in the shell and then top it with your mignonnette. So I picked salaria warmed over hot coals with miso, nasi pear and hazelnuts. Okay, so what do you get it? I mean, I'm thinking I'm just going to fucking order a burger like a normal person rather

than ordering from this restaurant that you have apparently set up in secret without telling us in my home town. Riley just wants to get bottled in Glasgow. Just want to get bottled with a bottle of Palomino Blanco from Golisia. Throwing a 1972 Pinot Noir across the room and going, right, nobody leaves until we find out what can't get it. This ponlasi has been hit by boiling saltwater full of oysters and no one is going anywhere. Hello, welcome back to this episode of Trash Future Free Edition, the free one.

It's the free one. We've got to stop doing this. Yeah, we're going to we are going to put off our guests and listeners if we keep on doing Morning Zoo Crew voice, but it is too fun. No, it is it is TF. It is back again. It is myself. Riley, I am joined by Milo Hussain and Alice.

How is it going to my co-hosts? It's going well. I'm just I'm still struck by this this awful restaurant that you appear to have either that or there's someone else with your tastes just circulating up here and that's scary. There's one Riley in every city. That's for law. No, I there's the I like the idea that there's like a dark mirror of you. There's a sort of a Wario to your Mario up here.

So what? Like small plates restaurants. I mean, the concept of a takeaway small plates restaurant is just so fucking abject. Everything's a takeaway. So I'm coming in so many Tupperwares. No, no, I got one. I got like a takeaway like multi course, like really nice Valentine's Day menu for me and my girlfriend.

And there were so many Tupperwares. There were instructions about when to temper things and fire things. It was like I was working in a kitchen again. Yeah, it sounds it sounds like a lot of work getting that kind of a takeaway. Anyway, but we are also very pleased to be joined by Leslie Kern, the author of Feminist City, Claiming Space in a Manmade World. And we are going to talk about some of the things that have been going on with policing and you might say be more violent.

That is to say the entire element of policing up and down the city and indeed in other countries. Yeah, it's been a been a been a weird couple of weeks. Leslie, how is it going? It's going well. Thank you for having me. So look, I think let's we have a few things we want to talk about. First, did you know that Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, has released his Dream Dinner Party guess as part of the Telegraph article behind the paywall rotation?

Where he's where he was the first one was Muammar Gaddafi. Joseph Coney, General Buttnaked. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Keir Starmer's Keir Starmer's dream blunt rotation is literally anyone takes the blunt and is then arrested. Colonel Gaddafi, just being furious that he's outranked by a naked man. You're telling me this man who refuses to wear clothes is a more trusted military commander? No, I think, I mean, like, I don't know what it is, but I imagine that like,

if he's going to please his kind of base, which is which are like Brit Pop dads, then it must be like Richard Ashcroft. For a second, I thought you were still talking about Gaddafi. And I just imagined a Gaddafi base of Brit Pop. So Gaddafi being photographed with the Gallagher brothers to throw a bit of red meat to the base. Who he has who he has actually said is some just absolute pillars of, you might say, carceral liberalism, such as Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

So awesome. Well, first of all, that's chasing because she's fucking dead. Like, unless you're going to have a Gaddafi dinner party, that's a little bit like. We're eating Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yeah, that's right. We know what she's doing. She's doing powering a former Supreme Court justice. Can I just say something about K. Stammer and optics for a second?

Because because this is like, I understand why he's chosen the Obama thing for the same reason that like he should have chosen Richard Ashcroft, which is that this is a figure that kind of largely appeals to the only audience that are willing to sort of like half-heartedly defend him. And like Obama is the figure of like imagined good liberalism, etc. However, my thinking is that K. Stammer has a really bad understanding of his own optics. So that kind of ranges from like whoever's taking his photos,

like photographing, I mean, like these really horrible positions and really bad lighting, etc. But I imagine that if he was like to be pictured with Barack Obama, like just how like fucking lame he would look. And like it just wouldn't work the way that I think that he imagined it in his own head, which is why like if you are going to think about who you who you're like best in a party is with to be photographed, like you should kind of look for someone at least at your level

or like a little bit lower, right? I think like someone. Yeah. Hmm. Ed Miliband. Yeah. Even Ed Miliband would make Stammer look uncool. No, I welcome what Mr.

Obama has said and I would like to add that in fact, I do like it and I will be keeping it. So before we move on much further, I want to sort of turn to our guest and ask what do you think of the idea of these politicians trying to appeal to some imaginary middle road voter with a an inoffensive fantasy dinner party that seems to be conjured up by the Telegraph? Well, it just seems guaranteed to open them to ridicule to, you know, spawn a million memes that go in exactly the opposite direction

that they intended them to go and to, you know, alienate those who might actually be progressive enough to like push them to do something actually good and interesting. To that end, he's also said he wants to hang, have a footballer, Thierry Henry, a goal scorer for Arsenal. Thierry Henry. Thierry Henry. I don't watch, I don't watch your games.

Pick up on that. Thierry Henry. My mind just glided over that one. How did you go Keely Hazel, but Thierry Henry? Only one of them is French. Your mind is fascinating. So we also have Nelson Mandela, Jacinda Ardern, and also his wife, Victoria, which is the wife guy.

