Some Recent Anniversaries

Olaseni Lewis

Recently, we have reached some crucial and tragic anniversaries:  

100 Years Since the Destruction of Black Wall Street.  

66 Years Since the Murder of Emmett Till.  July would have marked his 80th birthday.  

Meanwhile, this horrific roll call continues:  

 

Deaths of Olaseni Lewis and Sean Rigg.  Olaseni died in the UK in 2010, the same way as George Floyd, begging police officers to let him breathe.  Sean Rigg also died in London, in 2008.  

Go here for my show in which we asked:  Do Black Lives Really Matter? 

28 years since the death of Joy Gardner in London, UK.  

And these deaths keeps rolling on, on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Cressida Dick, Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, states that "no one is above the law".  Really?  Really, Cressida? 

According to Wikipedia, Cressida Dick held senior roles in the force's diversity directorate, in anti-gang and anti-gun crime operations, and in counterterrorism operations before becoming Commissioner.  She was a Met Police officer at the time of the death of Joy Gardner.  The documentary-maker Ken Fero called for her resignation with regard to the death of Joy Gardner. 

We live in a world in which MP Dawn Butler was racially profiled and stopped by the police because they thought her car was registered outside London (which has yet to be made a criminal offence).   

We live in a world in which a Black mother states that it is "not hunting season" on Black people (again - really?).  

Last year (2020), a Metropolitan Police Officer was the subject of a criminal investigation after kneeling on Marcus Coutain's neck during a stop-and-search operation.  The officer will not face charges, nor will he face disciplinary action.  

Yet, as reported in the Guardian,  Cressida Dick has said that the Met has transformed and is no longer institutionally racist.  (Say it with me:  really, Cressida?  Really????)

We need to realise and understand that this is not just a problem in the U.S.  This is not just an American problem.  Black deaths in police custody are happening all over the world.  Black men, women and children are dying in police custody and those responsible are not facing justice.  

We MUST find solutions.  Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is one such solution.  

I have blogged about this issue many times, and I shall continue to do so.  Our communities need to be armed with the skills of NVC, which can help to PREVENT these types of crimes.  

Go her for more Black history blogs.  

Go here for Zhana's conversation with Ken Fero, the director of Injustice. 

Go here for Nonviolence and NVC Resources.  

What do you think is a possible solution?  Please comment below and please share.  Thanks.  

Go here for my show in which we asked:  Do Black Lives Really Matter?  

 

Increase in Gun and Knife Crime

London Metropolitan Police 2018

If you have been reading and listening to my blog posts, you know that my work is about solutions. 

As I am sure you know, there has been an increase in violent crime, including knife crime and gun crime, in London. Black communities have been dealing with this crisis for many years.  

What is the response to this from the police?   

Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has said that there needs to be an increase in stop-and-search, and The Metropolitan Police are planning to do just that.  

 

As we know, the stop-and-search is deployed overwhelmingly against Black African-Caribbean people, particularly young Black African-Caribbean men.

Given that British prisons are already disproportionately incarcerating Black people, something is definitely wrong here. Several things, actually.

The police conducting their stop-and-search incidents are finding larger numbers of weapons.

http://www.itv.com/news/2018-04-07/london-knife-crime-met-police/

This would suggest that stop-and-search is not working. Stop-and-search is not preventing young people from carrying knives. The ethos has been described as making young people more afraid of being arrested than they are of carrying knives. Given most young Black men are aware that the police may kill them with impunity, and this has happened numerous times, making them more afraid of police is a tall order.

What needs to happen is for young people become confident in their ability to reduce or prevent violet crime without needing to carry weapons. Our young people need to become skilled in methods such as NVC (Nonviolent Communication) that can PREVENT violent incidents and PREVENT situations escalating into violence.

By the time a young person starts carrying a knife, ostensibly for protection, the situation is out of control. We need to PREVENT young peoplle believing they need to carry guns in order to protect themselves,as they know other people who are carrying weapons.

For more about this, see  Children and Knife Crime.

See also: Which Children Are More Likely to Bring Weapons to School? 

Please share this with your networks, and please leave your comments below.  Thanks.  

Ending the Violence through a Creative Response

This is a continuation of my previous blogs,

Ending the Violence
No to Pre-Trial Electrocutions
Police Officers Accused of 60 Other Assaults

I was in Brixton town centre a couple of days ago when I noticed that, outside Brixton police station, a tree has been dedicated as a memorial to a young African Caribbean man, Sean Riggs, who died in police custody.

