Beat Cops: What the Policing of UK Grime & Drill Music Teaches us about Police Racism in the UK

Join the Centre for Criminology for an insightful online seminar with Dr Lambros Fatsis.

Lambros Fatsis is currently Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Brighton. He has previously taught Criminology and Sociology at the University of Southampton and the University of Sussex, where he was awarded his PhD in Sociology. His main research interests revolve around police racism and the criminalisation of Black music subcultures fusing Cultural Criminology with Black radical thought. Parts of his research have been published by Crime Media Culture and The Sociological Review as well as in blog articles for the British Society of Criminology blog, for which he won the first-ever ‘Blogger of the Year Award’ in 2018. His forthcoming publications include: Policing the Pandemic (co-authored with Melayna Lamb) and The Public and Their Platforms (co-authored with Mark Carrigan), both published by Bristol University Press. When he doesn’t teach or write, he continues to exist as a never-recovering vinyl junkie and purveyor of Afro-Caribbean music.

The perception of UK grime and drill music as violent, threatening and dangerous resonates strongly in media and public discourse, making it difficult to situate such Black music genres outside a law enforcement context. Policing Black music(s) as criminal, however, distracts our attention away from the discriminatory logic and criminal justice processes that make crimes out of rhymes. This presentation aims at openly challenging such punitive thinking, and the disciplinary practices it justifies, by demonstrating how the policing against UK grime and drill offers unique insights into the institutional logic, nature, mission and function of police racism in the UK.

This seminar will be chaired by Dr Anna Di Ronco.

This seminar is part of an online open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Criminology. 

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