Against Police Power: Racialised Young People’s Resistance to Carceral Childhoods in Greater Manchester

Legane, Roxy (2025) Against Police Power: Racialised Young People’s Resistance to Carceral Childhoods in Greater Manchester. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

In Greater Manchester, the work of policing racialised young people is expanding far beyond the police force. As revealed through our work at Kids of Colour, and by organisations, community organisers and critical scholars: the wider concept and violence of ‘police power’ is of urgent concern. Grounded by Critical Race Theory, this thesis centres seven racialised young people from Greater Manchester. It considers their understandings and experiences of police power, including how such experiences feel. As well as struggle, it documents their resistance. Methodologically, we journeyed community together. Walking through or sitting in spaces they chose, allowing areas or questions to evoke memories and guide theory, unearthing their understandings and experiences. Whilst the stories told are uniquely theirs, they also shared experiences beyond themselves: of their families, friends, communities. Through this thesis, racialised young people unveiled that Greater Manchester is a site of harm. They expose police power as an all-encompassing web, one that is largely state led, by actors who are increasingly aligned by the shared value of punishment. It targets their lives beyond the narrow framework of ‘crime’, driven by more than physically caging our young people. Police power is evolving, finding efficient and concealed ways to harm and imprison. Therefore, police power creates what I come to term ‘carceral childhoods’, regulating and exhausting our young people. Despite it all, racialised young people are engaged in unglamorous, tiring, everyday resistance against police power. Resistance full of ‘tenacity’, solidarity, and strength, in communities they make or hold close. It is their knowledge, resistance, and beautiful dreams that we as adults and community must urgently learn from: for the sake of our collective liberation.