Why is policing so hard to reform?

George Floyd wasn't the first black man to die at the hands of a police officer in the U.S.. Before him there were many others, men and boys, women and girls, whose names were chanted by the protesters participating in this year's Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, calling for a radical reform of the police in America.

The issues raised by those deaths do not only touch law enforcement in the U.S.. Almost all European countries have had to confront similar challenges regarding the relationship between police and communities.

CGTN Europe has looked at four countries - the UK, Sweden, Italy and France - that have either implemented far-reaching reforms or failed to, struggling between crises of legitimacy and calls for change.

Police in the UK - and in this case our analysis will be limited to England and Wales - successfully underwent a number of reforms in recent years, which were mostly driven by public calls for more transparency and accountability.

Unlike other European countries, the 43 local police forces that constitute the police in England and Wales are overseen by an independent body, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary.

In 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron's government introduced elected police and crime commissioners, individuals who are elected every four years to oversee the police in their area. These commissioners don't have operational control of the police, so they can't tell police officers what to do, but they set the budget and decide on broad strategic priorities, as well as appointing the chief of police in each area.

Additionally, in terms of police accountability, in 2018 the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) was introduced in England and Wales to handle complaints against the police and oversee the system.

Recent public surveys show that the majority of the population is satisfied with the police – a support that's important to police in the UK, where the model of policing is based on consent.

But there's an important exception: "What is certainly true is that black people and people of mixed ethnicity in the UK have less confidence in the police than white people do and actually less than Asian people do and that other people of other ethnicities do," says Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation - a British think tank that conducts research on policing and crime issues and contributes to the creation of public policies around those issues.

The problem of structural racism within the British police emerged strongly only years after the infamous murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager who was killed in a racially motivated attack in south-east London in 1993. After an initial investigation, five suspects were arrested but not charged. The case was so poorly handled by the police that a public inquiry in 1998-9 led by Sir William MacPherson concluded that London's Metropolitan Police Service was 'institutionally racist'.

The inquiry pushed policing to change and urged government and police to act to increase trust and confidence in policing among minority ethnic communities. After a change in the law to allow for a new trial, Lawrence's killers were jailed in 2012.

As a result of the inquiry into Lawrence's murder "there's been an aspiration, certainly for the last 20 years, to increase diversity in policing," says Muir. "And we have seen some improvements in diversity. I think the numbers of black and minority ethnic police officers have increased from about three percent to about seven percent. It's higher in the bigger cities. I think it's about 15 percent in London now, so there has been an improvement.

"But, you know, if you think about London, 40 percent of the people who live in London are not white and only 15 percent of the police in London are not white. So there's still a big disparity. So there's still a long way to go."

"We acknowledge that BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] groups are underrepresented in the police force, and are actively implementing measures to make greater representation a reality," says a spokesperson from the UK Home Office.  "We anticipate that the ongoing 'uplift' – the recruitment of 20,000 new police officers – will lead to positive changes in this regard."

Representatives of the police say they're committed to fill this gap in representation within their officers. "We recognize we have been far too slow to increase diversity and we know there is still a long way to go so that policing is truly reflective of the communities we serve," said Chief Constable Ian Hopkins in a recent statement.

"The slower rate of progress in recruiting black police officers is likely to reflect the fact that confidence in police has historically been lower among black people than white or Asian – although latest statistics show an improving picture. Alongside that, for the last ten years most of the police service was unable to recruit new officers and staff, which has had an impact."

Black people in the UK are also more likely to undergo stop and searches and to be arrested than white people. According to figures shared by the UK Government, between April 2018 and March 2019 there were 4 stop and searches for every 1,000 white people compared with 38 for every 1,000 black people.

Muir says policing has changed a lot in recent times, and now faces a number of unprecedented challenges such as cyber-crime, domestic abuse and sexual crimes, while 20 years ago police officers mostly dealt with burglary and theft.

In the UK, as in many other European countries, the police are also facing the consequences of austerity in the public sector, which led to the worsening of issues such as homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health problems. Issues that the police are often called to deal with, but are not well equipped for.

