Book reviews (1)
01 October 2011
Black for a Cause...Not Just Because...The Case of the ‘Oval 4’ and the Story of Black Power in 1970s Britain, Winston N. Trew. The Derwent Press 2010, 310 pages (ISBN 10: 1-84667-039-1) Reviewed by Trevor Hemmings
Black for A Cause...Not Just Because tells the story of four young black men - Winston Trew, Sterling Christie, Constantine Boucher and George Griffiths – who became known as the Oval 4 after being assaulted by the police, arrested and falsely convicted of robbery in 1972. The book is the eyewitness account of one of the men who was falsely accused, and as such it is a unique historical document bearing testimony to the endemic police racism inflicted on the everyday lives of black British working class communities. It is also the record of a generation of movements that emerged to defend their communities in the early 1970s. The activism that arose to resist state (as well as non-state) violence was redefined by the media in terms of a breakdown of law and order and by the criminal justice system as lawlessness, defined by the emotive – but legally meaningless – US term “mugging.” In many respects the mugging scandal was a direct attack on the “investment made by Caribbean parents in their young, who were seen by Black organisations as representing the hopes and future of black settlement and development in Britain.” Indeed, the police war on mugging, just as with the war on terror in the twenty-first century, was mainly successful in criminalising many innocent young black men, removing any prospect of their employment or a future.
Winston Trew was one of a group of young Fasimbas (Swahili for Young Lion), members of a black youth organisation that provided educational, cultural and political support to their local south-east London community. The group embraced Malcolm X’s ideas on political community self-defence, self-organisation and self-reliance combined with the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Trew describes and analyses the experiences of growing up in south London as a young black man: the racism that blighted his education and his growing political and cultural consciousness set within the context of a putative British Black Power movement. He discusses his role in forming the South East London Parents Organisation (SELPO), and in so doing offers the first inside account of this historically important organisation. SELPO played a key role in establishing education classes to combat the racism of the British education system which regularly assigned black children an ESN (educationally sub-normal) status. The Fasimbas comprised the younger generation whose programme envisaged an education - and politicisation - to correct an education system in which black history had no place. These organisations forged links with like-minded social, cultural and political organisations in west London (Black Liberation Front, BLF) and north London (Youth Forces for National Liberation, YFNL). The period is evoked through the use of contemporary reggae and soul lyrics, that are suffused with protest and raise philosophical questions about the meaning of being black.
Trew describes in evocative detail the police ambush that led to the arrest of the Oval 4 after they left a political meeting and arrived at Oval tube station in south London in March 1972. The youths were set on by a gang of white men as they reached the top of an escalator and manhandled and abused by them. These plain clothes police officers accused Trew and his comrades of stealing handbags (no evidence was ever produced) but refused to show them any identification. Trew and his friends were arrested and subsequently imprisoned; Trew, who was sentenced to two years, was eventually released on appeal in July 1973. Like the case of Mangrove 9, who had successfully defended themselves against riot charges a few months previously, the Oval 4 convictions marked another turning point in the criminalisation of black youth by racist police officers who labelled them as “muggers”, a rebranding of robbery that was marketed as synonymous with violent black crime. Like the use of “sus” (stop and search based on racial profiling and stereotyping) before it, it necessitated the organisation of militant community-based organisation to counter abuses of police powers and the injustices of a compliant legal system.
In May 1978, some six years the trail of the Oval 4, the main police protagonist, Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell, was arrested and exposed as a “corrupt policeman.” The instigator of the framing of the Oval 4 was convicted of conspiracy to steal – ironically, one of the charges that the Oval 4 defendants had been convicted of – and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Transferred from anti-mugging duties, Ridgewell had been tasked to investigate large scale robberies from goods depots and rapidly became a lynchpin in a lucrative “police escort” service for escalating thefts. In December 1982 Ridgewell was found dead in his prison cell after suffering a heart attack.
This autobiography is an important historical work that, on one level, documents the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of a young black man for crimes that he did not commit. However, it is much more than this for it places the racist treatment black youth by the police in the early 1970s within the context of the media “mugging scare” which was utilised by the criminal justice system to criminalise black communities. The militant black organisations that emerged as a consequence, SELPO, The Fasimbas, and others, highlighted the racism that blighted the education system and in attempting to illuminate black history and culture found themselves targeted by an institutionally racist police force. This institutional racism remains to this day, as is manifested in the massively disproportionate imprisonment of young black men, the use of joint enterprise laws and the return of stop and search and racial profiling. But so, importantly, does the resistance of black communities that was born out of the struggles of the 1970s.
