One Question
“The police are a reflection of society, they’re taken from society. So if you’ve got sexists, racists, criminals, there needs to be an honest conversation with everyone – your police force is never going to be perfect. All we can do is try our best to identify the ones that are racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever, and deal with those.” Steven Keogh “If you want to talk about advertising, there’s no one on earth that can ever tell them anything positive about the police, because the biggest advert is the actions that came in their lives.” Kay Rufai
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As Keough explained, officers are taught to follow protocol – but education about the importance of treating members of the public in a way that makes their dignity a priority will go a lot further to repair police-community relations than reeling off legal rights. Those relationships have frayed over generations, with each incident compounding existing bad feeling; if advertising is about creating associations, then like their colleagues in the West Midlands, the Met police must contend with the negative ones that are already entrenched in public consciousness. By entreating officers to respond to stories of young people, Rufai’s project opened a dialogue between two groups of people who had otherwise co-existed in a hierarchy; while metrics like violence or drug related crimes weren’t impacted, the artist’s residency made other immeasurably valuable ripples. Placing narrative at the heart of his intervention, Rufai joined an existing conversation rather than shouting over it; instead of papering over old, ugly stories, there is something disarmingly simple about writing them anew.
