British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on June 22, 2009
British Journal of Criminology 2009 49(5):646-666; doi:10.1093/bjc/azp031
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The British Journal of Criminology 49:646-666 (2009)
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community
Examining the Impacts of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation
* Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice, School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Priory Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 ITZ, UK; C.Pantazis{at}bristol.ac.uk.
The ‘war on terror’ has emerged as the principal conflict of our time, where ‘Islamic fanaticism’ is identified as the greatest threat to Western liberal democracies. Within the United Kingdom, and beyond, this political discourse has designated Muslims as the new ‘enemy within’—justifying the introduction of counter-terrorist legislation and facilitating the construction of Muslims as a ‘suspect community’. In this paper, we develop Hillyard's (1993) notion of the ‘suspect community’ and evidence how Muslims have replaced the Irish as the main focus of the government's security agenda whilst also recognizing that some groups have been specifically targeted for state surveillance. We conclude that the categorization of Muslims as suspect may be serving to undermine national security rather than enhance it.
Key Words: Key words‘war on terror’ • counter-terrorism • policing • Muslims • suspect community
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Introduction |
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In this article, we examine the United Kingdom's response to the perceived new ‘terrorist’ threat and propose that recent political discourse and legislative measures have identified Muslims as the ‘new’ suspect community. This represents a shift from the ‘old’ suspect community, involving the Irish population as identified in Hillyard's (1993) study. Nevertheless, we also agree that it is ‘both difficult and dangerous to generalize about the policing of Muslim communities without affording suitable recognition to the very real differences in background, belief, experience and need among British Muslims’ (Chakraborti 2007: 109). It is therefore essential to acknowledge that within the Muslim community, the police have singled out specific groups, most notably Salafists and Islamists, as posing a specific threat (Lambert 2008). The aim of the article is to evidence the shift to Muslims as the new suspect community and to explore the consequences of these developments for the communities concerned.
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From the ‘Old’ to the ‘New’ Suspect Community |
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Hillyard's (1993) study of Irish people's experience of the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act (and subsequent amendments) introduced the notion of a ‘suspect community’ to capture the devastating impact of the legislation. Despite the then Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, describing the powers as draconian (Hillyard 1993: 4), the PTA was passed without any dissenting voices in Parliament just one week after the IRA Birmingham Pub bombings, which had killed 21 people and injured a further 180 in November 1974.1 The Act, drawing upon previous legislation already in place to deal with Irish political violence, was ‘part of a much longer line of exceptional measures directed against Irish people’ (Hillyard 1993: 2), predicated on the British state's historical construction of the Irish as dangerous following colonization.
Through his study, highlighting the harrowing experiences of many of those arrested and detained under the successive PTAs, Hillyard argued that a dual system of justice had been established. The ordinary criminal justice system existed for Ordinary Decent Criminals who had committed conventional crimes such as burglary, murder and rape, whilst a shadow and more draconian system developed to deal with those suspected of Irish ‘terrorism’. This system granted the police, immigration and customs officers wide and discretionary powers in terrorist investigations. Most significantly, the Act made possible the ‘potential to bring into custody and interrogate anyone, irrespective of whether or not there was any evidence against them, because the principal arrest required no reasonable suspicion of an offence’ (Hillyard 1993: 5, italics in original). The discretionary nature of these powers helps to explain why 86 per cent of the 7,052 people detained in Britain under the successive PTAs between November 1974 and December 1991 were subsequently released with no further action taken against them (Hillyard 1993).
The fact that the Irish population was subject to laws and practices, which were different from the remainder of the UK population, led Hillyard (1993: 257–8) to argue that the PTA had:
... constructed a suspect community in Britain. The wide powers of examination, arrest and detention, the executive powers to proscribe selected organisations, the range of specific offences under the Acts, the power to issue exclusion orders and a whole range of provisions covering seizure and investigation, have all played their part in making the Irish living in Britain, or Irish people travelling between Ireland and Britain, a suspect community .... To the extent that the legislation is principally directed at Irish people, it is an example of institutionalised racism.Hillyard's study documents how the use of these powers was instrumental in creating the Irish as a suspect community. First was the role of the police in trawling for ‘information’ from anyone who was Irish or had Irish links. The police would commonly arrest anyone related in any way to someone already connected to terrorism and then their friends and acquaintances would subsequently be interviewed. The process would undergo constant re-iteration until information dried up. Second, the police would interview Irish people on an ad hoc basis, whether or not they had any links to terrorism, and asked about personal details. Although potentially less coercive than the former interview process, Hillyard notes that this method demonstrates how the Irish were under constant surveillance. Both methods confirm that policing activity was a means of gathering as much intelligence as possible from the Irish community and anyone connected to it. Policing activity was therefore less about successful prosecution and conviction, although Ewing and Gearty (1990) note that if the intended purpose of arrest and detention were a prelude to criminal proceedings, then the legislation clearly failed.
Hillyard's thesis on the construction of the Irish population as a suspect community has not gone unchallenged. In a review of Hillyard's Suspect Community for The British Journal of Criminology, Greer (1994) makes a number of criticisms. He argues that Hillyard treats the Irish as a monolithic group, including those who are vehemently anti-Irish nationalist. However, we suggest that Hillyard's conceptualization could be considered legitimate on the basis of two arguments. First, the mere passing of legislation giving state officials powers to single out anyone travelling between Northern Ireland and Britain to question them in relation to terrorist-related activity meant that anyone could come under suspicion, regardless of their religious or political identity. This could be seen most readily in the police practice of writing ‘Irish Suspect’ on the form used to record people's fingerprints (Hillyard 1993: 159–60). Thus, even though these powers may have been used more rigorously against Catholics and Republicans than against Protestants and Unionists, the latter were nevertheless stopped and detained, particularly at ports and airports, because they were seen as ‘Irish’. The evidence therefore supports Hillyard's general argument about the wholesale discriminatory nature of the legislation affecting the Irish population. Second, and relatedly, the notion of a suspect community was embedded in a much wider anti-Irish discourse that meant that even though much anti-Irish British racism was synonymous with anti-Catholic racism, Protestants were also singled out for ridicule, humiliation and degradation due to being Irish (Hickman 1998).