While in the U.S. the police have received increasing funding in recent years, austerity measures in public spending have led to cuts to the police in England and Wales of about 20 percent in the last 10 years. Personnel numbers have fallen from 140,000 to 120,000 officers, although the current government is pledging to reverse that decline.

"What we haven't done, which those calling for defund have argued for, is that we haven't diverted that money into preventative services," says Muir. "We just use it to pay off the deficit on the government's finances."

Muir believes that there's a point of mutual understanding between police and critics of the police over the need to review the role and purpose of policing. "If you look at what's been written, particularly in America as part of Black Lives Matter, a lot of people have said, 'Well, the police have become overextended. The police are now trying to do too much.' And they're dealing with mental health problems, homelessness and parking, terrorism.

"And they rightly say, 'Should the police be dealing with all of these things?' And I think people are right to ask that question. But actually, the police themselves, certainly here, agree with that. I mean, by and large, they say, 'We've been stretched too wide. We need to focus on our core responsibilities.'"

The Swedish police have also been the subject of a major organizational reform in 2015, when a single national police was created out of the 21 autonomous county police authorities to improve local responsiveness and efficiency.

"There is a great deal of trust between the Police and the citizens," says a spokesperson for the Swedish national police. "The SOM-institute at the University of Gothenburg conducts an opinion poll every year, and the results show that 67 percent of citizens have good faith in the Police Authority."

But if the majority of the Swedish population supports the police, that isn't true for minority communities. According to local BLM protesters, Sweden, although often perceived as a model of egalitarian policies, has a history of racist policing and police violence shaped by its colonial past.

"The view that people have of Sweden, this humanitarian 'see no evil, do no evil, speak no evil' mindset that we want to sell the rest of the world, that we have actually sold the rest of the world quite well, it is not true," says Aysha Jones, activist and organizer of Black Lives Matter Sweden. "If you ask anyone who's any part of a minority, they would tell you that that vision that Sweden is trying to sell is based on lies."

During the recent BLM protests in the country, footage of police officers using pepper spray and knee-holds against protesters was shared online. BLM campaigners ask that the Swedish government defund the police and redirect the budget towards services that will help the community: in the past three years, the Swedish Police Authority received an increase of $760 million in funding from the government, increasing policing and security activities in marginalized and immigrant neighborhoods.

Jones says the suburbs where she lives, populated largely by residents with immigrant backgrounds or at least 'non Swedish' people, are seen as a 'no-go zone'.  "And by non-Swedish I mean people that are not pale, blond, named Sven or Andersson," adds Jones.

"In my area, where I live, they've just built this luxurious - like you wouldn't even see it in the movies - type of police fort," Jones describes. "And they invested so many millions, if not billions, into this police fort. And that is money that could have gone to the schools that they have closed in these areas. That is money that could have gone to the after school activities that they have closed. That is money that could have gone to the daycares."

The Swedish Police denies the existence of 'no-go zones' in Sweden, and says it's a term they don't use.

Episodes of discrimination against BAME communities, according to the police, have been "individual cases, not on an organized level."

"The authorities work with these questions on a long term basis, to secure a healthy culture within the organization," a spokesperson said.

"The role of the police is to uphold the law, reduce crime and increase security for everyone in society, regardless of background, gender, religion or sexual orientation. A prerequisite for us to be able to do a good job is by maintaining the trust from the public."

Despite the alleged problems existing within the Swedish police force, the country is home to an outwidely recognized example of police reform: the creation of Stockholm's mental health ambulance service.

Sweden has implemented a new way of policing the mentally ill, the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PAM) – taking the police out of the action entirely. In 2015, mental health professionals have been deployed instead of police officers to respond to call involving people struggling with mental health issues. Two trained nurses and a driver are deployed on an emergency vehicle and answer five to six emergencies every shift.

In the U.S., a report from 2016 recorded that 10 percent of police encounters involved people who were mentally ill. Statistically, mentally ill people are also more likely to be killed during a police encounter.

The Swedish mental health ambulance project represents the kind of reform other countries would like to implement - but the Swedish police system itself isn't past the need for more reforming. "We also want the police in Sweden to be more educated and more controlled," says Jones. "They have to have some type of neutral organization that reviews the police whenever the police does something wrong. That is something that we don't have here in Sweden."