What on earth? Again, I don't know why he keeps, because someone's got to do the cooking, am I right? Well, I feel like the answer here is just one of Donald Trump's best owns on Twitter, which was when Elizabeth Warren released her apology video for pretending to be nice for American. And she said to her husband, who was also in this video, thank you for being here with me.

And Donald Trump tweeted, it's in their house. He's supposed to be there. Exactly the same vibe. What dinner party are you having that your wife isn't there? It's in your house. It's an eyes wide shut dinner party. That's right. Kirstarmer is trying to get a moderate Tories over to his side

by hosting key parties, which they all seem to enjoy. And on the right in Britain. Because, oh boy, do we ever love them. But he's not invited anyone British. That's not very Kirstarmer. He's supposed to be appealing to... Well, presumably his wife. But British liberals love simping Americans, actually.

There are many eminent British female lawyers who are as impressive as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who he could have said, but he didn't. Because he doesn't have the grants. He doesn't have a female Supreme Court justice of our Supreme Court. Yeah, like Lady Hale or someone. Yeah, exactly. Or instead of that, we could do a... If I was a Labour adviser, I would say that he should make up characters

that go to the pub and invite them over. Like guys like Dodgy Dave or like Gaz De Plummer. Just like these fake... Yeah. Dave Courtney. I welcome Mr. Courtney's stance on highly illegal activities. And I think that we would have a very interesting conversation in the hot tub at the dinner party.

Dave Courtney and Kirstarmer in the hot tub with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The vibe I get from this is just fully for a dollar name a woman. Like name any woman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Are you suggesting that there might be some kind of casual misogyny and politics? The two women Kirstarmer can name at a first instance. Ruth Bader Ginsburg first and his wife's second. He says Ruth Bader Ginsburg and they're like, no, someone alive.

He's like, I know this one, my wife. My wife. Leslie, I mean, does this surprise you at all to see this sort of, you know, that Kirstarmer can think of precisely three women, none of whom are British? Well, where is his binder full of women? Didn't he learn this from Mitt Romney several years ago? You got to keep a binder. Oh, that's a blast from the past.

Yeah. His binder of women is outdated. He needs to put it to Google Drive. Anyway, that is a little bit on our feckless leader, Mr. Sturmer. Yeah, the thing that we said we were never going to talk about, we have once again talked about it. This is no longer even about the Labour Party. This is about a guy who is forced to be in the public eye

because the politics of this country are completely just ruined. I don't agree that I'm feckless. I have lots of feck. And I'm going to show that. This guy has no place in the public eye in this country. And yet he's forced to be here. So, another quick thing to bring up as well is Deliveroo. Enemy of the show Deliveroo has received the TF Gears of the Week

as it has closed its first day of trading as a publicly traded company down 30% from its price target in the single worst debut of a company in London's history as a financial centre. Wolfs. Turns out that when you open on the news that you might have to pay all of your impoverished, emissarated contractors, employee wages, that's very bad for your stock position. Yeah, so from us to Will Shoe, suck it.

That is right. Yeah, that's right. So, indeed, what has happened is before the actual flotation would have been a few days ago now, a couple days ago as of recording, fund managers like Legal in general, which manages over a trillion quid and assets, were basically excited concerns around the gig economy

that Deliveroo operates in. The same thing with Aberdeen Standard and Aviva and MNG, all of which were like, we're going to skip this IPO. And they said, oh, no, we have concerns about workers' rights and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, specifically that you might be giving them too many. Yeah, well, I think there are concerns around workers' rights or that they realise that these rights might be enforced.

Yeah, our concerns around workers' rights are that there will be some. Look, come on. If we could reverse that Uber Court decision for a while ago where they said you had to pay drivers an amount that they could live on, we would be all in on this IPO. It would be a standard tech IPO, but nope. I'm afraid that there's just a little bit too much sick pay

and vacation pay. We'll skip it. Of course, all of the fund managers are saying that they think that the gig economy is, of course, unethical. And I think any astute listener of this show should be able to see right past that bullshit, which is very funny. I mean, woke fund manager is a very funny bit. Just like, yeah, I'm only going to invest in companies

that I really believe are treating their employees and their contractors with dignity. Well, I mean, also, Leslie, as a geographer, does it surprise you at all that the, let's say, the proliferation of bicycle-based careers up and down London being paid no money at all was not a sustainable one? No, absolutely not. I mean, I'm not crazy enough to try to ride a bicycle

in a place like London, but it seems like this is just a recipe for disaster on so many fronts. It's like a health and safety nightmare. It's workers' rights nightmare. It's an economic nightmare. And, you know, I think these companies have... They deserve everything that's coming to them in terms of this negative press and blowback for what they're trying to do.

Yeah, and also what's also very funny is Deliveroo managed by such sort of grasping idiots who tried to get so much market share so quickly that a food delivery company lost money during the entirety of the pandemic. Didn't make a dime. A food delivery company. A food delivery company that doesn't pay its workers.

It's cold being not for profits. How do you lose money? You don't pay your workers and the demand for your product is huge. You manage it. Other than just like we live in some kind of... I'm going to give you two words. I'm going to give you three words here, Riley. Office cocaine fountain.

These three words are not necessarily related to Deliveroo. They are three unrelated words. Much like Kirstama, there doesn't bear any relation to the institution. I'm simply just saying words. Yeah, Alice is just trying to activate a Manchurian candidate by saying the word office cocaine fountain. Not related to any company under discussion here.

