Keeping us safe
The Runnymede Trust’s new report, Keeping Us Safe, calls for a fundamental shift in how the UK approaches safety, harm prevention and justice. Drawing on polling and in-depth community-based qualitative research, it finds strong public support for social investment over punitive enforcement when nuanced choices are on offer. As Farzana Khan, with Healing Justice Ldn, emphasises in the report’s foreword, the systems we rely on to create safety, justice and health cannot themselves be places of injustice, harm and violence.
The flourishing and freedoms of a society can be measured by its people’s capacity to dream and build life-affirming material infrastructures and social relations that keep all people safe, belonging and dignified.
By life-affirming infrastructures, we mean public and civic provisions: housing, education, health, transport, food systems and more that fundamentally enhance the quality of people’s lives. Not merely by prolonging life expectancy or ensuring financial stability, but in a fuller sense of living well with each other and with the planet.
By life-affirming social relations, we mean communities that are healthy, rooted in belonging, and capable of responding to harms and injustices in accountable and transformative ways. Communities that can address conflict without dispossessing or disposing of each other, and without entering cycles of violence and punishment.
What this requires is that the systems we rely on to create safety, justice and health cannot themselves be places of injustice, harm and violence, as is currently the case across many of our public institutions.
Keeping Us Safe reckons with the origins, development and maintenance of infrastructures of harm that are disguised as infrastructures of help. Often we turn to institutions like the police – despite decades of evidence of racism, discrimination and failing of the public – because we have been conditioned, both materially and culturally, to see policing as the only inevitable response to harm.
For decades, it has been documented – particularly by marginalised and racially minoritised people – that policing and the wider carceral structure (including detention, border enforcement and psychiatric restraint) don’t merely fail to deliver safety, but actively produce harm. That they criminalise and punish people when they are most in need of support. If we are serious about collective health and safety – which we all require and deserve – then we need a total reimagining of these structures.
‘How do we create the conditions for healing, health and flourishing?’
Keeping Us Safe offers a powerful proposition and invitation to build responses to harm that don’t reproduce the violence caused by policing and punishment, but instead meet our fundamental longing for safety. It asks us to consider how we create the conditions for safety – conditions that are deeply intertwined with dignity, health and belonging for us all.
It accounts for these longings and demands from a grounded and practical space, attending to our material, emotional, social and spiritual needs, and to what communities themselves are calling for. It helps us begin at the right place: ‘What do our communities really need for the conditions of safety, accountability, protection and health?’ Not: ‘We need more police on the streets and harsher sentences to make us safer’ – as is the mainstream rhetoric.
In a time of escalating economic, social, political and ecological crises, we are witnessing the weaponisation of criminality to deepen austerity, repression and inequity, and to advance authoritarian and far-right agendas. In this moment, we must confront a fundamental question: if violence begets violence and harm begets harm, how do we create the conditions for healing, health and flourishing instead?
At Healing Justice London – an organisation building community-led healing in response to intimate, interpersonal and structural violence – we grapple with the scale of distress and suffering we are witnessing. Nearly two decades of practice affirm what the many community responses in this report make clear: without structural change, we are projected towards a future with more violence, more trauma and more harm.
Now is the time to interrupt that trajectory and to turn towards our deepest longings: to be well, to be safe, to be loved, to be cared for, to live in dignity and to belong. And to ensure these are not privileges reserved for those protected by hierarchies of race, class, gender, sexuality and ableism but available to all of us.
The pursuit of collective safety and wellbeing is all our work. One that requires a total transformation of how our society is organised – including our notions of morality, our stake in each other’s lives and the civic and public services and infrastructure that we have. It demands that we redefine safety outside of securitisation, protection of property and punishment in the interests of capital, states and corporations, and instead towards meaningful safety for people and the planet.
So that when people encounter our communities, they can see by the material and social design of our institutions and relations, that life here is precious, cared for and we made it so.
Keeping Us Safe: Rethinking Policing, Harm and Justice is out now.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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