The Crises of Multiculturalism, Racism in a Neoliberal Age, Alana Lentin and Gavin Tilley. Zed Books (London) pp.285 (ISBN 9781848135819). Reviewed by Chris Jones
A sizeable book concerned “with the insistent sense of multiculturalism as a unitary idea, philosophy, ‘failed experiment’ or era...[S]ince 11 September 2001 commentators, politicians and media coverage have increasingly drawn on narratives of the ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ to make sense of a broad range of events and political developments, and to justify political initiatives in relation to integration, security and immigration.” However, as the authors are keen to stress, “multiculturalism has rarely amounted to more than a patchwork of initiatives, rhetoric and aspirations in any given context”. With this as a starting point, the authors work their way through chapters covering the idea of multiculturalism and its discursive functions; the persistence of racism via its replacement by the idea of ‘culture’; the complicated and frequently racist content of contemporary liberalism as shaped by concerns over ‘multiculturalism’; the nature of public debates on immigration and integration; the “post-racial logics of ‘diversity politics’ in [Europe]” and the ways in which discussions of diversity serve to mask racist assumptions and attitudes; and finally with an examination of “how partial and inconsistent visions of already achieved equality and freedom are at the nexus of new forms of racialised exclusions being elaborated by state and civil society actors”. Seeking to provide critical analysis and information of contemporary racial and racist politics, the transnational scope of The Crises of Multiculturalism provides a wide-ranging interrogation of the numerous ways in which racism has been re-packaged and re-invented in the contemporary era.
Shoot to Kill: police accountability, firearms and fatal force, Maurice Punch (The Policy Press, UK) 2010, 264 pages, ISBN 9781847424723. Reviewed by Dick Muskett
In the aftermath of the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, you can feel a certain trepidation picking up a book with the dramatic title ‘Shoot to Kill’ and a sub-heading of ‘police accountability, firearms and fatal force’. Is it going to be a justification of tragedies such as the shooting of an innocent electrician in a train at Stockwell, or a full-on denunciation of a trigger happy out-of-control culture that dominates the Met? Interestingly it is neither of these two things, but rather a well-written analysis of the evolution of firearms policy in the police, that sets out, with considerable success, to understand how Jean Charles de Menezes was killed in 2005 and what can be done to diminish the chances of such an event happening again.
Maurice Punch is not a police officer but he knows the organisational structures and tactics of the police well, not just in the UK, but also in the Netherlands and the USA and has written extensively on the subject. He acknowledges the advice and collaboration he has had from senior police officers here and abroad, which for some commentators may mean that he is irrevocably suspect. I’d suggest that this would be a pity as the book provides a fascinating insight into the drift into the current situation and highlights the fudging of the chain of command and the role played by ACPO, an unelected and unaccountable body, in formulating firearms policies for the police.
Punch sets the scene by tracking the history of the arming of police in the UK, from Robert Peel’s first police force. Although Peel’s force held a small number of pistols, cutlasses were more frequently issued to patrols in times of disturbances, with the policy being to bring in troops if it became necessary. Punch makes the point that although Peel and the Tory administration in 1829 were anything but liberal, they made a clear government decision that the police should not be an armed gendarmerie on the continental model but a civil force.
This can partly be attributed to the ongoing concerns about revolutionary ideas but also reflected the lessons the Government had learned from the deaths and injuries in Manchester in 1819, when a detachment of (probably) semi-drunken Yeomanry charged a peaceful rally in St Peter’s Field with sabres drawn, killing between a dozen and twenty people and injuring many more. Known sardonically as the battle of Peterloo, it influenced Ministers to avoid using Yeomanry in crowd control situations if possible.
Yeomanry were volunteer units, usually drawn from the sons of local industrialists and merchants, usually fond of designing fancy uniforms for themselves and riding around looking for an opportunity to break a few working class heads. Ten years after Peterloo, when the surge in membership of the Grand National Consolidated Union took off, the then Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, wrote on more than one occasion to magistrates concerned about militant trade union activity, urging them not to use Yeomanry but to call on regular army units who were considered to be more disciplined. I think it’s likely that a generally reactionary ruling class were not at all averse to the odd exemplary shooting, hanging or transportation of troublesome individuals, but general massacres of radicals risked a backlash they didn’t need.