Right now, one of our listeners is on their way to murder Abraham Lincoln. The book better late than never. An extremely long delay Manchurian cast. Yeah, that's right. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how were the two centuries? So the other sort of things to discuss about the... Mrs. Lincoln, how is the delivery from Pizza Hut? So another couple of things to note about the Deliveroo IPO.

A lot of apparently the reason that like it was shunned was like, there's more than just the workers rights thing. There's like a strange voting structure with the shares being offered. There's a bunch of weird stuff, right? Like I'm not going to say it was all the workers rights things, but boy, is it funny to watch all of these investment funds and also indeed on the company itself. Try to dress itself in very woke language,

like I don't know, four minutes to midnight before the thing went live. And also, you know, you know, your IPO is going very well when you try to flog stock in your terrible bullshit app to the users of that app rather than accredited investors. That's how you know it's going fan fucking tastic when you're being like, hey, do you want a side of stock in our company with your burger? It's cool. Anyway, so I want to sort of move a little bit on to kind of sort of

our two discussions of our two core discussions today, which are the British government's desire to completely exonerate itself from any kind of wrongdoing in any kind of history ever under any circumstances. Because wouldn't you know it and present. Yeah, indeed. So in terms of past, we're going to be talking a little bit about their report on race and institutional racism in Britain, which was surprising considering it was written by Spiked Magazine,

found that institutional racism wasn't really a problem and that the real problem was that people had a negative attitude because of people talking about institutional racism. And then we're going to talk about how the police... It's closed. The police essentially have given themselves an A-plus with their brutal put down of protests of a murder that was committed by one of them allegedly.

It's been such a great week for people being allowed to mark their own schoolwork. It's been phenomenal. It has. And it's been a great couple of weeks for the police too, because on the very day that we are recording this, it has now the reporting restrictions have been lifted. And we can now talk about the fact that a serving metropolitan police officer has been convicted of being a Nazi pedophile. Wow.

Genuinely, not just one of those things, both of those things. And Alice, why are you supporting him on Patreon? Would you like to answer that for the class? No, he was a member of National Action, which is a band far-right group. He lied about it, joined the police. They were like, well, right, you say not a member of any fascist parties. The gentleman says that he has not been in any sort of relational relationship

with any far-right organization. Take his word for that. And then when they found out that he was, they searched his computer for Nazi stuff. I hate it when that happens. So, yeah, it's been a great week for the Met. No, that was great for the grooming gangs. That wasn't my child pornography.

So just before we get into this, I want to ask Leslie, if Feminist City is a police-free city, I want to know if you can sort of explain what that means in the context of kind of, sort of in the context of what we're talking about, of the police sort of continuing to become more and more and more like a fascist street gang, including, for example, having members of National Action in them.

Yeah, what I mean by that is that Feminist City is one that cares about women's safety, and I don't actually think police forces care about women's safety, and I think that there are endless examples of the ways in which police forces act in extremely violent ways towards women or don't take violence against women seriously at all. So for me, Feminist City can't be one that has this kind of, what I think is a misogynist occupying force, be central to its operations.

Leslie, that's a great point, but have you considered what if all of the police were themselves women and we put a bunch of like women's rights stuff on the cars and the like baton stuff, wouldn't that be good? Well, maybe we could add some pink breast cancer ribbons to it and then it would just be completely pink washed. Yeah, I mean, that's a huge problem if we suddenly think that just, you know, by putting more women in these institutions that they'll change,

these institutions haven't become less racist because there's more people of color in them. They haven't become less sexist because there's more women in them. It's much deeper than that. Of course, as your other news item shows, it's very easy to deny the institutional aspect of these things when you want to. I can't wait to have my head cracked open by the Ruth Bader Ginsburg special edition baton. That's what I want.

It's because you have to imagine, right, it's so easy to forget that these institutions, whether it's the police or the army or the intelligence services or GCHQ here, the NSA in the States, it's easy to forget that these things have their place in history. It's easy to forget that like they weren't always here. Society functioned without them. It functioned differently.

You know, it had different problems. It had different things that went well and so on. But I think there is this conditioning that like to try to ask whether or not these things should exist is branded as fundamentally unrealistic. And in the case of the extremely cynical, and again like completely just functionally and ethically bankrupt institutions of this country in terms of both parties and also like just its organs of state,

it's actually construed in a sort of in a mirror universe bizarro way. Oh, actually, oh, you want to get rid of the police, but women are in danger in cities. And you want to get rid of the police? You must be misogynist. No, I saw a guy genuinely say after the process in Bristol that even in Somerset police should abandon the city of Bristol, like this fucking escape from New York

and just like seal it off for six months and not go in and see what happens. And I feel like the answer to that is like nothing or it would be slightly better. The Lionel hut's like rainbow dancing around. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're doing an experiment in Avon Somerset. It's a pilot thing.