A second critique by Greer (1994) is that the process of information trawling as explicated by Hillyard (1993) does not equate to treating people as criminal suspects, especially as the majority of those detained were released without criminal proceedings ever taking place. Greer is perhaps correct in his argument if a strict legal meaning of criminal suspicion is applied. However, legal understandings may have little resonance with people's everyday experiences of the law and their interactions with state officials, as well as their interpretations of these events. We would suggest that Greer has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Hillyard's work. Suspect Community is an empirical study based on the subjective experiences of individuals whose lives were impacted upon and disrupted by the PTA; as such, it should be seen as a sociological study of people's experiences of the law rather than an enquiry into the application (and misapplication) of legal rules.
Hillyard's (1993) observations about the PTA are significant for many reasons, not least for alerting us to its harmful impact on individuals and communities and also for drawing attention to how democratic values and practices were undermined in pursuance of greater security. The fact that, for a long period, his findings were largely ignored by criminologists had much to do with the general lack of interest and unsympathetic treatment of research on Irish people (Ghaill 2000) and little to do with the credibility of the research study. However, in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the term ‘suspect community’ is now common currency in relation to the treatment of Muslims, with regularly drawn parallels to the experiences of the Irish (CRE/UofB 2006; Hickman et al. 2008; Peirce 2008). Indeed, Hillyard and Percy-Smith (1988) foresaw this situation when they argued that the extension of the PTA to include international terrorism meant that other minorities would experience the scrutiny of the police in comparable ways to the Irish. Yet, the application of the concept ‘suspect community’ within the current context has been questioned by Greer (2008). First, he questions the notion of a British Muslim community, arguing ‘it is extremely doubtful if there is a "Muslim community" in Britain in any meaningful sense’ (Greer 2008: 169). Our analysis seeks to acknowledge the importance of differences within the Muslim community alongside the binding nature of ‘ummatic’ identity and shared experiences. Furthermore, we argue that this sense of identity in recent years has become heightened due to the perceived ‘injustices’ experienced by Muslims at the hands of Western nations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as continued support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine (Modood 2005; McGhee 2008a). Second, he argues that the use of the term ‘suspect’ is problematic. He correctly notes that state suspicion is not per se an infringement of human rights; however, it is if this suspicion is ‘groundless’ and ‘leads to adverse consequences for those concerned’ (Greer 2008: 170). Nevertheless, Greer disputes that there is any empirical evidence that the police are currently targeting individuals needlessly due to their religious identity. In this article, we seek to demonstrate otherwise.
We develop Hillyard's notion of the suspect community and advance its relevance to Muslim people's experiences in the context of the ‘war on terror’. Thus, drawing upon Hillyard (1993), we define a suspect community as:
... a sub-group of the population that is singled out for state attention as being ‘problematic’. Specifically in terms of policing, individuals may be targeted, not necessarily as a result of suspected wrong doing, but simply because of their presumed membership to that sub-group. Race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, language, accent, dress, political ideology or any combination of these factors may serve to delineate the sub-group.This definition is supported by two further arguments. First, adequate attention must be focused on political discourses underpinning the basis of a suspect community, often sustained and encouraged by other social structures and processes, in particular the media. In making this argument, we are mindful of over-stating the law's effect whilst simultaneously downgrading the role of other processes and social structures in the creation and sustenance of a suspect community—a criticism Greer (1994) alludes to in his review of Hillyard's work.2 Second, our use of the notion of suspect is not based on a strict legal category that is necessarily dependent on an association with the commission of a terrorist activity. Indeed, if we consider ‘suspicion’ in the form of a pyramid, then at the base, which will apply to the vast majority of cases, suspicion is primarily linked to an individual's perceived membership of a sub-group and not to suspected wrongdoing. Such contact may serve a number purposes including intelligence gathering but also disruption and deterring terrorist activity. It is rarely about collecting evidence with a view to constructing a case for criminal prosecution. We should also note that, in some cases, this may involve the police misidentifying individuals, such as mistaking Asian Sikhs or Hindus for Muslims simply on the basis of their skin colour. In a smaller number of cases involving arrest and interrogation, for example, the legal basis of suspicion may be more pronounced in that the police have some evidence that an individual is in some way connected to terrorism. At the top end of the pyramid, applying to only a handful of individuals, where individuals are placed under house arrest and monitored as terrorist suspects by the police, the legal evidence may be stronger but a criminal trial has been considered impossible due to the sensitive nature of the evidence, for example.
Using this working definition, we argue that the legislative framework, which developed in response to the perceived new threat of terrorism, identifies Muslims as the predominant target of the state's attention. The next section examines how the political discourse surrounding the ‘war on terror’ has aided the construction of Muslims as part of the new suspect community to emerge since September 2001.
