“Clear, Hold, Build”: British Imperialism, Co-option, Resistance, and Pacification Policing

• In Event: Critical Issues in Historical and Transnational Contexts

Abstract

This paper attempts to add to scholarship on the ‘imperial boomerang’ through developing a case study on a quasi-military policing strategy currently being rolled out across police forces in England and Wales; ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ (CHB). This strategy, explicitly drawing on and taking its name from imperial British Army counterinsurgency doctrine, designates specific hyper-local ‘serious crime areas’ in the inner-city as analogous to territories currently in the grip (spatially, economically, and psychologically) of enemy ‘insurgents’. CHB advocates for police to ‘reclaim’ these areas through aggressive and disruptive interventions (‘Clear’), alongside visible police presence (‘Hold’) and attempts to ‘co-produce’ ‘positive’, ‘non-criminal’ activity, alongside community ‘partners’ within these areas; in part through ‘trust-building’ and community co-option (‘Build’). Drawing on evaluative data on CHB and recent Black radical scholarship on the carceral state in the US, I explore CHB and connected policing strategies with the conceptual tools traditionally used to theorise pacification and warfare. Drawing on anti-colonial thinking I explore what counter-tactics might be necessary in order to build alternative abolitionist ‘life-affirming institutions’ when, in these inner-city contexts, policing embodies both the visible ‘hard’ tactics of bullets and ‘bully-vans’ and the more insidious ‘soft’ tactics of (dis)investment, ‘Information Operations’ and community co-option.

Author

• Tim Head, University of Essex