We're calling it Operation Purge. And so what we've decided to do is to make, as a way to make a point to the woke lift, we are for yourselves, we're going to make murder legal. So again, I'm interested in your view on this, Leslie, essentially this idea of this cynical repositioning of the police themselves as fundamental to the safety of women when I think much of the evidence that we sort of see

shows that they are more likely to be domestic abusers. They are less likely to take women seriously. They are more likely to be in, you might say, illegal fascist gangs as well as their legal official fascist gang. Also more, not to jump in on your question here, but also more likely to be abusive towards women who are employed as police officers. That also came out just like literally this week

was a BBC investigation that like a couple of women reported serving that police officer for sexual assault. They were both police officers. Nothing got done because why would it? Yeah, exactly. So this kind of bogus argument of, well, what are you going to do about all the rapists? I mean, the response is,

what are we doing about them right now? Like how many are in jail? How many actual charges for sexual assault get brought compared to the number of reports and compared to the number of unreported crimes? How many convictions actually happen for sexual assault? How many convictions actually happen for domestic violence? What are the police actually doing to prevent

or to prosecute violence against women? And the answer is really very little. So to me, I agree. It's a bogus argument and it's so ironic because you think this argument for more police, it's like, yes, let's just give more money and give more advanced weaponry to a predominantly male institution to use as they will.

And you think, yeah, that doesn't sound very feminist to me actually. I mean, to be fair, in the case of domestic violence in a high proportion of cases, the police are on the scene immediately. Exactly. Well, I think...

Took me a second. Yeah, that's very good. And I think the other thing, right, a lot of the responses from sort of maybe pro-police outlets, for example, portray the police relationship with women is still in a very fundamentally sexist way, which is like,

oh, we're here to rescue damsels in distress from sort of predatory other men. Women stay off the streets, you know, things like that. The police will get you. But it seems framed, though, in this sort of reversion almost to this heroic type that positions women as basically agency-less and awaiting rescue from bad men by good men, right?

Yeah, literally the advice that women would have been given in the Victorian city to dress modestly and have a chaperone and traveling groups and don't go out at night and avoid certain areas of the city. If you add, carry a cell phone, it's the exact same advice that we're giving in the 21st century, right?

So, yes, I think there's this continual, like, reimposition of sort of social control over women in the name of protection. Women there were sat near a very risque table, like... I think that was a lot of the problem. If anything, women are slightly more disarmed now than they were then, because at least Victorian women used to carry sharpened hatpins

with which they could stab a man. This was genuinely a thing, right? There were cases of dudes just fully getting stabbed for trying to grope women, whereas now you have keys, I guess, maybe. Unless you want to go to a bunch of martial arts classes and become Bruce Lee, which is kind of out of most people's reach, I suspect.

It's certainly out of mine. Then, what exactly are your options? Carry a gun. If you're in the U.S., that's what they want you to do. They want to sell more guns to women, so we can protect ourselves. You can carry a gun. A lady gun, a nice pink gun.

You can carry a gun in the U.K., but it has to be like a 200,000-pound Purdy's shotgun. The thing is, right... It has to be a flintlock. It's worth talking about the fact that... When we talk about this, every other time we've talked about the city on this show, we tend to talk about the city,

the criticism of the smart city, and how the intensification of private surveillance in exchange for slightly improved garbage pickup by a robot is hardly a good deal for citizens. The consent manufactured for it even is as the future. But we've never really talked about the city as a social level. We've never really talked about it as it is, rather as people are trying to,

especially tech idiots, are trying to turn it into something else. We've talked about the city as a machine, rather than something that people live in. Yeah. I think it's worth asking, right? Many of those same questions come up, which is, who is the city for?

Who does it benefit? How is its material reality, whether that is the positioning of sensors everywhere so that the Google can collect data on how often you shit, or whatever, or whether that is the building of public transport such that it's to take primarily male workers from a suburb into a job, straight line, back and forth, no dependence,

and it could be built for something else, right? So in as much as you criticize how the smart city is this vision of the future, where the city is for a small subset of mainly men who are tech gods, it's interesting to sort of ask, well, how has that already played out in how the city is designed now?

Yeah, you raise a really good example of how transportation networks are set up, how the kind of care labor that keeps this thing that we call the economy, that we have to protect at all costs, the actual human care labor that keeps us alive to participate in that is pretty much ignored or assumed to just happen in private spaces.

And yeah, I mean, the city is, I think many people are realizing this in the context of the pandemic when they've been asked to go outside to socialize and realize that the city is not very human. Like there's nowhere to go to the bathroom and there's nowhere to just get some water and there's nowhere to just sit and socialize that our cities have become so kind of locked down,

so militarized, so concerned with, you know, a terrorist threat or this need for constant surveillance that the human level experience has been pretty much pushed to the side. And it's like, if you want that, you have to pay for that by going into your, like, dining bubble, I guess, now in the pandemic. And if you want to think then, think back to the police,

and this sort of dovetails back again with the sort of, with the story of Sarah Everard in the UK, is that the police have existed to sort of, to keep the edges of that city very hard to make sure that you, not just that you stay on the pavement, but that you stay on the right bit of the pavement, that you're not talking to anyone or sitting on a bench for too long, that, you know, your social bubble is of the right size,

that if you're a Gypsy Romani or a traveler, that you're, well, don't exist. And, you know, all of these enforcement mechanisms, they mean that anyone who is not the person for whom the city was designed, who in this case isn't just a sort of usually male information worker, or, but a male information worker who doesn't leave his house, then those, then you are going to be,

you're going to come up against the city's extraordinarily cruel, deeply racist and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms. And, you know, this is something that happens to people individually, this is something that happened to the women then holding a vigil for Sarah Everard after her alleged murder by a police officer, where the decision was taken by police. They were saying, well, this vigil is illegitimate

because of the COVID rules. And we have to keep everybody safe by breaking up this statement. We have to keep everyone safe by breaking up this statement against our violence. But that's, like, if you read between the lines in the, like, exculpatory report, it is fully like a small minority of attendees were extremely abusive to police officers.