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Political Discourse and the ‘War on Terror’ |
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The threat of international terrorism had been a slow and creeping concern for UK governments from the 1980s onwards, but had gathered pace throughout the 1990s, before finally emerging as a full-scale ‘war on terror’ following the events of 11 September. Underpinning the ‘war on terror’ is the ‘new terrorism’ discourse promoted primarily by US academics and think tanks such as RAND (Burnett and Whyte 2005). This discourse supports the idea that the proliferation of international terrorist organizations and increase in international terrorist activity since the 1990s have led to a new security environment that has replaced the Cold War as the principal conflict threatening the integrity of Western liberal states (Hoffman 1998; Laqueur 1999; Gurr and Cole 2000; Howard and Sawyer 2004). The ‘new’ terrorism can be differentiated in terms of ‘different actors, motivations, aims, tactics and actions’ from the ‘old’ twentieth-century concept of terrorism (Spencer 2006: 2). For instance, the ‘new’ terrorists are inspired by religious extremism and ethnic-separatism (rather than political or ideological causes) and are not predisposed to political negotiation or military deterrence (Howard and Sawyer 2004). Significantly, they present a heightened threat to security because of the availability of weapons of mass destruction (Laqueur 1999). Crucially, from our perspective, the discourse of the ‘new terrorism’ identifies ‘Islamic fanaticism’ as the greatest threat to Western liberal democracies. As such, Muslims have now become the new ‘folk devils’ (Kundnani 2002) and the ‘enemy within’ (Fekete 2004).
Jackson's (2007) work on discourse analysis and the construction of enemies in the context of the ‘war on terror’ is of special interest here. He writes that the discourse rests on a series of labels, including ‘jihadists’, ‘radicalism’, ‘religious terrorism’ and ‘moderates’, which often sit as oppositional binaries, such as ‘extremists’ versus ‘moderates’, the ‘West’ versus the ‘Islamic world’ (Jackson 2007: 401), and are frequently used in conjunction with carefully worded qualifying statements that are ‘designed to mitigate the use of labels’ (Jackson 2007: 402). However, ‘the discourse as a whole consists of a number over-simplifications, misconceptions and mistaken inferences’ (Jackson 2007: 412). Statements from New Labour politicians and government documentary sources certainly point to the view that there is an acceptance that we are living in unprecedented times in which the challenges of terrorism are qualitatively different from the past and that this terror threat is directly connected to Islam and Islamists in the way discussed by Jackson (2007). Thus, just three days after the 11 September bombings, in a statement to Parliament, Prime Minister Tony Blair stated:
We do not yet know the exact origin of this evil. But, if, as appears likely, it is so-called Islamic fundamentalists, we know that they do not speak or act for the vast majority of law-abiding Muslims throughout the world. (Hansard 2001)Moreover, Countering International Terrorism: The United Kingdom's Strategy (HM Government 2006: 1) unambiguously identifies the new threat coming from Islamists, thereby making the explicit link between religion and terrorism:
The principal current terrorist threat is from radicalised individuals who are using a distorted and unrepresentative version of the Islamic faith to justify violence. Such people are referred to ... as Islamist terrorists. They are, however, a tiny minority within the Muslim communities here and abroad. ...
Despite the overall prevalence of this discursive construct of the Muslim majority as ‘law-abiding’ and ‘peaceful’, this position has at times been contradicted. Thus, in the context of several polls reporting significant support amongst British Muslims for the London July 2005 attacks, John Denham MP (Home Office Minister) claimed that:
Few terrorist movements have lasted for long without a supportive community. A supportive community does not necessarily condone violence, and certainly, most people in it would not want to become personally involved ... whether or not they condone violence they see terrorists are sharing their world view, part of the struggle to which they belong. (cited in McGhee 2008a: 69, italics added)
The logical outcome of Denham's construction of the ‘supportive community’ implicates the whole of the Muslim community and thus arguably underpins the construction of the Muslim community as suspect.
Nevertheless, the non-conciliatory approach adopted by Blair's governments has to an extent been superseded by developments under Prime Minister Gordon Brown (Bonnici 2007; Lambert 2008). After the failed bomb attacks in 2007, Gordon Brown apparently developed new guidelines for ministers, instructing them to drop the ‘war on terror’ language and banning them from connecting Muslims with terrorist attacks due to concerns about the undermining of community cohesion (Daily Express 2007). The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, followed this with statements appearing to redefine terrorist activity committed by Muslims as ‘anti-Islamic activity’ (Daily Mail 2008). More recently, Foreign Secretary David Miliband conceded that the Government's use of the ‘war on terror’ terminology was a mistake (The Guardian 2009).
It is unclear why such discursive shifts should have taken place under Brown's premiership, although Bonnici (2007) notes how, for the UK media at least, the answer was to be found in the United Kingdom's bowing to EU pressure to use more sensitive terminology. Regardless, the statements represent an important discursive shift in their attempt to reduce the risk of alienation and isolation felt by Muslims since the invocation of the ‘war on terror’ mantra (see discussion further below). However, we should also be cautious of over-stating their significance, given that the ‘new terrorism’ discourse still underpins the coercive policies pursued by Brown, as illustrated by further extensions to police powers in the recent 2008 Counter-Terrorism Act.
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Legislating for ‘New’ Suspect Communities |
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Although the PTA was primarily intended as a piece of legislation designed to deal with Irish political violence, by the 1980s, there were already signs that the Government perceived a growing threat posed by international terrorism. In 1984, the PTA was extended to encompass international terrorist activity (Hillyard 1993), whilst, in 1995, it was further amended to include the criminal offence of being in possession of items that could be used in terrorism abroad (where terrorism was defined in terms of using violence for political ends) (Peirce in Fekete 2001). Furthermore, the 1998 Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Conspiracy) Act made conspiring to commit any offence abroad a criminal offence that could be tried in Britain. Therefore, throughout the 1990s, a number of communities began to emerge as security targets and became the focus of policing activities. As Peirce notes (in Fekete 2001), the expansion of the PTA to incorporate international terrorist activity led to the targeting of refugee communities from Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Kashmir. These communities were predominantly Muslim. Bamford (2004) corroborates this by noting that ‘jihadists’ had become targets for British intelligence following the alleged involvement of British nationals in the East African US Embassy bombings in 1998.