The Italian police system, like others in Europe - France and Spain, for example - is a pluralist one, where law enforcement is split between 4 different forces with different functions: Polizia Statale (in charge of public safety), Carabinieri (the national gendarmerie, officially part of the military), Polizia Penitenziaria (working within prisons), and Guardia Finanziaria (another militarized force dealing with financial crime).

It's a complex system to navigate from an external perspective, especially when it comes to the figures of Polizia Statale's officers and Carabinieri, both in charge of public safety, but fundamentally different.

Initially both part of the military, Polizia Statale was reformed in 1981 to become a civil force. "In 1981, the police went from officially being part of the military, like Carabinieri, to become a civilian force," explains a source from the Italian police. "This change represented a historic turning point – for example, we could have trade unions – but our badges didn't change. On our uniforms we still had the same badges we had in the military."

The badges were officially changed only one year ago, in 2019. "This change wasn't only a formality: it was very important to mirror how the police has changed in the last forty years," the source said.

But the role of the military in Italy to enforce public order is still visible in the shape of the Carabinieri. In the midst of the pandemic, we saw the army getting involved and military trucks carrying the bodies of the victims of COVID-19 out of Bergamo, for example.

Military and police expenses cost Italy around $53 billion annually, and have grown their share of GDP, while schools and hospitals have suffered from severe cuts to their sectors in recent years.

Italo di Sabato of the Italian independent think tank Osservatorio Repressione is very critical of the situation, and thinks that more people in the country should discuss defunding the police as protesters are doing in the U.S.

"In this country, we find that the national health services are totally devastated by privatization and budget cuts, and we had the paradox of the coronavirus emergency, where police officers were everywhere but we didn't have enough resources in hospitals," he says. "And this should produce outrage, should generate a conversation or a movement like the one in the U.S. after the death of George Floyd."

But according to Di Sabato, reforming Italian policing isn't only a matter of budget and defunding. It's also an issue of fighting against the increasing use of policing as a tool of repression and opposing the impunity that the police seem to enjoy when found guilty of misconduct.

When thinking about police abuses in Italy, the events surrounding the G8 Summit in Genoa are at the forefront of the discussion. Back in July 2001, the gross misconduct of the Italian police in gained international attention: around 200,000 demonstrators had gathered in the city to protest at the summit, and dozens of people were unlawfully detained, beaten up and tortured by the police.

The police falsified evidence to justify the raid of the Diaz school, where protesters and journalists slept, planting Molotov cocktails and other weapons around the building, and beat up demonstrators - even when they were lying down or sleeping.

They arrested hundreds of people and brought them to the Bolzaneto detention center, where they tortured them, shaved the heads of those with dreadlocks, and allegedly threatened the women with sexual violence.

Carlo Giuliani, 23, was shot in the head while attacking a police van.

Despite being found guilty on several counts, no police officers involved in the events of 2001 served any jail time.

A source within the Italian police, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that things have changed from 2001, and what happened then wouldn't happen again in Italy. "It was a series of mistakes, errors in planning the services and managing the protests," he explains. From then, the police has changed its approach to public protests, getting in touch with demonstrators in advance, planning support services ahead.

It's true that after the G8, there wasn't any other case of police misconduct of such scale in Italy. But there have been individual cases of police brutality that have occupied the Italian headlines.

In 2005, 18-year-old student Federico Aldrovandi died of asphyxiation after being beaten up by four police officers who had stopped him while he was heading home after a night out with friends. The officers were found guilty of killing Aldrovandi in 2012 and were given 3 years of jail time, but as the Italian Parliament reduced their sentences, by 2014 two of them were already back at work.  

"Without a serious reform, without a proper democratic training, the police can only change for the worse," says Haidi Gaggio, the mother of Carlo Giuliani, as she lists of names of other victims of police violence.

The Italian police claims that police brutality isn't a systemic problem within the force, and that officers that are guilty of acting with excessive force are always prosecuted.

But the process isn't always as straightforward. Families of victims of police brutality in Italy, like Gaggio, have had to fight many years in their quests for justice.

