A favourite piece of graffiti to spray on the Cenotaph or the plinth of Churchill’s nearby statue is ACAB. It stands for ‘All coppers are bastards’, though Americans substitute the word cops for coppers. In graffiti form it is sometimes rendered 1312, from the place of the letters in the alphabet.
As a slogan, ACAB was taken up by Black Lives Matter. In an Independent comment piece, Victoria Gagliardo-Silver declared that ‘ACAB means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of colour’. It has come a long way from an uncontroversial statement among the criminal classes of my youth in the 1960s about their natural enemies.
The phrase was always associated with song. Eric Partridge, the relentless chronicler of slang, said that he first heard it in the 1920s: ‘I’ll sing you a song, it’s not very long:/ All coppers are bastards.’
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