Notwithstanding these piecemeal developments, it was the 2000 Terrorism Act that largely facilitated the designation of Muslims as the principal suspect community. The 2000 Act placed on a permanent statutory footing many of the powers contained in the temporary PTA legislation, but also included a new and broad definition of terrorism (Fenwick 2002). The Act defines as terrorist any action or threat of action against a person or property or electronic system designed to influence government or intimidate the public or sections of the public with the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause (ss 1 and 2).3 Through the open-ended nature of the definition, there exists considerable scope for the state to identify a wide array of groups as terrorist. This definition, in tandem with the Act's powers of proscription, offers the machinery necessary to label certain groups as terrorist. Section 3 empowers the Home Secretary to proscribe organizations believed to be ‘concerned in terrorism’. A total of 21 groups were banned when proscription powers were first applied in 2001. A further four were banned in 2002, 15 more groups were proscribed in October 2005 and, since then, a further nineteen, making the total number of proscribed groups under the 2000 Act currently 594 (Home Office 2009). Apart from the 14 organizations in Northern Ireland that are banned under previous legislation, the vast majority of other proscribed groups under the TA 2000 are international with aims relating to geographical regions affected by internal strife and conflict such as Kurdistan, Sri Lanka and Kashmir. Moreover, many of these proscribed groups have explicit aims regarding the overthrow of pro-Western regimes and replacing them with Islamic states. Others, like Al Qaeda, have broader agendas concerning the countering of Western influences.
Consequently, a range of activities (including non-violent activities) associated with those organizations is banned, including supporting and even attending the meetings of proscribed groups. Thus, anyone or any activities associated with these organizations can now be criminalized. It is at this point that the Act serves to create a ‘suspect community’. As many of the proscribed groups are located within or have connections to minority ethnic and refugee communities in the United Kingdom, the criminalization of activities and relationships involving these groups serves to implicate the whole community. This point is well illustrated by Peirce's discussion of proscription, noting that ‘more than one million people from refugee communities which are involved in liberation movements, movements of self-determination, resistance against tyrannies, are now inescapably criminalized’ (in Fekete 2001: 97).
The fixing of Muslim communities rather than individual suspects within the gaze of counter-terrorist policing is underpinned by the discretionary nature of the powers contained in the TA. This point is best illustrated through the relationship between the powers conferred by the Act and the notion of reasonable suspicion. Section 43 of the TA 2000 gives the police stop and search powers if they have reasonable suspicion that someone is involved in terrorist activities. However, the police have preferred to use their more extensive powers in ss 44(1) and (2) and 45, which allow them to stop pedestrians and vehicles within designated areas ‘for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism’ without the need for reasonable suspicion. These powers have afforded the police unfettered discretion to stop and search in relation to terrorist activities. Moreover, their purpose would seem to have little to do with identifying individuals involved within the commission of activities but targeting geographical areas and, therefore, inevitably communities to disrupt terrorist operations. This is corroborated by ACPO's evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, which stated that ‘The use of Section 44 stop and search to disrupt and deter this activity (terrorist reconnaissance) is of critical importance and should not be underestimated’ (HAC 2005: para. 4.9).
Furthermore, the police have the power to arrest without warrant someone whom they reasonably suspect of being a terrorist (s. 41). A terrorist is anyone who has committed an offence under the Act or has been ‘concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism’ (s. 40(1)(b)). As Stone (2006: 391) remarks ‘being "concerned in" is wider than being actively involved in the commission of a terrorist act, being a conspirator, or attempting to commit such an act’. Thus, there does not have to be any certainty on the part of the police concerning the particular crime committed by a suspect, nor do they need to be clear about a suspect's level of involvement in terrorist activity. We may surmise, therefore, that these powers of arrest, alongside s. 44 stop and search powers, allow the police to obtain information from individuals about terrorist activity without necessarily attempting to secure evidence to charge them for terrorist-related activity.
As well as creating the legislative basis for the new suspect community, we also recognize two broader shifts emanating from these developments. First, the dual system of criminal justice originally identified by Hillyard (1993) continues through the integration of many of the PTA's powers into the TA 2000. Indeed, in many respects, it has been extended through a number of measures contained in the development of subsequent counter-terrorism legislation that further undermine due process for suspects. This can be evidenced in the wide discretionary powers of stop and search and arrest under the TA 2000, the extension of pre-charge detention to 28 days (s. 23 of the 2006 Terrorism Act) and also the use of control orders to detain without trial (s. 1 of the 2006 Prevention of Terrorism Act).
We also note the presence of a third shadow system of justice that relates to the separate treatment of foreign nationals suspected of terrorist activity. The system was created by Part IV of ATCSA 2001, which permitted the Home Secretary to indefinitely detain foreign nationals who were suspected of involvement in terrorist activity but who could not be deported. Although Part IV was replaced by control orders that can apply to both British citizens and foreign nationals, McGhee (2008b) argues that this was a temporary solution to the ‘problem’ of foreign terror suspects. Thus, with the introduction of the 2006 Terrorism Act, the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, as well as the development of Memoranda of Understandings between the United Kingdom and a number of countries, there is now a well developed second shadow system to deal with foreign individuals. This would confirm Ibrahim's (2005) contention that, since 11 September, we are witnessing the increasing securitization of migration.