And you expect police officers to have a great deal of restraint and forbearance. However, they're only human. And as such, you know, they have, like, a limit of abuse they're expected to take, not a courtesy extended to women being murdered by police officers, it seems. But, no, apparently at that point,

once you do hurt the police's feelings badly enough, it becomes legitimate for them to respond with force, which, I mean, this is the thing, right? This has been somewhat radicalizing for me in that I've ceased being surprised. As sort of, for a while, I still had the sort of things like, don't the Met know how bad this is from a PR perspective, like doing all of these sort of unforced errors?

And it's like, no, they know and they like it. And this is good. This is like, it's a feature, not a bug. It's a vulgar exercise of power designed to send a message and, you know, a message received. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think throughout the pandemic, we've really seen the, you know, numerous states and cities

using it as an excuse for the expansion of police power and surveillance and even trying to hand that off to citizens. Like, call this tip line if you see your neighbors gathered together in a group of six or more. We have that here in Canada, too. And it's like, everybody suddenly becomes, like, super invested again in the carceral state in a form of punishment.

And yes, we're afraid. There's legitimate things to be afraid of. But the answer, which, you know, has been put forward too often when it comes to social problems, is let's make it a criminal justice problem, right? Oh, it's a public health thing. Well, if we let's make it a criminal justice problem and that surely that will fix it.

In Britain, if we had the COVID tip line, it would go down in the first 10 minutes because everyone would try and phone in their neighbors at once. Like, oh, we've brought in the NKVD. Great. Allow me to dial them immediately. I mean, what's very funny about, like, lots of people trying to argue against police abolition is, like,

if you kind of think about the arguments that they're making, which is very much, like, you know, the one bad apple thing, like, the extension of that argument is fundamentally bad. The only way that you can really fix policing is if everyone becomes a police officer. Which I think, like, in Britain, we've spoken about this before, like, I think there's, like, a big appetite for, like, a lot of people who would, like,

be quite chuffed if you gave them, like, pseudo police powers. And, like, yeah. If you gave these fuckers an armband, they would absolutely be for it. Yes, they became a bouncer. I mean, pretty much everyone's already a border guard, right? Like, if you're an estate agent, you're a border guard. If you're a landlord, you're a border guard.

Now, if you're a bouncer, you're a border guard. So, like, it's a pretty small leap, I think, from there to, you know, you are now able to do citizens' arrests of your neighbor for not putting out the bins on the right day. For not respecting the bin map. I think it also has to... Yeah, it also...

It also has to do a lot, as well, with, like, the roots of policing and the different roots of policing in the UK and the US and elsewhere. In a lot of other countries, police sort of arose from, like, colonial enforcement divisions, and that's why they were sort of often paramilitarized. In the US, they evolved from slave catchers. In the UK, they evolved from strike breakers. I mean, this is fundamentally...

They have always been keeping order for the extractive wealthy, and that's what makes the next thing I'm about to say sort of such an incoherent concept, which is that the Met especially, but sort of most other police forces up and down the country, like to advertise themselves as engaging in something called policing by consent, where they say this is a quote from the police themselves. They say, in the UK, policing by consent is not just an empty catchphrase.

It is an essential reality. So if, Alice, if you can play a sound board that sounds when... You know that this is not an empty catchphrase. That would be very good. Among many countries, the UK is unusual. Boy, is that right. The police are not the coercive arm of an oppressive and authoritarian government. Oh, that's good.

I'm not hitting the drop so far. So far, it sounds pretty empty. The police are not the coercive arm of an oppressive and authoritarian government, established and operated to create and maintain public obedience through fear. That's good. They are not... Is this like... This is like the start of a spectator article where they do that paragraph

of what they don't think at the start, where they accidentally get everything right, and then they just needlessly continue. Oh, no, we put the word not into all of these things that are just like observably true. They are not the agents of the executive government at all. They are us, our fellow citizens, citizens in uniform. Charged with preventing crime and disorder

and enforcing the criminal law established under the authority of the parliament. So, all of that stuff we said, I'm sorry to have wasted your time inviting you on here, Leslie. Apparently, it's not true. It's so good to hear. In fact, yeah, I'm so glad that I filled out my... I consent to be policed form every time I come to the UK. That's all right.

And if you don't fill that out, there's nothing they can do. You can just go on a killing spree. I would simply vote against the police by voting for a political party that was going to cut policing or reform it or abolish it. Where can I find one of those, Riley? Oh, well, I just... Can I vote for communist Kier Starmer's

Woko Haram left-wing loony labor? Would they do that? Well, so I have sort of everyone's response, because like the thing is, right, this is not... I think the thing that's worth focusing on and not losing sight of is that this all started because a police officer, a serving police officer

who had already been accused, who had already been, let's say, implicated in, I believe, a public flashing, murdered a woman allegedly, right? And then the public, many women quite like reasonably held a vigil in protest of the police violence, and the police decided to do more violence.

