FROM CRIME FIGHTING TO COUNTERINSURGENCY: The Transformation of London’s Special Patrol Group in the 1970s

Julian Go

Small Wars and Insurgencies, 2022, vol. 33, issue 4-5, 654-672

Abstract: The Special Patrol Group (SPG) of the London Metropolitan Police was formed as a crime-fighting unit in 1965. Beginning in the early 1970s, however, it underwent a transformation of ‘colonial counterinsurgenization’. The SPG shifted its initial role and increasingly took on the characteristics of a colonial counterinsurgency police force operating in the metropolis. The change is seen in the SPG’s approach to public order policing and crime prevention, especially in London’s African-Caribbean communities. The new counterinsurgency tactics of the SPG in those communities in turn generated the conditions for the very sorts of metropolitan uprisings the SPG had sought to subdue.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2021.1979714

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