The second development is that within these two shadow systems of justice, we are seeing an increasing shift towards ‘pre-emption’ as a way of dealing with the threat posed by the ‘new terrorism’. The United Kingdom, alongside other liberal democracies, has sought to introduce pre-emptive measures exactly because it perceives ‘terrorism as a catastrophic but incalculable threat that renders earlier security strategies like deterrence obsolete’ (De Goede 2008: 162). Thus, greater distance is drawn between the two shadow systems and the ordinary system designed for ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals’, as counter-terrorism is less concerned with the criminal justice aims of bringing individuals to trial and more with reducing the chance of terrorism (Cheong-Tham and McCulloch 2006). This is evidenced in the United Kingdom's counter-terrorism strategy (HM Government 2009) whereby prosecution has become subjugated to the wider policy goal of disruption. Prosecution appears to have become of secondary importance relative to pre-emptive measures, including the incapacitation of suspects through control orders, deportation and the seizing and freezing of assets.
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Policing the ‘New’ Suspect Community: The Terror of Prevention |
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One of the ironies of the counter-terrorist measures introduced by government is the manufacture of ‘terror’—a form of terror that is experienced by those caught up in the shadow criminal justice systems but is also felt by the wider community that they are from. Hillyard (1993: 262) observed this in relation to the PTA: ‘... the use of successive Prevention of Terrorism Acts has often constituted the terror of prevention. Law is thus an integral part of the repression and organisation of state violence, whether it takes place in a person's home or in police custody.’ Using Hillyard's notion of the ‘terror of prevention’, we argue that, in relation to policing practices, it can form a continuum with stop and search at one end and shoot to kill practices at the other extreme. Stops and searches may be experienced as a form of harassment if individuals feel that they are been deliberately targeted simply as a result of their perceived membership of a social group. Indeed, police counter-terrorism powers under the TA 2000 have proven controversial (Pantazis and Pemberton 2006; Blick et al. 2006; Chakraborti 2007; Moeckli 2007; Pantazis and Pemberton 2008), especially in London, where the powers have been used most (MPA 2007). The following analyses utilize published Home Office/Ministry of Justice statistical data, as well as documentary sources, to examine police stop and search practices under the 2000 Terrorism Act (s. 44(1) and (2)).
Extent of stop and search
Table 1 illustrates the total number of police searches pre and post 2001 under the TA 2000 (column 1). Following the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf in London, as well as other bombings against British targets in 1996, police searches for terrorist-related activities (TRA) increased to almost 44,000 during 1996/97. Thereafter, in the context of the Good Friday Agreement, searches dropped significantly each year until 2001/02, when searches began to rise. The 11 September attacks initiated a major UK police collaboration with US police and homeland security departments, leading to a greater number of searches. Searches continued to increase between 2001/02 and 2005/06, particularly since the July 2005 London bombings. Thus, between 2001/02 and 2006/07, there were 205,000 police searches for TRA in England and Wales—with almost half occurring since 2005/06.
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Whether the data presented in Table 1 represent a true reflection of the use of police counter-terrorism powers is difficult to ascertain. Leaving aside the thorny issue of police under-recording (Smith and Gray 1983; Miller et al. 2002), it is quite possible that these stops and searches represent just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Statewatch (2004) argues that ‘the number of stops and searches as part of anti-terrorist operations is more than double the official figures’ because large numbers of police forces are recording anti-terrorist stop and searches under the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (s. 60). Although the police were given these additional powers to deal with football violence, it is not inconceivable that they might be used for terrorist-related offences. Elsewhere, we argue that several factors make this a plausible claim, although it is difficult to verify without employing an alternative research strategy (Pantazis and Pemberton 2006).
What is significant about s. 44 stops and searches, aside from their growing use, is that they very rarely lead to an arrest (Table 1, columns 1 and 2). From the 205,000 stops and searches carried out since 2001/02, there were only 2,571 arrests (just 1 per cent of the total). Moreover, the Home Office admits that ‘many of the arrests were not under the Terrorism Act’ (Ayres and Murray 2005: 12)—just as Hillyard (1993) had demonstrated with the stop and search powers under the PTA. Searches resulting in arrests under s. 44 are significantly lower than arrests resulting under other legislation such as PACE (s. 1) or the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (s. 60) (Ministry of Justice 2008). The use of s. 44 powers and their low resultant arrests raises critical questions about their intended purpose, as well as their effectiveness. Is the aim of s. 44 powers about deterrence and disruption, as often advocated by the police (HAC 2005)? Or is their use related to intelligence-gathering purposes in the same way as Hillyard argued in relation to police powers under the PTA and, therefore, linked to the construction of a suspect population? Or is it about social control of the ‘dross’ (Choong 1997)? Examining the profile of who is stopped and searched may help to answer these questions.
Ethnic profile of those stopped and searched
The Home Office/Ministry of Justice collects some limited information on the suspect's background. The annual publication, Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System, provides data on the ethnic appearance of the suspect as judged by the police officer making the search, but this is not ideal, particularly when potentially more reliable data are available.5 Critically for our argument, however, the suspect's religious identity is not recorded and so ‘it is therefore impossible to tell how many Muslims have been stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act’ (HAC 2005: 17). We are also hampered by the broad ethnic categorization of suspects into ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Other’, which is made even more complex by the ethnic diversity of Muslims living in Britain. In this context, Chakraborti (2007) writes that whilst the 1950s and 1960s commonwealth immigration resulted in large numbers coming from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and India, later migrants came from Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, whilst more recent settlers have included Bosnians, Kosovans, Kurds, Iranians and Somalians. He further notes that these groups have been supplemented by white converts to Islam. Thus, whilst the link is often made between Muslims and the ‘Asian’ category, it is highly problematic to think of Muslims belonging exclusively to any one ethnic category.
Table 2 shows that, in absolute terms, the ‘White’ population bears the brunt of the majority of s. 44 searches (Table 2). Thus, in 2006/07, 70 per cent of searches were experienced by the ‘White’ population. This may appear surprising, given the preceding discussion. However, the ‘White’ population represents the majority population of Britain and elsewhere we have argued that anti-terror powers have been used to police a number of disparate groups, including anti-war protesters, environmental campaigners who reflect the profile of the general population (Pantazis and Pemberton 2006). Neither must we forget that ‘Irish dissidents’ continue to be regarded by the security services as potential security threats (The Guardian 2006a; 2008). Furthermore, neither can it be ruled out that ‘compensatory stops’ are being used ‘whereby police officers stop and search whole groups of white men in order to make the ethnicity figures seem more reasonable’ (MPA 2007: 51).
