Institutionally beyond reform

Wheeling out Cressida Dick to give the Metropolitan Police’s reaction to the conviction of two men for the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence almost 19 years ago says it all really.

Dick, acting deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, was notoriously in charge of the bungled police operation that resulted in the virtual execution of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes as he sat in a Tube carriage at Stockwell in 2005.

Menezes was shot seven times in the head after being mistaken for a terror suspect, denied a chance to identify himself. Immediately the Met went into cover-up mode, claiming that Menezes had vaulted the gates at the station and was wearing bulky clothing that could have hidden a bomb.

None of this was true, of course. Menezes’ simple misfortune was to be identified as a possible wanted man by watchers for whom one “foreigner” clearly looked like another. Not to mince words, this was racism in practice.

Now the police did not murder Lawrence. But they did their best to prevent his killers from being convicted by wilfully ignoring the evidence that this was a racist killing involving David Norris, Gary Dobson and other local gang members.

Dick claimed that the recommendations in the 1999 Macpherson inquiry report into the Met’s failures over the Lawrence killing “have transformed policing”. Oh really? Among other things, Macpherson found that the Met was “institutionally racist”.

Leaving aside the absolutely indifferent handling of the forensic evidence which threatened to wreck the case against Norris and Dobson, other facts do not back up Dick’s claim.

Statistics show that a black person is more than nine times more likely to be searched than a white person. This is a higher ratio than before the Macpherson report was published.

The number of black and Asian people stopped and searched by the police increased by more than 70% in the five years between 2004 and 2009, according to Ministry of Justice figures. They show that more than 310,000 black and Asian people were searched by the police on the streets in 2008/09, compared with 178,000 in 2004/05. Although the Met covers only 14% of the population of England and Wales, their officers carried out 42% of all stop and searches. The figures for 2008/09 show there were three times more arrests of black people than white people, based on per 1,000 population figures.

Ann Juliette Roberts, of Edmonton, north London, was initially targeted by officers in September 2010 because she did not have enough money on her Oyster card for her journey. But the situation soon escalated after they insisted on searching her bag because she was holding it "suspiciously", the High Court heard last year.

The black special needs assistant was restrained face down on the floor and handcuffed. Officers found bank cards with different identities, which she explained were in her name, her maiden name - having recently married - and her son's name. She was arrested on suspicion of fraud and given a drugs test.

Roberts is asking the High Court to rule Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act "incompatible" with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Section 60 allows officers to search anyone, without suspicion, for dangerous instruments or offensive weapons in a designated area for a 24-hour period.

Most recently, of course, are the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of black man Mark Duggan, shot by police in north London in August outside the vehicle he was travelling in. The official version of events indicated that Duggan fired a gun and a bullet lodged in a police radio. An investigation has since found no forensic evidence that Duggan was carrying a weapon at the time. Duggan’s killing triggered a wave of inner-city rioting across England.

The facts (including involvement with News International over phone hacking, leading to top resignations and Dick becoming acting no 2) point to a Met that is yet another unreformable section of a state that oppresses rather than serves most of its citizens – black and white – in one way or another, most of the time.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

A state of terror

Gordon Brown is generously offering the “expertise” of the British security and intelligence services to fight al-Qaeda’s activities in Pakistan. But many are increasingly questioning the ability of the British capitalist state to protect anyone from attacks as well as its abuse of anti-terror powers to create an authoritarian regime.

The dust is not yet settled over Friday’s inquest verdict into the killing of Jean de Menezes. The jury’s 8-2 vote for an open verdict – the most damning available to it – showed that they did not believe the police account of what happened. Jurors held their nerve, despite coming under enormous pressure from the coroner who had ruled they could not say that the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician was unlawfully killed at Stockwell tube in July 2005.

Fellow passengers on the tube insisted during the inquest that the police had given no warning. Anna Dunwoodie, for example, said she thought the police were “out of control” and said there was a “sense of panic” when they rushed aboard the train. It was also revealed that the marksmen from C12 and C2 were allowed to “confer” after they realised that they had executed an innocent man.

It is not only the Menezes case which has shown an overweening and out-of-control police. After the arrest of MP Damian Green earlier this month by nine anti-terror officers, even the Financial Times ran a headline saying “The police, and the state, are out of control”. Philip Stephens went on to remark that the police’s "disdain for political process spoke eloquently to the authoritarian culture of our times”.

Meanwhile, data unearthed by under the Freedom of Information Act about the Kent police operation against climate protesters at Kingsnorth power station last summer showed that claims about “violent protesters” were untrue. The injuries reported by the 1,500 police on duty ludicrously included "stung on finger by possible wasp"; "officer injured sitting in car"; and "officer succumbed to sun and heat". Lib Dem justice spokesman David Howarth said: "That the minister could defend as 'proportionate' a £5.9m policing operation in which there was not a single injury to police officers caused by the protesters beggars belief. The threat posed by environmental direct action is being systematically overblown by both the government and the police.”

And, in yet another bizarre use of anti-terror powers, police detained photographer Jess Hurd under the Anti-Terrorism Act as she was taking photographs at the Canary Wharf wedding of gypsy couple Nora Quilligan and Danny Sheridan from the Dale Farm camp in Essex.

Meanwhile two Bills are going through parliament which will give yet more powers to the police. A new counter-terrorism Bill will give the home secretary greater powers to withhold intercept evidence from the families of the deceased in the interests of national security or the UK's relationship with another country or "otherwise in the public interest". Organisations like Inquest are warning that key evidence will be suppressed, especially in “contentious deaths involving state agents”. The coroner and lawyers would have to be vetted and the inquest would take place in secret.

And, yet another move by the surveillance state, the Coroners and Justice Bill, announced in the Queens Speech earlier this month, has been denounced by Phil Booth of NO2ID. He warns: “Rather than protecting our personal information, as it should be, the government is cutting away safeguards for its own data-trafficking convenience. This is a Bill to smash the rule of law and build the database state in its place.”

The rule of law is the last thing on New Labour’s mind, however. Brown’s regime is sitting atop social anger that is building towards an explosion as a result of the economic crisis. The government is keeping the state onside by giving it more and more powers to intimidate every sector of society, from political opponents to activists. The Menezes jury’s defiance of the state is to be commended. We should build on that and carry through the proposals outlined in our new book, Unmasking the State

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Police above the law

The refusal of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to quit over the killing – or, more precisely, execution - of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station in 2005 verifies one thing above all: the capitalist state and its institutions consider themselves above the rest of society and see no reason why they should be made accountable for their actions.

While ordinary workers can get fired on a pretext, or for some minor misdemeanour like stealing some paper clips or discarded materials, the police, MPs, ministers, judges, senior civil servants, MI5 and MI6 spies and the like can and do get away with almost anything. Police can kill innocent people going about their business, cover up their actions, block inquiries, while ministers break election promises, take secret decisions to go to war and authorise the infiltration and destabilisation of legal organisations.

All these actions are sanctioned because they carry the authority of a state that is there to rule over people and maintain the status quo. That, above all, means the perpetuation of private property rights. We’re not talking about people’s houses but the legal right to form companies, employ labour, sell products and services and keep the profits. What is generally known as capitalism. Try taking over a factory or office in defence or jobs and you are doing something illegal which strikes at the heart of private property. And the state will be down like a ton of bricks to restore the owner’s “rights”.

So Blair’s refusal to quit his job is no surprise. After all, no one in the Metropolitan Police has admitted responsibility for the shooting dead of a Brazilian electrician while he sat in a Tube carriage quietly reading his paper. In this sense, the police are above the law. They have a shoot-to-kill policy (nodded through in secret by the toothless, pathetic Metropolitan Police Authority) similar to the one adopted by the British army against Republicans in the north of Ireland.

So long as they think there is a danger to themselves or the public, they can kill someone – and there’s no comeback. The case of Harry Stanley, shot dead in 1999, is typical. He left a pub in Hackney carrying a chair leg in a bag. Someone phoned the police to say he had a weapon. Police arrived and minutes later Stanley was dead. No one was prosecuted. After all, police thought he had a weapon. De Menezes, despite police disinformation in the wake of his death, did not wear bulky clothes that might have concealed a bomb, did not leap over the Tube ticket barrier, behaved calmly and was given no warning before being shot. But Blair did attempt to block an independent inquiry, during which time the police involved wrote up their notes so that they told the same story.

It can only get worse as the state introduces ID cards, a national DNA database, extends the scope of what constitutes a criminal offence, monitors phone calls and e-mails and continues stop-and-search aimed at minority communities. This kind of state is beyond reform. Struggling for a new, democratic state, in which all institutions are subordinate and accountable to popular control, is the best way to remember Jean Charles de Menezes


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor