Conclusion

Abstract

The New York Roundtable that gave rise to this edited collection was a sobering experience for the British delegation. We left for New York on 9 August 2011, less than a week after police shot and killed Mark Duggan, whom they suspected of being a prominent gang member — a claim that has been disputed by his family (Moore, 2014). The riots that ensued provided a distant backdrop to our meeting, but lent the proceedings an eerie sense of urgency. While it was abundantly clear that all was not well at home, many of us were struck by how polarised the situation was in the US. We were told that several representatives from local community groups had refused to attend the event because the host institution had a history of training police officers; those community members who did attend talked about regular armed patrols in their neighbourhoods and spoke of the police as an occupying force, intent on harassment and intimidation; and we visited a Brooklyn-based community project that regularly took to the streets to film the police as a means of ‘empowering communities, ending police misconduct, unprofessional behavior, and discrimination’ (CopWatchNYC, 2013). Three years later, as we sit down to write this conclusion, it is the US that is picking up the pieces after rioting sparked by the fatal police shooting of a young black man — 18-year-old Michael Brown.