The politicians of this country sort of had to respond because this is the kind of thing that... To someone who didn't read that thing about policing by consent and mistakenly thinks they are the coerced environment of an oppressive and authoritarian government, that this requires some explanation. And so the Tories respond. So I'll do the Tories first and then Labor.

The Tories... There's going to be a spot the difference thing. Yeah, I'd like you to spot the difference, please. Home Secretary Preeti Patel first decried the attacks on female officers. She said, that's fucking right, lads! Well, effectively, yeah. She said that the attacks on female officers

by protesters were disgraceful. Oh, now who's the violent scouts with men, huh? Now who's doing a misogyny, huh? Yeah. And then said... Have you considered that many of the police officers as brutalizing you were themselves women? And then she said...

Okay, I always say many, some. Have you considered the some of the police officers? Look, she said then, too many of us have pretended to be on the phone to a friend to scare someone off, she said. Too many of us have clutched our keys in our fist in case we need to defend ourselves and that is not okay. Well, then saying, that is why we need to further empower

and multiply the numbers of people on the street who will cause women walking alone to need to defend themselves. Yeah, we need more cops. I'm not going to name the guy, but I always think back to the guy that we all know who volunteered himself to be like an escort for women crossing the road on their own,

who himself has a history of... Yeah. So, lads, I just want to throw back to you here, right? The government response seems to have just been to ignore the fact that this problem is centered on the police and police cannot be the solution to it. Yeah, in fact, yeah, the only solution they can even imagine is more police and didn't they suggest something

like undercover police going into nightclubs? I mean, that seems even more... Just to make sure everyone has a nice time. Exactly, so already the problem is that women don't know who to trust or who is safe and so you're going to just create a situation where that's even more confusing for people. And, yeah.

Personally, I love to go into a nightclub. I love to go into Clapham and Fernos and see like five or six guys in super dry Japan tops and very clean trainers with short hair all asking to where they can buy some cocaine at the same time at an incredible volume. That makes me feel so safe. A guy in bootcut jeans ordering a lager and lime

leans over to you and goes, Oi, mate, got any Charlie? By the way, could you say that into my lapel, please? Those are just guys who are enjoying their white boy summer and I don't think that we should judge them for that. The white cop summer. Indeed, well, in the UK it shall be white cut summer, apparently. So one of their plans is they have the Cash for Safer Streets fund

being doubled to 45 million. That's basically investing in improved street lighting and CCTV cameras in, quote, areas of concern such as alleyways and parks. And now Leslie, having read your book, right, about this concept of areas of concern, you know, it's that the threat always comes from the dark. It never comes from the actual array of forces in the city.

No, we never want to look at what are the actual structural issues that create danger for women. We never want to look at domestic violence, which is where most violence against women actually happens. We don't want to shine a light on that. We want to worry about dark alleys. And of course, we use this as an excuse to police communities that are already overpoliced and already being racially profiled

and targeted for all of these, you know, really problematic interventions. And in your book, what I find really sort of astonishing as well is you say, actually, the people who are more likely to be attacked like, you know, dark alleys in the city or whatever, actually, that's where men are more likely to be attacked. And that's where the male focus city focuses most of its enforcement action because it's in fact just projecting that fear. Yeah, in public spaces, it's true that men are more likely to experience violence,

but women express more fear there. And I do think we have to care about the fact that women feel fearful, whether we're attacked or not. Simply feeling fearful is also a kind of form of oppression. But as I say, we continue to turn a blind eye to domestic violence, to sexual assault from acquaintances, to harassment in the workplace, even though those are the areas where violence against women is so much more prevalent. Like, it comes back to once again, doing the thing about doing everything right

in that like Sarah, I was abducted from a main road, a heavily trafficked main road. The closest thing to broad daylight by a guy who, and I cannot stress this enough, was a police officer. We don't know yet whether or not he used that status to abduct her. But if he had been challenged, he could have said quite truthfully, fuck off, I'm the police. And nothing would have happened. So adding more streetlights or adding more CCTV cameras,

it's difficult to me to see what the utility of that is. Time for that curfew for men that I've been talking about. Lock it down. Yeah. Lock it down. Oh my God. Yeah, the idea that spawned a million Rod Little articles about how actually he's the most persecuted man in Britain.

Well, it's... That's right. Yeah, he was already a curfew for Rod Little instituted by his goddamn wife. That's right. That's a lot about our society. What a fucking evil Fred Flintstone of a man. So this is the Tories, basically. Their response is we're going to do security theater,

but actually we're going to make the problem worse. But look, I think you'll find that when we look at the opposition response, which came out in an interview that Kirsten Dahmer did in a paywalled article in The Telegraph today. Finds a real opposition. Why is he writing in The Telegraph? What is he trying to appeal to? He's going to get Alison Pearson round one of these days.

Come on. I think it's very important that we appeal to the voters who will never vote for us under any circumstances. It's like Boris Johnson writing a column in the morning start. That'd be very funny. That would be great. I would absolutely respect that. I think communism absolutely spiffing stuff.

