Arresting Sounds: What the Policing of UK Soundsystem Culture Can Teach Us About Institutional Racism

Despite a long history of policing Black music culture(s), across the African diaspora, criminologists have paid scant attention to policing as an instrument of racial rule. However, knowledge of how Black cultural life is policed is essential for understanding why it is attracts police attention in the first place. This book chapter looks at the criminalisation of UK reggae, grime, and drill music to reveal what is policed when such genres are policed. Arguing that the suppression of Black British soundsystem culture should be understood in the context of institutional racism in the UK, cultural and racial prejudice will be blamed for turning respectable forms of public participation into receptacles of racist myths about “black criminality”. By way of conclusion, UK soundsystem culture will be (re)introduced as a unique cultural ecosystem which creates and sustains active public life through its technological innovations (equipment), sonic architecture (frequencies, beats), communicative practices (toasting, rhyming, rapping, spitting), and politically-conscious content (lyrics).