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Whilst the ‘White’ population encounter more s. 44 searches than other ethnic groups, the evidence from Table 2 shows that, compared to relative rates in the ‘resident population’, ethnic minorities experience significantly higher rates than ‘White’ people. The increase in searches since 2001/02 has affected all ethnic groups; however, the surge has impacted on Asians more than others (reflecting a six-fold increase between 2001/02 and 2006/07). However, contrary to commonly held beliefs among campaigning groups, politicians and even the police, based on the ‘resident population’ methodology adopted in this paper, the ‘Asian’ category does not emerge as the ethnic group to consistently experience the highest share of searches on an annual basis. Searches were sometimes slightly higher for the ‘Black’ group, but also surprising is the high rates of searches experienced by the ‘Other’ category. Whilst the ‘Black’ population experiences consistently higher rates of searches under other legislation such as PACE and the CJPO (Ministry of Justice 2008),6 the ‘Other’ category captures the Chinese population and any other ethnic category not denoted by the remaining categories used by the police. Thus, it is not inconceivable that it could also include those of Middle Eastern/Arab appearance. If we take 2006/07 as an example, rates were highest for the ‘Black’ population (186 searches per 100,000 population), then the ‘Asian’ group (179 per 100,000 population), followed by the ‘Other’ category (173 per 100,000 population). Bottom is the ‘White’ population, at just 54 per 100,000 population. Put another way, Black and Asian people were more than three times as likely as their ‘White’ counterparts to be stopped and searched under police s. 44 counter-terrorism powers.
There have been long historical concerns about the treatment of the ethnic minorities by the police (Sivanandan 1981; Smith and Gray 1983; Bowling and Philips 2001; Sharp and Atherton 2007). Lord Macpherson's (1999) Inquiry blamed this on police ‘institutionalized racism’, whilst singling out the often racist stereotypes held by individual officers. Specifically, in relation to police powers of stop and search, the term ‘disproportionality’ has been ‘used to describe a disparity, or imbalance in the application of the power to different ethnic groups in comparison with a neutral criterion’ (Bowling and Phillips 2007: 944), whilst there is also increasing usage of the term ‘racial and ethnic profiling’ to capture the idea of the police using racial or ethnic appearance to determine whom to stop and search for terrorist offences (see Kundnani 2006; Harris 2006; Moeckli 2007). These explanations have not gone without challenge and, indeed, since Macpherson, there has been renewed vigour to assess whether his assessment was correct. Home Office research (MVA and Miller 2000) and subsequent studies (e.g. Waddington et al. 2004; Hallsworth 2006) question whether ‘disproportionality’ can adequately explain the ethnic group disparities in police searches. Using alternative research methodologies, based on the ‘available population’ rather than the ‘resident population’ (as used in this paper), MVA and Miller (2000: 7) argue that ‘overall, across the five sites, the findings of this research did not suggest any general pattern of bias against people from minority ethnic groups either as a whole of for particular groups ...’. The argument goes that variations in searches are determined by the fact that ‘ethnic groups place themselves at greater or lesser risk of being stopped by the police through their differential use of public space’ (Waddington et al. 2004: 893). Whilst space limitations do not permit us to enter into a more detailed discussion of the merits of this approach, a recent review of police stop and search tactics, involving a critique of different research strategies, concluded that ‘the most informative measure of disproportionately is the per capita rate of stop and search’ (Bowling and Philips 2007: 959) and this reflects discriminatory police practices.
But, even if we are able to overcome the difficulty in demonstrating bias in police practice, there is still the issue of whether these figures reflect a Muslim bias and, therefore, evidence of Muslims being targeted as a suspect community. For example, Garland et al. (2006) warn that caution is required about police stop and search data and their interpretation of Muslim bias. Due to the crudeness of the ‘Asian’ category in that it captures all those from South Asian communities, regardless of their religious identity, they question the claim of institutional bias made by Muslim organizations based on the current evidence. They argue that police bias cannot be accurately evidenced until police recording practices of ethnicity and religion improve. These authors and others (e.g. Delsol and Shiner 2006) make a case for using mixed methods and sources of evidence in relation to stop and search. We contend that using statements from documentary sources and qualitative data could provide evidence that there exists a police bias against Muslims and, thus, a Muslim suspect community.
In the context of the political discourse that has identified Muslims as the new ‘enemy within’, Hazel Blears’ evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee (2005) on Terrorism and Community Relations perhaps gives the firmest indication that Muslims are being targeted as the new suspect community by the police. As Minister at the Home Office, she claimed that:
... the fact that at the moment the threat is most likely to come from those people associated with an extreme form of Islam, all falsely hiding behind Islam, if you like, in terms of justifying their activities, inevitably means that some of our counter-terrorist powers will be disproportionately experienced by people in the Muslim community. That is the reality of the situation ....
The significance of Blears’ statement cannot be understated. Attracting widespread condemnation from Muslim communities and civil liberty organizations, her statements represented the first time any Minister had sought to justify the acceptance of using police stop and search powers against a specific religious group. Her statement is substantiated by the experiences that were articulated by young Muslims living in London and reported in the MPA (2007: 50–1) publication, Counter-Terrorism: The London Debate:
‘Stop and search is being targeted at young Muslim men’;These findings have been further corroborated by studies that have sought to describe the experiences of Muslims in order to understand the use of stop and search within the current security agenda (e.g. MSF 2007; Spalek et al. 2008).‘Stop and search is only used against immigrants or foreigners’;
‘Police seem to abuse the search laws under Terrorism Act 2000. They just make searches on ethnic minority groups, which are mainly Muslims’;
‘I was stopped under the Terrorism Act 2000 for wearing Islamic clothes with a rucksack near Stockwell tube station ...’.