One of these was the family of Stefano Cucchi, beaten up to death by officers of the Carabinieri while under arrest in jail in 2009. It took ten years for Cucchi's family to see justice prevail: after a first trial in 2013 found the police officers involved not guilty, only in November 2019, after a long battle against the omertà within the institutions, two officers were found guilty of murdering Cucchi and were given 12 years in prison.

According to Di Sabato, a sense of police impunity has been fostered by the way certain groups – drug users, migrants - have been criminalized in Italy in recent decades.

"We need to look at the way media and politicians treated these cases to understand," he explains. "Stefano Cucchi was described as a drug user, just like Federico Aldrovandi - either he was drunk or he was on drugs. There was an attempt to classify the victims in that category that we can call dangerous people. And this blocked a real discussion or a debate around the necessary reform of the police and how democratic the state really is."

Currently, the Italian public appears to be divided in its feeling toward the national police over the role they're playing to maintain order and ensure people follow COVID-19 restrictions. Despite a majority recognizing the importance of enforcing the rules, there have been cases of police officers falling victim to attacks by angry civilians protesting against the restrictions.

"It's a very bad climate in France at the moment," says Pauline Birolini from the French NGO SOS Racisme. "So there is this part of the population that defends the police no matter what. But I think that now most of the population doesn't really feel protected by the police anymore. And I think it's terrible because protecting population is the number one action why the police is here.

"A lot of people are scared to go and file complaints now because they feel like they're not taken seriously by the police. And also, in everyday life, even people that are not victims of any offenses, they fear more and more the police.

"Even me, sometimes I'm scared to go and protest because you don't know what's going to happen. You feel unsafe. You're faced with policemen that don't even talk to you."

The BLM demonstrations in the U.S. have resonated strongly in France, where thousands of people took to the streets to protest against discrimination and police violence in the country. Two cases have been brought back to the spotlight and have become the focus of the French campaign: the deaths in police custody of Adama Traoré in 2016 and Cedric Chouviat in January 2020.

24-year-old Traoré died after officers restrained him by pinning him to the ground on his stomach, a technique that's considered controversial. His case is still under investigation, and no officer has been charged over his death.

42-year-old delivery man Chouviat, who was stopped while riding his scooter near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, was held in a chokehold by three officers while a fourth filmed the arrest. He reportedly said "J'etouffe" ("I'm suffocating" in French) seven times before collapsing, and died of asphyxiation at the hospital two days after arrest.

The three officers who killed Chouviat were charged with manslaughter and the aftermath of his case also saw calls for a change in policing techniques - such as banning the use of chokeholds. Former Interior Minister Christophe Castaner had already attempted to impose such a restriction, but his plans were set aside in June after protests by police unions.

"We've been advocating to create more specific training for police officers, also to work on the stereotypes and those bias, to learn how to recognize them - because we all have bias, we all have stereotypes, and it's normal, it's human nature," explains Birolini. "But it's really complicated because there's a lot of police unions that are very strong and that do not want to have such training. So it's really hard for us to convince the government to change its politics in that direction."

The problems associated with confrontational tactics were recognized by the French government after the public recoiled at the view of police brutality during the protests of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and the strikes against pension reforms, with officers teargassing crowds and striking out with batons.

But prosecuting officers who have abused their powers isn't as straightforward as in some other countries.

"It's like a corporation, it's policemen investigating others policemen's actions," Birolini explains. "Police, like in a lot of countries, are a very big corporation where they all help each other. And it's very hard, you cannot really speak out from the inside."

The country has attempted police reforms for the last 40 years. A first experiment was made in 1997 with the electoral victory of the Socialist Party and Lionel Jospin as prime minister, who promoted the creation of neighborhood policing (police de proximité). The initiative was criticized by the police as a 'soft' approach to crime, and after the electoral defeat of Jospin in 2002, the neighborhood policing approach was officially ended by interior minister and future president Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced a new policing strategy based on what he called "culture du résultat", focused on arrest and detention rates. This approach was linked to an increase in police aggression and 'easy' arrests of illegal migrants and marijuana consumers.

"Policemen have a tendency to want to make more arrests and things like that," says Birolini. "And the easiest arrests most of the times are to go to sensitive neighborhoods with drug issues, and to arrest young people that are just dealing a little bit of drugs. And most of the time in these sensitive neighborhoods, that's people of African descent, Arabic descent."

