Warrior cops to police the poor?

Our Director Richard Garside was quoted on the Aljazeera website on Tuesday talking about what a militarised police force says about society.

Richard explained that the primary role of the police was to maintain social order, not, as is commonly assumed, to stop crime.

He went on to say that:

'The more general point, that the police disproportionately tends towards policing the poor, and that the more unequal the society, the more punitive the criminal justice interventions might be, has some inherent plausibility....One proxy measure might be the proportionate prison population, which tends towards being higher the more unequal a society, and lower the more equal.'