KEIR STARMER’s reaction to the demand by Black Lives Matter campaigners — that controls on the funding of police forces be utilised to modify the way the police operate — fell squarely into the range of responses that senior law enforcement officials offer when the operations of the state’s coercive apparatus are challenged.

Faced with a popular demand that confronts the code of inviolability with which state institutions cloak themselves, the former Director of Public Prosecutions naturally thought such an outlandish idea was “nonsense.”

In fact, such controls on public expenditure are quite routine. Conservative and Labour governments routinely use funding as a way of compelling local authorities to operate in ways the State prefers.

The idea that such routine policy procedures cannot apply to the police shows how powerful are the myths which obscure the reality of policing our class-divided society.

“Defund the police” is a simple slogan that captures the complex reality that the police function in contradictory ways and that while some of their functions command wide approval, the way the police service operates in particular places and in relation to particular people is a highly accurate measure of how homogenous and integrated a society is. Or to put it another way, how sharply class antagonisms are expressed.

If the slogan “defund the police” evokes a positive response in any part of society this signifies that the codes of consent which allow police to appear to function unchallenged have broken down.

In Britain this happens every decade or so, and every time the demand that police forces be held accountable to the people they police is raised again.

Britain has a more or less unified national police regime which is obscured by a pretence that it is locally controlled and directed. Nominally it is divided into local forces but successive governments have strengthening the trend to uniformity.

The Metropolitan Police — for most of its existence under the direct control of the Home Office rather than nominally subordinate to local oversight bodies — is now rather loosely under the mayor of London.

Not that any of these formal arrangements make much difference to the way police forces operate when driven by either central government edict or their own institutional imperatives.

The preferred method of central control since 1948 has been reliant on the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) structures.

ACPO was a private limited company funded by the state which co-ordinated and directed police operations at national level. It evolved in order to resolve the notional local accountability of police forces with the increasing drive to centralise.

ACPO acquired wide executive powers including the operational direction of investigations, anti-terrorism measures and the control of major operations, such as policing the 1984 Miners’ Strike.

For the last decade successive governments have modified this arrangement, rebranding ACPO as the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) and creating a loose framework of oversight and accountability with the election of local police and crime commissioners.

In addition to the executive functions that the NPCC has acquired it operates as a kind of ‘trade union’ for the corps of senior police officers. Two years ago it threatened the government with legal action over cuts to police budgets. Apart from any professional concerns top cops may have had about service levels and resources they perceived a direct threat to the viability of their pension scheme with the new funding arrangements.

It seems that police commanders at least understand the utility of measures to “defund” the police.

Last years’ National Crime Survey found that 75 per cent of people over 16 expressed confidence in their local police.

The way in which this official survey frames the question focusses on the specifically local character of policing. Its conclusions are a striking illustration that somewhere around 14 million people don’t have confidence in their local police, while it is an uncontested fact that levels of dissatisfaction are much higher in working-class and black communities.

Black Lives Matter is not the ephemeral expression of a passing phase. It is the expression of a deep-rooted, systemic problem that police forces have in class society in securing consent for their operations in general, and for their tactics in relation to the working class and to black people in particular.

For senior police in many European countries — where parallel police forces operate under the hierarchical control of different ministries and are often the direct instruments of antagonistic political tendencies — this model, where a nominally private association receives state funding and co-ordinates many police functions and in practice makes national policy, excites both disbelief and envy.

Policing is very expensive. The EU average of expenditure on public order and safety is €507 per inhabitant. Only Luxembourg spends more per capita than Britain’s €724.

Although police forces constantly complain of underfunding and recent Conservative governments have proved less accommodating towards the police than their immediate predecessors, when push comes to shove, as it did in the 1984 miners’ strike, the government found the extra £300 million.

The government worries about public perceptions of policing. Earlier Home Office research concluded that “All social groups had little knowledge of police activities or the rationale for them.” One result is that at the operational level the police manage the gap between popular perceptions of what they do and the reality with a public-relations-orientated response that reinforces the myths.

Many people are stuck in a romanticised notion that visible local police patrols are effective in dealing with crime, although the Home Office concluded that some people are more open to the idea that a “more proactive, targeted, solution-orientated policing” including covert action is more useful.

Police struggle to make this visible and understood at local level. At the top end this approach is spectacular. The highly complex Europe-wide drugs bust last week, directed by Dutch and French forces, is a good example.

This was based on a high degree of inter-force co-operation and resulted in more than 800 arrests while two tonnes of drugs and £54 million in cash were seized. The British end of this operation netted £13.3 million and resulted in 171 arrests. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick described it as a “game changer.”

It was certainly an effective operation and credit goes to the people who cracked the encrypted messaging system used by the gangsters’ management and for the media-savvy staff work which allowed Priti Patel to pose even before the early morning news.

However, the market conditions which called forth such a large criminal organisation as the one disrupted have not disappeared and new networks, possibly violent rivals to the gangs just put out of business, will emerge. Game changer it is not.

At local level pro-active policing is not always “solution-orientated” but more problem-creating. In practice policing functions on the assumption that the public is not a single entity and that a “segmented” approach with different “styles” of policing appropriate for different groups is necessary.

This is the normal operational methodology dressed up in the language of academic criminology. It informs decision making at both national and strategic level.

At local level every police force, in dealing with different groups of people, draws on a wide repertoire of methods. Stop and search, which leads to the kind of encounter that resulted in George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, is a basic operational tool and every police officer worldwide knows just how unpredictable each encounter can be.This is the sharp end of pro-active policing.

For black people in many countries, not knowing the codes of behaviour that shape the expectations of everyone in these situations will get you arrested and can get you killed.

“Respectable opinion” is struggling to get a grip on Black Lives Matter phenomena. Conservative Home, for example, which preens itself in the poseur politics of the right wing, anxiously hunts down “Marxist” plotters and extreme left-wing groups. The reality is that this movement is home grown and deeply rooted and thus, for the Establishment, a much more dangerous phenomenon.

It is led by a diverse range of forces including important cultural figures: driven more by the multitude of negative experiences that black people have of the police than by any over-arching political agenda, and it has spectacularly transcended racial divisions and mobilised a new layer of enthusiastic local organisers.

Ministers are very careful about how they talk about the Black Lives Matter movement, conscious that it has catalysed opinion and action way beyond black constituencies.

The demand that the police become accountable to the communities they serve is a demand for justice that resonates in every part of society and one, you might expect, that any prominent figure in the justice sector might endorse.

It is a demand that, if previous experience is a guide, will not be met except by cosmetic changes and sweet words.

There is already something of a trend to make this issue less about measures to challenge the structural racism across British society and the institutional racism of the police in particular, and more about making white people conscious of any “privileges” a white skin confers.

Deepening political understanding of the role that racism plays and has played in the murderous development of British capitalism is one thing – and something done spectacularly well by Bristolians in toppling their local slaver statue. Displacing this in order to refocus anger on our inner selves something else.

Changing the way people think is a difficult task unless they are involved in changing the way the world works. The sweeping range of people involved in the BLM movement will not find it easy to achieve their common objectives in the face of the enormous barriers that exist to protect servants of the state and inviolability of state institutions.

But in trying they are already changing not only the minds of millions but themselves into citizens of a new age yet to be born.