The author’s account takes a broad sweep across policing history, including the siege of Sidney Street in 1911, and amateurish approach to firearms in the 1950s and 60’s, with stories of how, following reports of armed criminals, cardboard boxes of elderly revolvers, sometimes still in their factory grease, were dug out of lockers. Constables recalled going out with a revolver in one raincoat pocket and a handful of rounds in the other, with a Sergeant’s instruction not to load the gun unless they really needed to. A long way from the Heckler & Koch semi-automatic carbines seen in public places today.
The author uses the narrative to highlight several factors that seem central to the story of police and guns. First are the recurring mistakes and cock-ups whenever guns are used, a few ending in tragedy but more as farce. Then there are the interesting statistics: Punch states that in the overwhelming number of cases where firearms are issued, no shots are fired; one of the experienced officers who took part in the Stockwell operation that resulted in Jean de Menezes death had previously taken part in over 2000 firearms incidents but had never before fired at a person; a senior officer had in his career granted around 4000 authorisations for the use of firearms but in none of them had the police opened fire; in the rare cases when police have fired, at least half the rounds have missed their targets, and on the very few occasions that a person has been hit by a police bullet, over half survive.
Punch correlates these figures to similar statistics from both the USA and Holland and finds the same picture. For example, in New York, a city with over 30,000 police officers, the vast majority will never fire a weapon in anger in their entire career. The author’s argument is that in general police officers avoid opening fire and when they do, they will try to avoid shooting to kill, despite that fact that all training insists that if the weapon is fired, it must be aimed at the centre of the torso.
What Punch does stress over and again is the dislike of firearms and an unwillingness by most operational police to use them if it could be avoided. This seems partly because of the tradition of an unarmed force, partly because it was thought by some that more armed police would lead to more armed robbers but primarily because of an organisational feature that few of us have heard of. Police Officers in the UK are sworn in as Constables, and although this is generally assumed to be a rank, like Private, it is also a post under the Crown and as such police officers, whatever rank they may rise to in their career, are utterly different from any other uniformed public servant, whether a soldier, a firefighter or a traffic warden.
The common law assumption about the role of a constable is that their authority is original, not delegated, and the holder of the office is accountable to the law, not to another person, exercising ‘his’ power at ‘his’ discretion. This could be interpreted to mean that it was the constable’s responsibility whether they opened fire and they could not in theory be ordered to fire by their superior. This culture, certainly until the last twenty or so years, was about resolution of a situation by de-escalation, of the use of minimal and proportionate force, of justifying every round fired and the personal responsibility of each individual officer. Punch’s thesis is that by and large this worked reasonably effectively so long as the armed officer was dealing with either a bank robber armed with a handgun or an armed individual suffering from acute mental stress, and behaving with complete irrationality. Terrorism, and to a lesser extent the acquisition of powerful automatic weapons by some criminal gangs, have made that old school approach as archaic as the elderly Webley revolvers it depended upon.
From the 1970s, conflict in both the Middle East and Ireland started to spill into Europe and UK police forces started to re-think their response to an entirely new situation. The picture that emerges is a spike in the acquisition of new and much more powerful weapons and the training that their use required. This was patchy and relatively uncoordinated, due probably to the differing approaches of the Police Authorities and a resistance to the need for heavy weaponry by many senior police officers. Special firearms units had to be formed, with selected officers undergoing a radically different type of training but alongside most of their colleagues adhering to the concept of an unarmed police for all normal duties.
What didn’t match the ‘mission creep’ of increasingly sophisticated firearms were the command structures to oversee the tactical deployment of the weapons. The authorisation system to deploy weapons on the ground, probably adequate when the threat was a villain with a sawn-off shotgun, proved to be clumsy and painfully slow in the face of the new threat. Punch describes instances when the only officer in an area who could authorise the deployment of firearms was away for the weekend, and so on. Inevitably, the newly trained firearms teams grew to see themselves as an elite who were hampered by their commanders caution and equivocation. Punch does however note that however special the new firearms teams saw themselves, they were not in any sense on par with regular army SAS units, in training or experience.
Central Government had reacted to growing public concerns over a range of issues, from police corruption to miscarriages of justice and public disorder, by deluging forth a stream of legislation covering all manner of police and criminal justice issues, but as Punch observes, studiously avoiding the subject of firearms use and fatal force. The pressure on Chief Constables to bring coherence to the use of firearms did not diminish however. For instance, Justice Rafferty’s statement following the trial of the individual police officer who fired a fatal shot that killed an unarmed man in a police raid in Hastings in 1998 was pointed. She made it clear that there had to be a line of institutional responsibility running back to senior officers who should also be held to account when things went wrong. But the policy vacuum on the use of firearms remained until it was filled by an organisation that had no statutory role and no public accountability – ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers.
