Rioting across France has made the news over the last week, sparked by the killing of Nahel Merzouk, a teenager of Algerian descent, by a police officer. Nahel was shot in the chest during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, on 27th of June. The officer involved has been charged with voluntary homicide, but that has not calmed the rioting that has erupted in cities across France. Also last week, a BBC documentary named a sixth suspect in the racially-motivated murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993, leading to calls for further investigations into institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police. The combination of these two stories prompted me to take a look at anti-police political stickers in Edinburgh. The Police are not the most common topic of protest stickers, but whilst other topics come and go, this one does remain fairly constant (I have written two blog posts about anti-police stickers in London, here and here).
A lot of stickers criticising the polica use this acronym, which stands for ‘All Cops are Bastards’. This ties into the argument that the violence and discrimination committed by police officers, particularly against minority groups, is not the result of a few ‘bad apples’, but is actually a feature of the policing system (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 28/11/2021).A more complex design that also incoporates the ACAB acronym (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 28/11/2021).Stickers like this one play with the acronym, suggesting it stands for other things, but the anti-police meaning is always there (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 06/10/2022).This sticker also builds on the ACAB acronym by changing it to make it even less forgiving (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 05/02/2023).This sticker has a rather more elaborate design, but the message is just as clear (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 31/08/2020).The text on this sticker is in German and translates as ‘No friend, no helper.’ Police officers sometimes use seemingly innocent friendly conversations to gater intelligence, particularly during protests, so activists engage with them as little as possible (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 27/03/2021).This sticker conveys the same message, although I’m not sure what the relevance of the shark-human hybrid is! (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 28/09/2022).A simple design, but it gets the message across. This sticker was produced by Dog Section Press, an anti-profit radical publisher (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 28/09/2022). This sticker also calls for the abolition of police, describing them as the ‘biggest gang in town’ (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 17/02/2022).This sticker plays with the common association of police officers and pigs. Describing police as pigs goes back to the 1870s. (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 28/11/2022).This sticker includes a more specific criticism of the UK police, and mimics the style of material produced by the British governmment (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 16/05/2021). Blue Lives Matter was a slogan that appeared in response to the Black Lives Matter campaign, arguing that police officers have a right to use violence to defend themselves. This sticker subverts that slogan in turn, and also incorporates the ACAB acronym (Photo: Hannah Awcock, 26/10/2021)
University Teacher in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Interested in the cultural, historical, and political geographies of resistance.
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Turbulent Isles 