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The Impacts of Counter-Terrorism Policing on Muslim Communities |
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 TopIntroductionFrom the 'Old' to...Political Discourse and the...Legislating for 'New' Suspect...Policing the 'New' Suspect... The Impacts of Counter-Terrorism... Community Relations:...ConclusionAppendix |
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The previous section charted the use of counter-terrorism powers and considered the ‘terror’ generated when they are deployed. In light of this discussion, the following section in part furthers this analysis through an examination of the impacts of these powers on Muslim communities and also considers how these developments may serve to undermine security. We examine three issues: police–community relations; radicalization; and wider community relations.
Police–community relations: disrupting ‘the flow of information’
Community policing has been viewed as integral to the ‘war on terror’ by New Labour and is embedded within many of its policy documents, perhaps most notably within the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST (HM Government 2009). It is argued that these relations are vital to promoting the ‘flow of information’ from these communities in order to prevent ‘terrorism’ (Innes 2006). Nevertheless, how community policing, or ‘soft’ policing, can co-exist alongside the ‘hard’ approaches that have been charted within this paper thus far is open to critical scrutiny (Spalek and Imtoual 2007). In fact, we would argue that the predominance of these ‘hard’ approaches has been damaging to the potentially more progressive ‘soft’ approaches—a point illustrated in a recent study by Spalek et al. (2008), who argued that a ‘sense of grievance amongst Muslims’ was creating barriers to good community relations. Indeed, these sentiments are shared by some senior police officers. For example, after the Forrest Gate raids, Metropolitan Assistant Commissioner Ghaffur, the highest-ranking Muslim officer in the country, argued that the incident and others like it ‘drip feeds into vulnerable communities and gradually erodes confidence and trust ... the impact of this will be that just at the time we need the confidence and trust of these communities, they may retreat within themselves’ (cited in Blick et al. 2006: 34).
Consequently, deteriorating police–community relations have impacted negatively on the ‘flow of information’ from communities, as highlighted by the example of London's Salafi and Islamist communities (Lambert 2008). Since the 7 July London bombings, Lambert argues, these communities have been at most risk of being targeted as ‘suspect’ because of the ‘distortion’ of these strands within Al Qaeda propaganda. Due to the suspicions surrounding these community groups, the government has sought to work with more ‘moderate’ groups, such as the Sufi community, with the consequence that many Salafi and Islamist groups have disengaged from these processes. Lambert (2008), however, identifies the alienation of Salafi and Islamist groups as potentially having drastic consequences for the ‘flow of information’ as well as the ability of the police to counter Al Qaeda propaganda. He argues (Lambert 2008: 82) that these communities are better placed than others, such as Sufis, who have ‘little knowledge of Al-Qaeda activity’ and ‘even less street credibility to be able to tackle it’. There are notable examples of ‘soft approaches’, such as the work of the MPS Muslim Contact Unit, which has had ‘modest success’ in countering Al Qaeda recruitment. However, it is difficult to see how such skilful, yet ultimately fragile, ‘soft approaches’ can thrive, when the full weight of state suspicion and the brutality of ‘hard’ methods have fallen on these communities.
Radicalization
It is well documented that the use of ‘hard’ approaches during the Irish conflict against the Catholic community served as a recruitment tool for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Hillyard 1993). For Lambert (2008), parallels may be drawn between the ‘over-reaction’ of the British state to political violence in the history of the ‘Irish troubles’ and the present-day threat of ‘Islamic’ terrorism. The symbolic injustices promulgated in the name of the ‘war on terror’ that have disproportionately impacted on Muslims have caused deep resentment within these communities. The detentions originally made under ATCSA Part IV and then the PTA control orders are illustrative of this point. As Rehman (2007: 866–7) argues:
The ATCSA propelled into the Muslim vocabulary the saga of the Belmarsh detainees: held on mere suspicions under section 23 of the Act and facing an environment almost as hostile and poisonous as their co-religionists in Guantanamo Bay, the Muslim men detained at Belmarsh high security prison, came to be referred to as the ‘British Guantanamo Bay’ detainees.
The grievances among the Muslim community produced by the use of such powers should be viewed alongside a series of factors that provide the context within which radicalization make take place. For the authors of Preventing Extremism Together, the question of radicalization could not be decoupled from ‘British foreign policy—especially in the Middle East ... we believe it is a key contributory factor’ (Home Office 2005: 90). Moreover, as Abbas (2007) argues, radicalization of young British Muslims must also be contextualized within their ‘dislocation and alienation’ promoted by the disproportionate levels of poverty, segregation, poor housing conditions, educational underachievement and unemployment they endure. Whilst this list of grievances does not explain why relatively socio-economically privileged individuals are radicalized, McGhee (2008a) suggests that dominant narratives of radicalization fail to take into account the ‘ummatic attachments’ of some individuals that promotes solidarity with fellow oppressed Muslims. Identifying a tipping point amongst a range of potential grievances is difficult, and, moreover to identify within this process the role and impact of police harassment or the use of ‘special powers’ is at present unclear—more detailed micro-sociological work is necessary (Blick et al. 2006). Yet, to not address these grievances is to ignore the important lessons from the Irish conflict.