With all the recent media feeding frenzy around the allegations of assaults by police officers at the G20 demonstrations, there has been no mention of this young man's death. I have seen no connections made between the G20 incidents and the ongoing assaults on African people by the police.

According to information posted on the tree memorial, there were two cameras present when Riggs died, but neither was working. That is the official line. Judge for yourself how believable that is.

Our young people need to carry cameras all the time as a way of protecting themselves from police violence. This is one important lesson to be learned from the incidents that took place at the G20 demos. But once in police custody, use of cameras will often not be possible.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is one of the most effective methods of countering violence. For more about this, see

Ending the Violence
Improving Relationships/Improving Communication
Nonviolent Communication

NVC is used to transform situations, including cases of extreme violence. It is not the same as passive resistance, it is a creative response.

I hope you will join my course in London in October and find out how you can use NVC in your own life.

We really can transform this situation and create a better future.

Below is an excerpt from "A Duty Of Remembrance", by Toyin Agbetu, taken from Nyansapo: The African Drum.

What I like most about this piece is that Toyin is bringing in the spiritual dimension, talking about revering the ancestors.

We need to have an awareness of the problem. But it is far more vital to focus on solutions.

A Duty Of Remembrance

Greetings, I was recently reading trough a book that was sent to me called Again We’ll Rise by BJ Gilwards. Inside it were a collection of inspiring quotations and statements from African people spanning millennia. It made me think hard about many of the wisdom's we have forgotten, the legacies from our history, the good and the bad, the gains and also the losses.

During January 1999, a gang of eight officers from the British Police Force brutally restrained a young man named Roger Sylvester. In describing their actions the police lied claiming Roger was violent. However contrary to their statements Roger was seen being dragged limp, naked and handcuffed into a police van by several witnesses. Roger, a council worker stopped breathing and fell into a coma at the emergency psychiatric unit at St Anne's Hospital, Haringey. Six police officers had pinned him down on the floor for about 20 minutes.

Ben Bersabel, a nurse on duty at the time of the assault said he had noticed Roger was being held down on his front and calling out for a doctor. The police ignored Rogers’s pleas for help and as a direct result of their actions he suffered heart and kidney failure, severe brain damage and bruising to his body. Roger, 30 was a mental health service user. He died six days later at the Whittington Hospital.

Roger’s family made several complaints about the abusive actions of the officers. This led to an investigation carried out by Essex Police under the supervision of the racist Police Complaints Authority (PCA) but to no avail. When the discredited PCA was abandoned it was replaced with the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) which now has overall responsibility for the police complaints system. It is important to note that the British tactic of rebranding old as new is common and even the Metropolitan Police Force has formally changed its name to the Police ‘Service’ in an attempt to soften its brutish image.

Now for many years Roger’s family were denied justice, the British media in an attempt to exonerate the police deliberately mislead the public by reporting state fabrications. A typical story was that published by the BBC with the headline ‘Detained man's drug delirium’.

… But then after several years of campaigning the family achieved a breakthrough. On 3 October 2003, an inquest jury returned a unanimous verdict and ruled that Roger had been unlawfully killed. In a just ‘civilised’ society the six police officers should have faced murder or at the very least, manslaughter charges for their ‘unlawful killing’ but instead in 2004, a high court judge formally quashed the verdict allowing the police force to once again escape justice after killing innocent Africans.

… So what is the solution? How do we as a community achieve justice, reparation and ultimately Maat for atrocities committed against our Ancestors? Well the first thing we must do is respect the ritual of remembrance and hold a memorial or commemoration for them every year without fail. For this act to be progressive it must not only be carried out for the victims of Maafa but also the survivors and heroes.

… You see we need African Remembrance at the very least, once a year. Our own right to dignity demands we collectively remember their names especially in circumstances where the loss has been both tragic and traumatic instead of worshipping those ‘celebrities’ and role muddles the government and its media promotes as ‘black’ British or American idols.

So to those who have passed and whose names we rarely call, please know that not all your children have forgotten your sacrifice. And in remembrance to those of you who are also still with us, I want to thank you, from brother Colin, Aiah Menjor and Milton Hanson to sista Ama Sumani and Elder Rosie Purves, there are so many of you out there who I want to thank for doing the work, and those of you who silently support them, you know who you are. In the meantime I have written to the IPCC making an Freedom of Information (FOI) request for the details of all the cases involving African people who have died in custody that Freddy Patel has been involved in and may have covered up. If we don’t do think this work important, then who will?

