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

Time to sack the watchdog

Two advisors have resigned from the community group set up by the Independent Police Complaints Commission after the police killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham last August.

The move marks a serious breakdown of relations between the black community and the body that is supposed to monitor police behaviour.

A statement by Stafford Scott reveals the IPCC’s complicity in a process of deliberate disinformation. Scott, who has engaged with the police since the Macpherson report, says that police removal of the vehicle that Duggan travelled in shortly before he was shot has so tainted the investigation that “we will never be able to have faith in their final report into the killing.”

Scott says the IPCC broke its own guidelines “by giving out erroneous information to journalists regarding the 'shoot-out' involving Mark Duggan and police that didn't actually happen.”

Both the Met and the IPCC are now threatening to report the Guardian to the Press Complaints Commission for stating that Mark Duggan was unarmed at the time he was shot by a police marksman.

Scott, who was an advisor to the Met, now believes the IPCC suffers worse flaws than the force it is investigating.”

But the police killing of Duggan is, human rights campaign group Black Mental Health UK, says, is not simply an isolated example of cover-ups. It forms part of a pattern and a “hidden history” of black people in Britain.

Matilda MacAttram, editor of the BMH’s Solution Magazine , told A World to Win that “a very important part of the black experience is marked by deaths in custody. This is something as live today in the recent cases of Kingsley Burrell-Brown and Mark Duggan as it was over 42 years ago when police hounded David Oluvale to death and threw him into a river.”

The second-ever edition of the on-line magazine, produced during Black History Month, has Oluwale and five other black men on its commemorative cover. Oluwale, Orville Blackwood, David Bennett, Mikey Powell, Sean Rigg, Kingsley Burrell-Brown - none of them over 40 years of age - all died in custody between 1969 and 2011.

“It is a pattern, which is the same whether or not you are a mental health user. The deaths of these men may not seem linked, but for their families, a fit and healthy man, their loved one, no longer exists,” MacAttram says.

The Solution Magazine highlights the long-term effect of deaths in custody or during police raids on the children left behind, by interviewing the sons of Orville Blackwood and Cherry Groce.

African Caribbeans are 50% more likely to enter the psychiatric health system, 44% are more likely to be sectioned, 29% more likely to be forcibly restrained, 50% more likely to be placed in seclusion. Detention rates for people from the UK African Caribbean community has doubled over 2005-2010 and over half the deaths of people in police custody are mental health users.

Stafford Scott and his fellow adviser John Noblemunn should be commended for refusing to serve on the community reference group set up by the IPCC. Scott has courageously broken the confidentiality agreement he signed when agreeing to serve on the group. He is now calling for “a body truly willing and able to investigate the police,” which he says, “is the only way to ensure that they will learn from their mistakes; and that, when mistakes occur, communities do not believe the one route to justice lies in taking matters into their own hands.”

But the lack of progress in the treatment of ethnic minority and black people in custody, whether directly by police or in mental health institutions, shows that existing institutions are far more than just flawed. It is a powerful argument for the disbanding not only of the IPCC, but of the police and the prison system and their replacement by bodies under the control of communities they are intended to serve.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

The story of a riot foretold

Riots across London are a result of rising anger against the corrupt and repressive Metropolitan Police, and against the poverty and unemployment hitting the poorest first.

The police version of the shooting of Mark Duggan after the Met's CO19 firearms squad fired into the taxi he was riding in is falling apart. They claimed an officer was shot, but was saved by his radio - and then Duggan was shot in self-defence. Now it appears the bullet in the radio may have been police issue.

Duggan’s family was only allowed to see his body 36 hours after he was killed. When they and about 100 supporters stood peacefully outside Tottenham police for four hours on Saturday night waiting for answers, nobody was prepared to talk to them. Police instead formed a confrontational line across the front of the police station.

As the protests escalated across Tottenham, it appears that a 16-year-old girl was beaten when she advanced towards a line of police to remonstrate with them, saying all the community wanted was answers. An extreme sense of injustice rapidly built up, leading to two nights of rioting across London and opportunist looting as well. This fury on the streets shows that the issues behind Britain’s 1985 inner-city riots have never been resolved. The regeneration of estates like Broadwater Farm and other deprived areas is being reversed by the economic crisis.

The Coalition’s slash and burn budget cuts are affecting the poorest boroughs. The London Borough of Haringey slashed its budget for youth services by 75% after the Coalition cut its grant by £41million. Labour Councillors who voted for this must share the blame for the riots.

Eight out of 13 youth clubs in Tottenham – safe havens for youth trying to avoid “post-code wars” and crime – have been closed. Local youth at the end of July warned in a filmed interview that there would be riots. There are currently more than 50 people for each unfilled job in Haringey, and the number claiming jobseekers allowance has risen 10% this year. There are plans to cut as much as 25% from the budget for courses for 16 to 18 year olds at North East London College, with a big campus in Tottenham.

And Tottenham is not an exception. A sense of extreme alienation amongst tens if not hundreds of thousands of youths in London and around the country is simmering and will continue to erupt in explosive ways. Added to the sense of injustice is a lack of trust in the police and the political system as a whole.

Back in 1985 local MP Bernie Grant took the side of the community, when riots broke out after the death of Cynthia Jarrett. Yesterday, slick New Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, condemned the violence and looting and commiserated with injured police. He said nothing about the killing of one of his constituents.

The same political, police and media establishment that colluded to hide the crimes of the News of the World, is coming together to attack the youth. Small wonder that big swathes of the community feel unconnected from any political process.

Now the right-wing media are calling for strong leadership and a strong arm to put an end to the disorder on the streets and in the financial markets. It seems the Coalition is not brutal enough for them.

These are important warning signs. A bold approach to re-shaping society is urgently needed that will unite the youth and communities across the generations to challenge this rule while it is still possible to do so. Democratising the economic and political basis of society through the formation of local People’s Assemblies, which will self-police communities, offers a positive way forward.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary