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

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.