Good laugh. No bloody lark, in my opinion. But you, let's get real. I mean, also you make a joke about that. But wasn't that basically like what has led to the current situation of spike.com columnists in number 10 now? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So maybe this is Kirsten Dahmer's like attempted planning. He's trying to kind of do a reverse living Marxism on The Telegraph. 9D chess. His boyhood magazine, Living Thatcherism. So this was the opposition response. And where Starmer said that Labour had to be repositioned on crime and policing. Now, again, Corbyn promised 20,000 more Bobbys on the beat. It was like one of the weakest parts of his manifesto, as far as I'm concerned.

Being a bang for the barbie. Of course, because he only said that. Yeah. So Starmer only thinks in cliches and categories. And so he's like, well, we weren't strong enough on the issue in recent years. So he's basically called for tougher sentences on people who assault key workers, which is shop staff, and a lower bar for when police officers should investigate antisocial behavior.

So his solution is to bring back the ASBO. Not giving them any more money, though, which is very funny, because like we've inadvertently done a bit of a social experiment where we've disproved the idea of just defund the police because we've been doing that for the last decade or so in Britain. And it turns out that what this does is it makes them worse somehow. We have this rabid dog that we have kept on a starvation diet. Yeah, exactly. We're not defunding it in order to make it stop doing any of the bad stuff.

We're just defunding it to make it stop doing all of this stuff quite as energetically. Yeah, because in Britain, like funding the police has become kind of a center left thing because the right are so rabidly into defunding the police because they're into defunding absolutely everything. That like having more cops has kind of got bound up in the logic of anti-austerity, which I suppose isn't completely illogical, but it just kind of lacks a broader perspective. So here's what Stromer's proposal is. He says, I know what it means for a community here or across the country not to feel safe.

He said probably because he knew about making them feel very unsafe as the director of public prosecutions, jailing teenagers for years. Lots of donkey's, they feel unsafe. And I've done something about that. And by that, I mean simple testimony. If you don't feel you can go out after dark on your own street or your own road, there is something fundamentally wrong. And too many people are in that position.

So also next door to a spike columnist also that that position of, oh, your own road. So you shouldn't venture too far afield. And you know, let's say if you're in, if you live in like, I don't know, a tower block in Brixton, you certainly shouldn't feel safe in, I don't know, Kensington or South Kensington specifically, right? That mobility, but a box everybody in all we need to make sure people. You don't want to get run over by a Lamborghini in fairness. So we need to make sure people still feel safe in their areas. And I mean, that idea of sort of enforcement boundaries, that's just town stuff though.

That's just like regular local communities in the local area bullshit. I think you're not wrong, but like the unintended effects of that are just like staying in your box. And so his solution has been to call for a hundred and fifty million pounds more for the police to hire more community support officers. And more importantly, this is what I think is so just birdbrained new labor shit to hire more back room staff to ease the paperwork load for frontline officers. Backroom stuff. He wants to being a roadie. That's why they do violence because they're stressed out by paperwork. It's a very relatable problem.

Trouble is I've got fatigue from doing all this admin and that's why I beat people up. It's not because I enjoy it. All these gender forms that they have to keep filling out when they arrest people. They need secretaries to harass in the back office, right? That's all right. Yeah. Giving the police rubber, rubber women to assault and to take it out on in the office. So Starmer's Starmer's whole suggestion here again seems to be like what we need to do in order to protect everyone in order to protect people again.

He is on it. And again, just like Corbin was completely unable to confront that the problem is the police and the problem is the police not just in that the problem is every individual officer. Well, it is that too. But also the problem is the fact that there need to be police because if there weren't landlords, there wouldn't be police effectively. If you get my meaning, right? Yeah, I certainly not in the way that we currently know them.

Yeah, precisely. It is it is there. There is this there's brutal extractive inequality that you need and let you need these. There's basically a an armed gang to brutally defend. And yeah, I mean, the thing is the greater the brutality of that extraction, the greater the brutality required of the armed gang defending it. Well, the thing is, I have brain problems and my brain problem is that like for my sins, I'll confess this now, I'm still not a police abolitionist.

But the action that sort of the vibe that I have is like Gandhi's quip about Western civilization, right? Where if you describe what the police say they do, like policing by consent, they're an impartial human rights respecting organization to protect the public and investigate crime. My attitude to that is, yeah, that's a fantastic idea. When do you want to start? And like, because genuinely, I can't quite square just police abolition in the sense of what that one commenter was saying of just like they do escape from New York, right? Because I'm as scared of the people who would volunteer to make themselves enforcers of law and order,

absent any sort of professional sanction of doing that anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Because it would be the same people, but just with no oversight at all. It would be them and it would be like bathroom inspectors trying to like check my fucking chromosomes. Oh, the turf police. I mean, I was going to just raise something that's just completely crazy. Like has labor considered that maybe it's austerity that's making things more dangerous for people that couldn't possibly be that.

Yeah. I mean, this is why abolition, I totally agree with your concerns, but this is why police abolition has to be come out of a radical transformation of society, right? That you can't just, you know, create that vacuum and expect that something magical will fill it. But you have to kind of rebuild things from the ground up in a completely different way. And I think one of the things, right, is that I don't think that this country we live in or indeed the country that you live in and I am from, Leslie, I don't think that these countries become places where everyone can like live lives of sort of dignity in them. As long as the institutions of the police as they are currently constituted still exist. I don't think there's a future for Britain where there is an institution called the Met Police.

