Description
In February 1999, William MacPherson published his inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder to identify “lessons to be learned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivated crimes.” MacPherson identified the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, acknowledging how police structures and culture reproduced racial inequalities. Twenty years later, the structure of British policing remains largely unchanged and its public image continues to be challenged by scholars, activists, and cultural producers sharing narratives of racist abuse. The core question driving this paper: under what narrative conditions are anti-racist counter-imaginaries around policing likely to succeed?
This paper explores how the BBC drama Line of Duty constructs and constrains fantasies of racial justice. The series centers on an anti-corruption unit and offered a rare space in mainstream television where institutional racism could be acknowledged and interrogated from within the police apparatus. Its sixth season, with over 13 million viewers, tackled questions of institutional racism explicitly. It was released in 2021, less than a year after the murder of George Floyd and less than a month after the government released its controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, denying the existence of institutional racism. With direct references to Stephen Lawrence’s murder and the subsequent MacPherson Inquiry, the show promoted a lively online conversation about the issues of racism in the police and ultimately divided audiences in a multitude of ways.
This paper deploys a mixed-method analysis of online discourse around Line of Duty’s sixth season. I ask three questions: 1) What do divergent audience responses to the finale reveal about pre-existing fantasies of racial justice? 2) How does the audience's struggle over the show's anti-racist narrative shape their conceptualisation of racial justice? 3) What does the discourse around the finale tell us about the struggles of producing anti-racist narratives in contemporary popular culture?