Taken from Nyansapo - The Pan African Drum
Toyin Agbetu is a writer, film director, poet, and founder of Ligali, the pan African human rights based organisation.
To subscribe to this free newsletter, Nyansapo the Pan African Drum, contact Ligali http://www.ligali.org/index.php

No to Pre-Trial Electrocutions

Congratulations to my fellow AfroSpear members for organising another Day of Blogging for Justice to raise awareness about the use of tasers against Black men, women and children.

Click here to read my post on the previous Day of Blogging for Justice against tasing.

It is a travesty that another such event is needed. Tasing is also being referred to as "pre-trial electrocution" and rightly so.

Here are some more of today's blogs:

TNT Truth Not Tasers

AfroSpear Blog

Here in London, attacks by the police are much in the news at the moment, following the demonstrations around the G20 a couple of weeks ago. Three people have been named as victims of police attacks, one of whom, Ian Tomlinson, is now dead. Films of the incident suggest that Tomlinson was minding his own business, watching the demo from the sidelines, when attacked from behind by a police officer. He collapsed, and died shortly thereafter.

It has been decided that a third inquest into Tomlinson's death will be carried out, as the findings of the first two contradicted each other.

The day after Tomlinson's death, a woman protester was struck by a police officer.

I note that (1) both of these protesters were white, (2) both incidents were filmed. In the case of the attack on Tomlinson, several different cameras in different positions recorded the incident.

And (3) none of the alleged attacks involved the use of tasers. In other words, London's Metropolitan Police are capable of doing plenty of damage without deploying tasers. Tasers are rarely used in the UK at present, but once their use becomes widespread, the situation will only worsen.

Given the current state of the economy, with an increase in employment being forecast, many are predicting an increase in civil unrest. So lots more opportunities for the police to use heavy-handed tactics.

I will be blogging more about this soon, but I wanted to post this today in support of the Day of Justice.

Black people have been saying for many years that the policing of our communities is often brutal and violent. When Black people die in police custody, no one is ever prosecuted or deemed to have acted unlawfully or inappropriately.

As I said recently in Police Officers Accused of 60 Other Assaults, African young people and adults need to be carrying cameras and/or camera phones at all times in order to record these incidents. However, I add that, once a brotha or sista is inside a police cell, he or she has no opportunity to use a camera, and no guarantee that the cameras in place are in working order or contain film. Again, I will blog more about this soon.

Again, all credit to the sistas and brothas of the AfroSpear for keeping the issue of tasing in the forefront of our minds.

Police Officers Accused of 60 Other Assaults

In the wake of last week's demonstrations about the G20, a Metropolitan Police officer is accused of striking an innocent passerby.

Camcorder footage reveals the officer allegedly striking a man on the back of the leg as the man was walking away. The man is seen to fall over, and died shortly thereafter.

Interestingly, the passerby was white. It is a rarity for white people in Britain to suffer assaults from the police except in large demonstrations such as the Wapping pickets and the miners' strike of the 1980s. Or at least, such assaults are rarely pubicised.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission asked newspaper The Guardian to remove the video from their website.

It would be even more interesting if we could produce film footage of police officers' assaults on members of the Black community, similarly to the Rodney King incident.

It remains to be seen what, if any, action is taken against the officer involved. In the Jean Charles de Menezes case, no one was found to be guilty of causing his death even though this innocent Brazilian man was shot at point-black range following the London 7/7 bombings of 2005. It was claimed they officers involved thought he was a suspected terrorist involved in the bombings.

The Jury recorded an open verdict and made it clear that they did not believe the court testimony of the police officers involved, who stated that a warning had been given before de Menezes was shot. For more on this, see Q&A: The Day de Menezes Died

Nubiart Diary recently reported on four officers who were recently convicted of assaults on a British Muslim man, who have been accused of involvement in 60 other incidents.

The article cites a string of other recent complaints against London's Metropolitan Police. To read more, visit News and Views: ANC Welcomes Ruling.

This article also includes a report from the ANC on the Pretoria High Court's refusal to grant parole to someone who murdered two ANC members.