That is one that is what I don't think there's a future for Britain. That's also true. And but I think it's true. The idea of simply, well, once you get rid of the Met Police, that's the problem solved done and dusted. It's that like, no, you must get rid of the Met Police. Like that is basically non-negotiable at this point. But Leslie, as you point out, it's not done there. That there is much more to do and that the idea of just volunteer enforcers of social norms through physical force probably isn't the way forward, I would imagine.

All changed, changed utterly. And I feel like there's a sort of diversity of views on the left that encompass everything from after the Revolution, we'll have cops but good because they'll have like red hats on instead of blue. All the way through to after the Revolution, we will have autonomous self-organizing communes where no one will commit crimes. And I'm still just in the middle here like, man, this fucking sucks. Can someone invent something better than this, please? Yeah, all cops will be Boston Assamo. Elon, please.

What are you doing in crimes for? What the fuck? I'm supposed to sell hundreds. They keep making me fucking arrest people for this kind of fucked up shit. Just stop doing it. And so like, I don't know what the next step looks like. I just know it's certainly not this one. No, this is literally intolerable. I mean, you could try housing, like you could give money to housing people. We can't do that. It's Britain. Come on. The government can't spend money on anything that is good.

What that sort of brings up right is that the need for violent enforcement of norms sort of tends to subside. The more you remove the incentive to contravene those norms, like if someone isn't worried about... Number one, most of what the police actually do anyway is hand out tickets and prosecute nonviolent offenses, like small possession of recreational drugs. And if you then take that away, and then if people have enough housing and food and so on, that they're not sort of forced to do... Not commit crimes of acquisition, yeah.

Then that takes away another big chunk of what they're supposed to do. And if you actually have a properly... Let's say you have an actual functioning like mental and physical health care services, all of a sudden that takes away another... And again, not wanting to go sort of into discussions about like carceral medicalism or whatever, but that's like more... What you're thinking of here is not so much abolishing the police in one stroke, but like reducing it to a size where you can drown it in the bathtub,

which I kind of appreciate. What if the cops are all really small at little kittens? That would be cool. I had a joke on Twitter a while back that was like, I love to live in the future in 2050 and go to my job at the public safety department, where my only uniform is like a t-shirt that's like high vis. I can't kill anyone. Nobody has to respect me and I spend my shift standing next to a guy

firing off fireworks in the carport lane going, hey man, other people need to use the carport lane until he runs out of fireworks. Yeah, that's right. And then you're also the next week, which was like, have you heard of the International Space Station? So Leslie, I just want to ask, right? Like what does... Does that sound sort of like what you're thinking of?

And you can elaborate on that a little more. Sure. And this is... I can't take any credit for these ideas. I've learned them as have so many of us from paying attention to Black Lives Matter movement and discussions around when you defund the police, what will you refund, right? What will you put money back into? Will you put it into housing?

Will you put it into education, healthcare, mental health services, childcare? I don't know, another wild and crazy idea that we don't seem to be able to countenance. But all of the sort of things that reduce those inequalities, right? And reduce the friction in society that generates more potential for crime or antisocial behavior, as you say. And I think through that, again, when people have fundamental safety and security and stability, we're not going to need this occupying army to, I don't know, tell us not to jaywalk or whatever it is that they do.

It's very important that people don't jaywalk. That's my primary concern when we get rid of the police is who will stop people from crossing. There's no incentive for people to cross the road when they won't be hit by a car unless there's a law that prevents them from doing that. Milo, I think you actually think that, to be fair. Yeah, exactly. Of course you fucking do. One of the few things I like about Britain is that there are no laws about shit like that, like when you can and can't cross the road, because they know that if they did that,

British people would just be like, no, I'm going to get hit by a car deliberately to prove a point. Yeah, have you got a cross in the road license? We'll say. That's right. Also, I'm just noting. I think we've wrapped that up nicely here. So I just want to say, before we do our endings and thank yous and stuff, Leslie, is there any other points you'd like to leave on the table before we head off?

Well, I'll guess I'll just say from a feminist perspective, any city that says it cares about women's safety can't be one that's willing to throw other people under the bus in order to get it. So to me, I always want to be really skeptical as all of you are about all of these kinds of bogus claims about what will actually make the city safer for people. Autonomous killbots. Look, we just got to give it to Boston. Yeah, Boston. We got to give it to BAE, sis.

Boston Asimo with a clock. Boston Asimo. So I'm not supposed to use a gun. I can barely fucking walk. I keep missing. I still, I will cherish until the day I die the memory of that security patrol robot in San Francisco that somebody pushed into a fountain. Yes. Yeah, the cocaine fountain.

Yeah, that's the that's the future for me. So I just want to say number one Leslie praxis. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and I'm talking to us about this. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. It's been been amazing. It's really gives me to flatter us. You can get feminist city claiming space in a manmade world from Verso.

I recommend that you do. I read it in advance of this podcast episode and I found it very worthwhile. So run. Do not walk to your nearest Verso books website and order it. Yeah. And across the road illegally across the road illegally to order it. And also don't forget to check out the TF stream and all our TF spin offs, including the TF Patreon five bucks a month second episode a week. So do that as well.

So a lot of calls to action on this one. But in all other news, I think it's time for us to head on the down the old dusty trail and we will see you on the bonus episode. Are you saying that now? Later everybody. Bye. Bye.