Adam Elliott-Cooper: Black Resistance and the History of Policing

Before Adam Elliott-Cooper wrote a book about policing, he was discussing it with young people in Hackney. Working as a youth worker in 2011, he found that a workshop about stop and search could quickly become a much wider conversation. Young people wanted to understand the history behind their encounters with the police. They also wanted practical ways to challenge the misuse of power. Those questions helped set the direction of his research. ^[1]

His writing has kept that connection between explanation and action. As an academic and campaigner, he examines how policing operates, how its powers have developed, and how people organise against racism within it. His first solo book, Black Resistance to British Policing, published in 2021, places those struggles within a longer history. Its central subjects include the people doing the organising, whose work can disappear when public attention settles on a confrontation or a headline. ^[2]

From youth work to research

In his interview with New Humanist, Elliott-Cooper recalled moving between educational workshops and less formal discussions with young people. Their interest in policing offered a way into questions about society, history and change. The exchange ran in both directions: a request for historical explanation could become a request for practical help, while a discussion about an individual encounter could raise questions about the distribution of power. ^[1]

He completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2016. His thesis, Race, Space and Policing in Post-Duggan Britain, examined resistance to police violence after 2011. The academic record reflects the questions that emerged through his community work, while locating them within human geography: a discipline concerned, among other things, with how power operates through places and people’s access to them. ^[3]

His academic career has included research at UCL and King’s College London and teaching at the University of Warwick. He is now a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, where his teaching and research include race, political thought, social movements and policing. He also serves on the board of The Monitoring Group, an organisation working against racism and racial violence. These roles bring scholarly research and organised community work into the same professional life. ^[4]

The longer history behind a confrontation

Black Resistance to British Policing draws on a decade of activist research. Its chapters move between historical resistance, campaigns following deaths in custody, the disturbances of 2011, surveillance and debates about abolition. Elliott-Cooper’s concern is how those subjects connect: how earlier organising informs later movements, and how a new technology or police tactic can carry older assumptions into a different setting. ^[2]

Looking at resistance over time changes what counts as evidence. A protest can be studied through its public demands, but also through the meetings, relationships and earlier campaigns that made it possible. The resulting history has more room for continuity. People do not have to appear on television to have played a part in the development of a movement.

Elliott-Cooper’s approach also takes Britain’s imperial history seriously. In a 2025 essay published by Amnesty International UK, he argued that predictive policing has a history reaching back well before computer algorithms. Colonial authorities identified populations they regarded as threatening, watched them and acted on assumptions about their likely behaviour. He examined how racial categories helped organise those judgements. ^[5]

That argument asks readers to look at what happens before an arrest. Who becomes an object of suspicion? What information is gathered about them? How are patterns interpreted? New equipment does not settle these questions by itself. Its significance depends on the decisions and institutions surrounding its use.

Women at the centre of organising

One of Elliott-Cooper’s substantial contributions is his attention to women’s leadership in campaigns concerning policing. His 2019 article in Antipode, “Our life is a struggle”, used interviews, observations at demonstrations and participation in campaigning to examine this work in England after 2011. He identified women as central organisers in the campaigns against Black deaths in custody that formed the subject of his research. ^[6]

The article also examined expectations of respectability: ideas about how a person ought to behave, speak or present themselves to be considered deserving of sympathy. Elliott-Cooper connected those expectations to histories of race and gender. His argument makes it possible to ask how a campaigner can be required to demonstrate an acceptable identity while also demanding that authorities account for a death. ^[6]

This changes the picture of political leadership. A bereaved relative who speaks in public is also doing organisational work, developing knowledge and making decisions under pressure. Treating that person only as the emotional centre of a story risks missing the political labour involved. Our feature on Doreen Lawrence provides another route into the relationship between family campaigning, institutions and public life.

Recording the experience of protest

In 2020, Elliott-Cooper authored Netpol’s report Britain Is Not Innocent, with research support from Jack Etches. It investigated the policing of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Britain, drawing on testimony from more than 100 witnesses, including protesters, legal observers and people supporting those arrested. The material concerned a particular period, during the coronavirus pandemic, when demonstrations and public-health restrictions intersected. ^[7]

The report documented accounts of excessive force, the containment of crowds and failures to protect people facing racist attacks. Netpol concluded that the policing it examined showed institutional racism. That conclusion should be understood as the report’s assessment of the testimony and evidence it gathered. ^[7]

For readers of Elliott-Cooper’s books, this is a useful example of the relationship between research and campaigning. Recording an account preserves material that can otherwise be lost once a demonstration ends. It allows specific claims to be examined and contested, instead of leaving only an impression of what happened. It also makes the experience of those being policed part of the record from which the event is understood.

What can the law change?

A later project approached racial injustice through the history of legal action. In 2024, the Baring Foundation published a report by Elliott-Cooper and legal scholar Kojo Koram covering the period from 1975 to 2020. It combined a review of existing literature with interviews with campaigners and activists involved in the struggles it examined. ^[8]

The report followed changing forms of organising and legal challenge across several decades: resistance to discriminatory policing, responses to racial violence, the effects of counter-terrorism measures, and campaigns around deaths in custody. Its chronology makes room for both the possibilities and the constraints of working through the law. Different campaigns encountered different legal tools, political circumstances and obstacles. ^[8]

That historical approach is useful because the phrase “access to justice” can sound abstract. A legal challenge involves time, knowledge, money and sustained support. Studying how earlier campaigners used the law makes it possible to ask more precise questions about a later campaign: what it is seeking, which institution can provide a remedy, and what might remain unresolved even after a legal victory.

The Macpherson inquiry provides essential context for that debate. Reporting in 1999 on the failed investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder, it identified institutional racism alongside failures of competence and leadership, and made 70 recommendations. A 2021 review by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee recognised the changes the inquiry had helped bring about, while concluding that its overall objective of fairness in policing had not been achieved. ^[9]

That record leaves room for a demanding discussion about change. An inquiry can establish facts, alter procedures and create new expectations of accountability. Assessing its legacy also means asking whether the people it was intended to protect experience a meaningful improvement. Elliott-Cooper’s work enters this debate from the perspective of campaigns seeking changes that survive beyond an official response.

Empire, housing and the state

Elliott-Cooper’s work extends beyond policing. He is one of the eight authors of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State, published in 2021. The coauthors are Gargi Bhattacharyya, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha. Their collective argument connects racial politics to economic change, the media and the state, taking up subjects including the hostile environment and Brexit. ^[10]

The book places individual acts of racism within wider arrangements of power. Its authors are interested in how imperial relationships change and persist, rather than assuming that the formal end of an empire also ended its effects. Reading it alongside Elliott-Cooper’s solo work broadens the field of inquiry: policing sits among institutions that shape who belongs and under what conditions. ^[10]

His research on housing offers another connection. With Phil Hubbard and Loretta Lees, he coauthored a study of gentrification and displacement published in Progress in Human Geography in 2020. The authors examined displacement as the disruption of people’s relationship with home and place, including its emotional and material consequences. Losing a home means more than moving from one address to another; it can also mean losing everyday connections and familiar surroundings. ^[11]

For a reader following these different projects, place is a useful thread. A home, a street or a neighbourhood can be experienced as somewhere to belong, while also being subject to decisions made by landlords, governments and police. Following those decisions helps make broad arguments about power tangible.

Taking abolition seriously as an argument

Elliott-Cooper identifies with the politics of police and prison abolition. In a 2023 interview with PoLAR, he explained this through changes intended to reduce society’s reliance on criminal punishment: better access to secure housing, mental-health support, services for people facing domestic violence and provision for young people. He presented these as practical steps within a more far-reaching ambition to transform social relationships. ^[12]

This is a political position, and it invites questions about implementation, accountability and how to respond to serious harm. Understanding it properly means engaging with the proposed alternatives and the evidence behind them. For Elliott-Cooper, the issue is how safety can be created and sustained, including for people whose experience of existing institutions has been damaging.

His 2023 article “Abolishing institutional racism” examined how the meaning of institutional racism has changed between Black Power organising, the period around the Macpherson report and more recent abolitionist demands. He argued that the limits of earlier reforms help explain why later activists have pressed for more fundamental change. Readers can examine that argument alongside our feature on Stuart Hall, whose work offers another route into the study of race, culture and political power. ^[13]

Black Resistance to British Policing, available to explore in our Black History bookshop, is the clearest starting point for Elliott-Cooper’s sustained account of these struggles. His research gives readers a way to follow the work behind a movement: the questions young people ask, the evidence campaigners collect, and the histories they draw upon when deciding what to do next.

Sources

1. New Humanist: Black resistance and racist policing with Adam Elliott-Cooper.
2. Manchester University Press: Black Resistance to British Policing.
3. King’s College London: Adam Elliott-Cooper academic record.
4. Queen Mary University of London: Dr Adam Elliott-Cooper.
5. Amnesty International UK: Predictive Policing from the Colonies to the Contemporary.
6. King’s College London research record: “Our life is a struggle”.
7. Netpol: Britain Is Not Innocent, November 2020.
8. Baring Foundation: Challenging racial injustice in the criminal justice system in the UK.
9. House of Commons Home Affairs Committee: The Macpherson Report, Twenty-two years on — Summary.
10. Pluto Press: Empire’s Endgame.
11. King’s College London research record: Moving beyond Marcuse.
12. PoLAR: Racism, Policing, and the Black Resistance in Britain.
13. Race & Class: Abolishing institutional racism.

Image: Adam Elliott-Cooper, 2017. Interview still: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb), CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Source: Adam Elliott-Cooper über Überwachung, Rassismus & Black Lives Matter. Some responsive previews crop this image for display; these adaptations are shared under the same licence.