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Community Relations: ‘Permission’ to Hate |
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The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), in their evidence to the Home Affairs Committee on Terrorism and Community Relations, drew upon the experiences of the Irish community as a suspect community, and articulated the concern that once a community is treated as ‘suspect’ by the police, ‘the public are encouraged to do the same’ (HAC 2005: Vol. 1, para. 171). We contend that high-profile police raids, arrests and detention of ‘Muslim terrorist’ suspects have had a clear impact on the public consciousness. Moreover, the demarcation of a specific social group as a suspect community arguably serves to generate fear of this social group amongst wider society—a point illustrated by opinion polls conducted with Muslims after the 7 July bombings, who reported being viewed with increased suspicion (52 per cent of Muslims surveyed, The Guardian 2006b) and, consequently, that relations with other communities having deteriorated (75 per cent of Muslims surveyed, YouGov 2005). The extent to which these relations have weakened is disturbing. For example, the MCB (HAC 2005: para. 76) reported that ‘76% of its members felt that the attitude of the public had changed since 2001 and that Islamophobia was increasingly becoming acceptable and was already a legitimate form of discrimination’. Similar levels of discrimination have been reported in other surveys. For example, in a survey of 1,125 Muslims, conducted by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) (2004), 80 per cent of participants reported experiencing religious discrimination. Previous studies commissioned by the IHRC in 1999 and 2000 found reported levels of discrimination to be 35 and 45 per cent, respectively (see also the FAIR 2004 study).
Poynting and Mason (2006) offer an explanation for these developments. They argue that the targeting of specific groups by counter-terrorist measures offer wider society ‘permission to hate’ these groups and, consequently, may provide an ‘ideological and moral licence to anti-Muslim hate crime’ (Poynting and Mason 2006: 367). There is considerable evidence to support this contention. For example, the MCB documents the rise of violence experienced by Muslim communities:
Victimisation of Muslims under the anti-terrorism legislation has led to increased incidences of Islamophobia and racism against muslims. This has manifested itself in the form of vandalism of mosques, Muslim graves and homes. The increased hostility towards Muslims has also seen an increase in hate campaigns against Islam and Muslims from far right groups. (HAC 2005: Vol. 2, ev. 30)
Hate crimes against Muslims appear to have risen, particularly since the 7 July bomb attacks (BBC 2005a). For example, in a three-week period in London after the bombings, there were 269 religious hate crimes reported compared with 40 in the same period of 2004 (BBC 2005b). In response to the escalating number of attacks, the Muslim Safety Forum implicated ‘prominent people within our society’ in a process of vilification that identifies British Muslims as sharing ‘something in common with the bombers’ (BBC 2005a).
In summary, the suspicion that underlies the policing of Muslim communities would appear to have legitimated, to some degree, the hate crime experienced by Muslims. As such, the use of these powers has arguably served to further pre-existing social divisions.
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Conclusion |
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The construction of the Irish as a suspect community through the PTA served to radicalize and alienate, and, ultimately prolong the Irish conflict. The lessons of this conflict are largely not being heeded. As we noted, there have been recent attempts to ‘tone down’ the ‘language’ of the ‘war on terror’ by senior ministers and there are positive examples of ‘community policing’. Arguably, these have been lost in the populism of authoritarian counter-terrorism responses and under the weight of the legislation it has championed. As we have demonstrated, the ‘terror of prevention’ continuum, which ranges from the day-to-day harassment of Muslims through stop and search to high-profile police raids, has had a corrosive effect on the relations between Muslim communities and the police. Within this context, the conditions for radicalization are being fomented and the ‘flow of information’ necessary for effective counter-terrorism policing has been jeopardized. Thus, the very powers that are supposed to promote security are serving to undermine it, whilst Muslim communities continue to endure the spectre of state suspicion.
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Appendix |
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Sources: For s. 44(1) and (2), Stop and Search Data: Home Office (2003) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System—2003: A Home Office Publication under section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. London: Home Office; Home Office (2004) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System—2004: A Home Office Publication under section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. London: Home Office; Home Office (2005) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System—2005: A Home Office Publication under section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. London: Home Office; Ministry of Justice (2007) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System—2006: A Home Office Publication under section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. London: Ministry of Justice; Ministry of Justice (2008) Statistics on Race and Criminal Justice System—2006/07: A Home Office Publication under section 95 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991. London: Ministry of Justice.
For Census Data: Current Estimates—Population Estimates by Ethnic Group Mid-2006 (Experimental), Past Estimates—Population Estimates by Ethnic Group Mid-2001–2005 (Experimental), www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=14238; Mid-2001 (Revised) Local Authority Population Studies: 09/09/04, www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=15106; National Statistics (2003) 2001 Census of Population: First Results of Ethnic Groups and Identity, www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/ethnicity0203.pdf.
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Acknowledgements |
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We would like to thank Paddy Hillyard for his helpful comments on a draft of this article.
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Notes |
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1 Fenwick (2002) notes that, by 2000, the ‘temporary’ measures had been in existence for 26 years, with each successor Act proving to be an enlargement of its predecessor despite levels of violence dropping.
2 Despite the focus of Hillyard's (1993) study being on the workings of the PTA, he is also clear about the importance of considering other forces that maintained and consolidated the view as the Irish as suspect.
3 The 2006 Terrorism Act (s. 34) widened this definition further to include acts that influence ‘international governmental organisations’, as well as governments.
4 Of these, two organizations are proscribed under powers introduced in the 2006 Terrorism Act as glorifying terrorism.
5 The police also record the ethnic identity of the suspect as described by the suspect themselves according to 16 Census categories but this is not published in the statistics on Race and Criminal Justice.
6 Bowling and Philips (2007: 943) suggest that it may be ‘possible that stops/searches involving black people may be more likely to recorded than those involving white people due to police officers’ perceived need to "cover their backs" or because stop/searches involving black people are more often confrontational and less likely to be "voluntary"’.
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