There was another attempt at reintroducing a form of neighborhood policing by François Hollande in 2012 during his mandate as president, but that was soon to be derailed by the terrorist attacks of 2015, which redirected resources to intelligence and anti-terrorist units and extended the power of the police.

Amid the ongoing terror threat, President Emmanuel Macron faces demands for police reform by civil rights movements and anger from an overstretched police.

"Macron said in the beginning of his mandate that it was something that was important, that he was going to fight against discrimination and against racism, that it was a priority for his mandate," says Birolini. "For now, we haven't seen anything concrete. That's the issue, we're still waiting and we're hoping that it will be a very important and central topic in the next presidential elections."

A spokesperson for the police trade union Alliance Police Nationale did not respond to questions from CGTN Europe about the alleged "fracture" between police and sections of the French public.

According to Muir, often policing reforms occur as consequences of scandals and crisis, or they tend to be part of a government's  political strategy- but they're rarely initiated by the police themselves. "I think policing does have quite a conservative organizational culture. And I think part of it is due to the fact that I think police culture can be quite defensive.

"I think because of the nature of their job, they tend to club together - there's a lot of camaraderie. It can be quite a dangerous job and so I think there's a lot of, you know, 'We're all in this together' and they tend to almost see themselves as sort of standing apart slightly from society. And they get very defensive about criticism from the outside."

"First of all, we need to start from the idea that police officers are public figures that have an absolutely fundamental role in maintaining order, but they're also people that are used a bit as buffers between the institutions and society, so they're in a condition of limbo that's already quite stressful," explains Cristina Civilotti, a psychologist and therapist conducting research at the University of Turin, in Italy, on the stress and trauma police officers face in the course of their work.

Every individual situation is different, Civilotti notes, but most police officers get into the profession with one of two mindsets: pride in their role, or economic interest.

Although most of us might instictively prefer police officers motivated by the ideal of protecting society rather than pursuing a steady salary, Civilotti warns that with this pride comes with a sense of belonging that can turn vicious if officers start feeling alienated from that same society they're serving.

"It can transform itself into a feeling of not belonging, which hurts the individual, or even worse into a feeling that creates antagonism against society."

According to Civilotti, this potentially dangerous situation derives from the stress factors inherent to the profession: from the exhausting working hours and their impact on officers' personal life; to the force's group sense of identity and mentality; to the overwhelming power acquired by virtue of holding a weapon, for which many police officers aren't prepared.

Research shows that being exposed to traumatic or violent events also has an impact on police officers' mental wellbeing and behavior, with the potential of turning into aggressive conduct.

"A police officer who might exercise violence during the job isn't necessarily a violent person in their private life," says Civilotti. "It's mostly out of self-protection. By being exposed to violent events, an officer might absorb and develop violent behaviors and the risk is that they adopt these behaviors without the supervision of a common sense of ethics that they'd have otherwise in a personal, private context as civilians."

These violent behaviors emerge with difficulties from the forces, as "protecting each other, protecting the colleagues often leads to omertà," says Civilotti. "But this happens also because there's still shame within the force to show vulnerability, depression, anger."

For French civil rights campaigner Birolini, it's the government who has to step up to implement reforms: "I think the main is that the government doesn't really acknowledge that there is a problem with police violence, or they tend to look the other way, and they tend to say that there's no police violence in France."

But the global movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd makes the chance for reforms look a bit more possible and in reach. "I hear people in everyday life talking about it, media talk much more about it, politicians also," says Birolini about police violence. "I think it's a good thing. I just hope that it will not remain at the phase of the talking, but I hope that concrete steps will be taken and that proposals that have been made for a long time by civil society professionals will be listened to and that things will actually change."

"I think that mankind is born good," says Jones from Sweden when asked about whether she think countries will solve the problem of police brutality and structural racism. "I do believe that as soon as you give people the facts, people are going to want to do the right thing." But she adds that, unfortunately, she doesn't think these will be changes that her generation, or her children's generation, will be able to see. "A change is coming, but it won't be now," she says. "I won't be living to see it, and I don't think that my kids will be living to see it. But I do think that it is coming."