With hindsight, it’s possible to see that the Police’s long tradition of resisting centralisation and of clinging fiercely to local autonomy created an open goal and ACPO took advantage. It may also be that Chief Constables who might be bitterly opposed to a policy being formed by civil servants felt much happier knowing that potentially contentious policies were being developed by individuals they knew well, in an organisation that they were part of.
In any event, it appears that ACPO were responsible for significant changes in the way that police in the UK used firearms. Punch sets out the long standing ground rules for opening fire, and then contrasts them with the very different approach after the Kratos policy was adopted. Kratos was seemingly formulated by ACPO to deal with an admittedly entirely new situation, where a suicide bomber would be likely if apprehended to detonate the device he or she was carrying. From an approach that was based on firing only as a last resort, after due warning and then with the aim of preventing the individual from harming someone, Kratos instead set out a strategy of shooting the potential suicide bomber in the head, at once, without warning and to continue firing until the target was incapable of taking any further action, in other words, dead. Moreover, the thinking that produced Kratos overturned nearly two hundred years of policing practice by laying down that a senior officer could order an armed officer to take this action.
Maurice Punch takes the reader through the aftermath of the fatal tube bombings on the 7 July 2005, followed by the failed bombings a fortnight later. His account of the 24 hours following those attempts, as the suspected perpetrators were tracked is riveting and I found its recounting of the succession of errors and cock-ups had a familiarity that sounds real. The circumstances of operating in a city where a fortnight ago over 50 people died in suicide blasts, and where the previous day a repeat had only been avoided by chance created a tension that made a violent climax almost inevitable. The awful death of Jean Charles de Menezes was the result.
There will be many people who will believe that a Kratos policy is never acceptable under any circumstances. There will be very many more who despair of it but will ask what else can be done? If there are grounds for believing that a suicide bomber is about to detonate themselves, what do you do? That’s a question that each of us has to decide for ourselves but the State is certain to reserve that right to kill if it seems it is justified.
What we can usefully do is to focus on demanding that if ACPO is to be the chosen body to create policy on the use of firearms by the police, then ACPO has to be publicly accountable and its policy proposals must be scrutinised. The procedures for taking the ultimate action of killing need to be very much more coherent than they appear to be at present and senior police officers need to spend a considerable time examining what went wrong at Stockwell and thinking hard about how each little glitch could be avoided.
Accidents will always happen but steps can and must be taken to reduce the chances of them happening to infinitesimal numbers. Maurice Blunt’s book is a good enough place to start that process.
Policy Press: http://www.policypress.co.uk/
Steadfast in Protest – Annual report 2011,
Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders (FIDH-OMCT), November 2011, 617p.
Regional Analysis on Western Europe, pp.396-412. Reviewed by Marie Martin
The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders was created in 1997 as a joint initiative by the International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT). For the past 14 years, the Observatory has been reporting on cases of “persons at risk or victim of retaliation, harassment or violation due to their involvement individually or as a group, in favour of the promotion and the implementation of rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and safeguarded by various international mechanisms". While this year is obviously marked by the uprising in the Middle East and in North Africa, the report is an occasion to recall that, in a number of countries “no wind of change [has been witnessed] but a great deal of continuity or even an exacerbation of threats and assaults on human rights defenders”. Despite Europe having one of the most developed and comprehensive legal frameworks protecting fundamental rights and freedoms, many people face threats, violence or harassment in Western European countries as a result of them taking positions in favour of human rights. The EU has appointed “human rights defenders’ focal points” in over 80 countries, but appear to fall short of implementing its own guidance when it comes to internal social and political challenges. Growing discrimination against migrants, LGBT people and minority groups such as Roma, restrictions to press freedom and trade-union activities, along with judicial, administrative and financial restrictions to non-governmental organisations directly impacted on the environment in which human rights defenders were operating. Whether cases happened in EU or non-EU countries, a worrying trend towards the restriction of civil liberties, e.g. through the storage of personal data, and freedom of speech through arbitrary arrests and threats, is perceptible. Disturbing cases revealing total impunity and the disproportionate use of force against human rights defenders are not limited to “developing countries”, as this report sadly documents: See:
http://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/obs_2011_uk-complet.pdf