Empire ended abroad, but its policing lived on at home. — Daniel Davis
Racial Foundations: How Empire Shaped the Policing Blueprint
The previous parts of this chapter established how British policing was built on class control, moral regulation, and suspicion-based intervention. But there is a fourth layer to the foundation. One that is harder to see because it was present before Britain’s cities became visibly diverse.
British policing was racialised before it was multiracial. Ideas about who was dangerous, who needed watching, and who posed a collective threat were not responses to demographic change, but imported, through empire long before that change arrived.
This part examines how racial logic entered British policing, how the Irish became the first large domestic suspect population, and what this history means for understanding the system today.
The Racial Logic of “Otherness”
While the Metropolitan Police was taking shape in London, Britain was already a global imperial power. Across the empire, order was maintained through racial hierarchy, military coercion, surveillance, and the systematic categorisation of whole populations. These logics did not stay overseas, and shaped the assumptions of early policymakers, magistrates, inspectors, and Home Office officials determining who was considered as suspicious, needed watching, and who posed a threat, decades before those questions were applied to communities at home.
Officers were learning to police through a racial lens long before Britain had a visibly multiracial population. In the mindset shaped by empire natives were inherently disorderly, Irish people volatile and disloyal, migrant seamen unpredictable, Jewish immigrants threatening, and Black sailors morally suspect. These were not observations drawn from evidence, they were categories inherited from colonial governance and applied domestically.
Although the lens shifted as populations changed, the structure stayed the same: categorise, monitor, pre-empt, and control. Race in British policing was never simply demographic, it was ideological. The ideas came first, the populations came later.
For how these logics were formally constructed into a racial framework for governance, see O.3.
Policing the Irish: The First “Suspect Population”
The clearest early example of this logic operating at home was the policing of Irish migrants arriving in London, Liverpool, and Glasgow throughout the nineteenth century. Irish communities faced intensive surveillance from the outset. They were treated as politically unreliable, prone to violence, resistant to authority, and collectively dangerous. Again, not because of anything they had done, but because of what they were assumed to be.
The Irish became the first large population in Britain to be policed as a collective threat rather than as individuals suspected of specific offences, and the template of nationality functioning as evidence of risk.
This template was later applied to Black communities arriving in British port cities. The policing of the 1919 race riots in Liverpool, Cardiff, and Glasgow, where returning Black and minority ethnic seamen were violently targeted amid post-war competition for work, reinforced rather than challenged racial suspicion. Black residents were treated as the source of disorder rather than its victims. By the time of the Notting Hill riots in 1958, this pattern had hardened. Black communities were again criminalised rather than protected, and their presence framed as the problem
Through the 1960s and 70s, the “sus laws“, provisions of the Victorian-era Vagrancy Act 1824 that allowed police to stop and arrest anyone on suspicion of intending to commit an offence, were used disproportionately against young Black men. No crime was required, suspicion was enough. The logic established in the Met’s earliest years, that certain people could be policed for what they might do, rather than what they had done, was now operating explicitly along racial lines.
The 1981 uprisings in Brixton, Toxteth, Broadwater Farm, and other areas were in large part a response to decades of exactly this kind of policing. They were not the beginning of a problem, but the point at which a much older problem became impossible to ignore.
Why Racial Logic Preceded Racial Diversity
This history matters for a reason that’s easy to miss. If racial disproportionality in policing were simply a response to demographic change and an institution adjusting imperfectly to a more diverse society, then reform would be relatively straightforward: train officers better, reflect communities more accurately, improve communication.
But the evidence points elsewhere. To the racial logic was present in British policing before the communities it would later target had arrived in significant numbers. It was imported from empire, embedded in institutional assumptions, and operational long before it had obvious domestic targets. When those communities eventually arrived, the machinery was already in place.
This is why disproportionality has proven so resistant to reform. It’s not a malfunction, it is the system operating according to assumptions it has carried since its founding.
The Blueprint in Practice
Strip away the origin myths of consent, neutrality, and impartial public service, and what remains is British policing as it was actually designed: preventive rather than reactive, suspicion-based rather than evidence-led, classed in its targeting, racialised in its assumptions, moralising in its reach, and oriented toward order and stability rather than universal safety.
That blueprint did not dissolve as Britain changed, it adapted. Stop and search, gang databases, Prevent referrals, predictive policing tools, and protest intelligence operations all operate on recognisably the same underlying logic, managing populations, anticipating disorder, and policing risk rather than crime. The language is modern, but the structure is not.
The Macpherson Report, which in 1999 found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist following its catastrophic mishandling of Stephen Lawrence’s murder, and the Casey Review in 2023, which found the institution to be institutionally racist, misogynist, and homophobic, did not describe a force that had recently gone wrong. They describe a force whose structural problems have deep roots. Understanding those roots does not excuse what the reports found. But can explain why the findings were so consistent across so many decades, despite so many rounds of reform. The question of how policing organisations respond and resist when those findings are made, is taken up in Volume II and Volume III.
What This Means for Practitioners
Reform is most often framed in terms of training, oversight, cultural change, and communication. These things matter, but have limits when the institution being reformed was not designed to serve all communities equally in the first place.
Practitioners working within or alongside policing today inherit more than uniforms and procedures. They also inherit assumptions about who is risky, who is suspicious, and who needs managing that were built into the system long before any of them arrived. Recognising those assumptions is not about assigning personal blame, but about understanding why certain outcomes keep recurring despite genuine efforts to prevent them.
The system is not broken in the way reform rhetoric usually implies, it’s working according to a design that was never meant to deliver equal safety. That is the uncomfortable starting point for any change that aims to go beyond the surface.
Conclusion: The Foundation Laid
Across its four parts, this chapter has traced the founding architecture of British policing through its interlocking layers: the material conditions of industrialisation that made a new form of control necessary; the political myth of consent that gave that control a respectable face; the operational logic of suspicion, moral regulation, and labour management that made control routine; and the racial foundations, imported from empire, that determined whose bodies would bear the greatest weight of the system.
None of these layers were accidental, and none have fully disappeared. Together they form the foundation on which everything that follows in this series is built. A foundation that is historical, structural, and still active.
The chapters ahead trace how the domestic and imperial logics developed, intertwined, and evolved. How policing travelled through empire, how race was formalised as a governing category, how the “dangerous classes” were invented, and how all of it fed back into the institutions that shape everyday life in Britain today.
The blueprint has been laid, the next step is to see how it spread.
Bridge to O.2
If this chapter has shown how racial logic entered British policing before racial diversity arrived, the next examines where that logic was forged. Because the Metropolitan Police did not develop its methods in isolation, it learned from empire.
O.2 explores:
- how Britain’s colonies became a laboratory for policing techniques unavailable at home
- how surveillance, coercion, and population classification were refined on colonised peoples far from public scrutiny
- and how the methods developed overseas were brought back and applied to communities in Britain
From the foundations at home to the laboratory abroad — and back again.
About the Series
By Daniel Davis | Researcher and Commentator on Policing and Social Justice.
Read Practitioner Brief 0.1— Policing And The Architecture of Control
Continue to 0.2: Imperial Boomerang: How Colonial Policing Came Home (Part 1)
Explore The Full Series: Governing Through Crisis
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