It was clear that they were always there to protect the right wing against the left wing.

All they wanted to do was criminalize me, right? I'm criminalized for five minutes. That's what they do.

I'm criminalized back to the left here.

Hey, it's Riftka Brown here, reporter and commissioning editor for Navara Media.

I'm standing in for James on this episode of Navara FM to give you something a little different, a little more experimental perhaps.

Like many of you, we in Navara have been thinking a lot about the police lately.

Tisky has kept a close eye on developments in the Kill the Bill movement, from police brutality at the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common,

to the Bristol uprisings that have thrust the city into the national spotlight.

In the articles team where I work, we've been publishing a ton of interesting responses to this abolitionist surge.

My favourites include Sam Knight's close look at how the police lobby jumped up the police crime,

sentencing and courts bill, and Sandeep Sandu's history of the taser.

Here on FM, James dug deep into the theory of policing in his recent interview with Professor Mark Niochlius.

Mark made a number of points in that episode, many of which will be relevant to today's episode.

Perhaps the most pertinent is his insistence that we need to stop talking about the police and start talking about policing,

the tentacles of police power that creep into everything from parking wardens to food standards agencies.

All of the institutions concerned with order in the most general sense,

that go under different terms, welfare or public health and so forth.

They're all closely connected with what now count as the professional police force.

They're working credibly closely hand in hand with the professional police forces.

If you think about the way insurance companies operate or football clubs operate,

they're all operating in very, very close tandem with professional police forces,

to the point in which you might want to say, well, actually, they can't actually function without engaging

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