The UK Border Force is in effect under military command, reflecting a wider increase of “hyper-militarisation” in policing, according to a new report on international law enforcement.
A report by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death, says the 21st century has seen the emergence of paramilitary and “political” policing across Europe, employed at borders, during civil unrest and against public protest.
It cites the Home Office’s 2020 request for Ministry of Defence (MoD) support and the creation within the Border Force of a new post of clandestine Channel threat commander as evidence of the Channel becoming “hyper-militarised”.
Liz Fekete, the director of the IRR and the report’s author, said: “What they have begun at the border does not end at the border.
“First, the government portrays asylum seekers arriving in small boats in an already militarised Channel as a national security threat. The plan to allow French police to push back boats in the Channel can only lead to more injuries, more deaths.
“Second, we know that plastic bullets (still used in Northern Ireland) have already been authorised for use at the Notting Hill carnival and BLM (Black Lives Matter) protests of 2020 and that, since then, BLM protests have been subjected to baton charges, horse charges and pepper spray, and that student occupations for Palestine have been violently suppressed.
“Third, we know that discrete firearms units have been created within crime fighting units (recall the deaths of Mark Duggan and Chris Kaba) and that Jean Charles de Menezes died as a result of the ‘shoot to kill’ approach of Operation Kratos.
“This is why we are saying to the government today that ‘it’s time to take stock’. For this is demonstrably not policing by consent.”
The report says the MoD’s oversight for policing small-boat crossings in the Channel has “effectively [put] elements of the UK Border Force under military command”. In support of this analysis, it also highlights Keir Starmer’s announcement last year that he was giving Border Security Command counter-terrorism powers to deal with people-smuggling, and Drone Watch UK’s written evidence to the House of Commons defence committee in which it said that the Channel had been militarised through the use of military-grade drones.
Another theme of the report, titled Paramilitary Policing Against the People, is the “creeping” growth of “less-lethal weaponry”, which can nevertheless cause life-changing injuries, such as Tasers, which were introduced to policing in England and Wales in 2003, Northern Ireland in 2008 and Scotland in 2018.
The report discusses 69 deaths of migrants, refugees and other racialised people across Europe through the use of such weaponry, mostly asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa at the Spanish-Moroccan border. The weaponry is often used in public order situations, it says.
Kojo Kyerewaa, a national organiser for Black Lives Matter UK, said: “Only racism can explain the British state’s fear of Black people on the streets.
“The Met’s 5,900 plastic bullets and 700 officers trained to fire them are not ‘public safety’ tools. They are instruments of racial terror. When we flooded the streets to denounce police brutality, the Home Office aimed those very weapons at us – weapons proven to blind, maim and kill. This is not an oversight. This is their vicious racist designs against us.”
The Met previously said it was “inaccurate and irresponsible to imply the ethnicity of those likely to be involved in an event or protest influences the tactics considered”.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Britain has a long tradition of operational independence for the police who keep our streets safe. Any use of their powers is an operational decision.”
