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Today, we reproduce here a joint statement by the organisers of the Ferguson Solidarity Tour. Full signatories are here.

 The excesses of policing have come under more scrutiny since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson and we feel that today, International Day Against Police Brutality, is an important time to speak out against the injustices of policing.

The advising charity Inquest has recorded 1507 “deaths following contact with police” in England and Wales since 1990. Each time someone dies after contact with the police the grief and mourning of their family and friends is put on hold indefinitely. Instead they are forced to become campaigners seeking justice for their loved ones and themselves.

What these family campaigners want more than anything else is the truth about what happened to those killed. Many would agree that police should not investigate the circumstances of the killing themselves, yet the Independent Police Complaints Commission is populated by a significant number of ex-police officers; a clear conflict of interest.

For a reliable account of the circumstances surrounding a death the coronial inquest system is often relied upon, yet there is no guarantee that families who have suffered a loss will receive the legal aid often necessary to hire a barrister that represents their interests in these proceedings. In the majority of cases unlawful killing verdicts returned by juries have not lead to prosecutions against police.

We demand that the families of all those who die at the hands of the state automatically be afforded legal aid to help in their pursuit of the truth. Where inquests find an unlawful killing a CPS prosecution should follow as a matter of course.

Police brutality is by no means restricted to those instances where people die in custody. Stop and search monitors StopWatch place Black people in London as almost three times more likely to be subject to stop and search. A recent HMIC report has found that African-Caribbean people are also disproportionately subjected to strip searches, accounting for 17% of the total. With such drastic disparity and discrimination this amounts to a routine and violent incursion into many people’s everyday lives.

There is also a direct continuum between this kind of everyday police brutality and the deaths that have received more attention of late. The death of Habib Paps Ullah, who died during the course of a stop and search, highlights the potentially lethal results.

There are still worrying numbers of people pursuing justice from the state due to police brutality of many forms. Today is a day for remembering and protesting these brutalities.

On Thursday 22nd January, it was announced by the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) that a £200,000 budget was set aside for a new tough anti-gang initiative called “Operation Shield” which is being trialled in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Westminster and Haringey for the next 12 months.

Operation Shield, according to the London Evening Standard, will enable the Metropolitan Police Trident team and local authorities to bring civil or criminal sanction to “known gang members” if any supposed gang member carries out an assault, stabbing or other serious crime.

“The penalties will range from recall to prison, gang injunctions banning them from parts of the capital or mixing with their associates, mandatory employment training courses or ejection from social housing.

The offender who triggers action will be fast-tracked through the criminal justice system for swift sentencing.”

In other words if a crime or misdemeanour has been committed then the police will be able to assign guilt to anyone they identify as a “gang member”. This then could lead to an entire family being evicted from their home and/or innocent people serving long prison sentences. This is akin to collective punishment, people being punished for acts for which they neither participated nor in many cases had any awareness of.

The precedent for this can be described by many working class families who have had family members wrongly convicted through Joint Enterprise. A law which has enabled the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service to imprison people from as young as 13 years old on the pretext of association. The campaign group JENGbA, who spoke at our 2014 conference, describe cases of predominately black youth who had been imprisoned for joint enterprise murder despite being unconscious, physically not present and in one case partially blind, that is the case of a Warrington youth Jordan Cunliffe, who is serving 12 years even though it was recognised in court that he was not at all involved in the fatal attack.

Also Operation Shield is using the precedent of the “fast-track justice” that was seen during the uprisings of August 2011. Anyone being pushed through this scheme may face prejudice and stigma in the courts as a “serious gang member” and thus face exemplary long prison sentences.

The use of the word “gang” in policing and crime contexts, we believe is a racialised term to stigmatise groups of working class black youth and stereotype them as criminals by default. This trial project will form the basis of more mass stop and search, mass arrests and arbitrary evictions in places like Brixton, Tottenham and council housing in Pimilco and Victoria.

London Black Revolutionaries are organising leaflet drops around Lambeth this weekend and the other target area in the coming weeks. We will be supporting these efforts and organising our own leaflet drops, community meetings and actions in the coming months.

If you want to get involved with LBR’s efforts see below and with our activities please contact us directly.

Saturday 24 January, 5pm to 8pm
Karibu Education Centre, 7 Gresham Road, London SW9 7PH

Brixton event on Facebook

Black lives matter. Black lives should have mattered before they were gunned down or choked to death, both to the officers charged with protecting and serving them and to a judicial system that has exposed itself as involved in a deadly chokehold of its own.

– Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou

Speakers: Reverend Sekou, Marcia Rigg (Sean Rigg Justice & Change Campaign), Lee Lawrence (son of Cherry Groce), Carole Duggan (Justice for Mark Duggan), Wail Qasim (Defend the Right to Protest), London Campaign Against Police & State Violence.

The London Campaign Against Police and State Violence is supporting the United Families and Friends Campaign efforts along with others to conduct a national Ferguson Solidarity Tour to help build links with other campaigns against racialised state violence and murder.

The speaker from Ferguson, Missouri the place where the #BlackLivesMatter movement started is Reverend Sekou. We believe that his contribution to the discussion of resisting and organising against state racialised violence will be important for many to hear.

Our speaker will be share the platform in this rare and necessary event organised by Defend the Right to Protest and many others.

We are aware of that the London Black Revolutionaries have pulled out of the tour which is regrettable and we wish it could have been avoided. However their concerns about the issue of black democratic leadership in this movement is something that we share and will monitor this issue closely.

Our solidarity for those who continue survive or have lost loved ones to racialised state violence endures beyond these meetings, and our police station or court support, it will endure and continue to live when we come together on the street.

Whether in Westfield or Brixton, New York or Ferguson, Burkina Faso or Nigeria, Black Lives Matter.

In June last year, “D”, a black man while driving through Brixton was stopped and assaulted by police officers from the Territorial Support Group. The ferocity of attack left him with a cracked rib. After he pulled over, the officers jumped out of a van and claimed that they saw him make a drug deal. He was originally charged with “assaulting a police officer” but this was changed to “police obstruction” and the trial took place at the Inner Crown Court, earlier this week. D was put on a warning list and so was given only 18 hours notice before his trial date started making it difficult for LCAPSV to organise court solidarity.

After a 3 day trial, D was found “Not Guilty” by a Crown Court Jury, he is grateful for all the support he has received and is now taking considering his options about subsequent actions. Thank you for all the support whether in attending or even just sharing this incident. 

Case background

JOIN US AGAINST THE RACIST PRISON SYSTEM

Date: 31st December 2014

Time: 6pm to 8pm

Place: Brixton Prison, Jebb Avenue, London SW2 5XF

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/621568717969283/

Tube station: Brixton

Bus routes are: 45, 109, 118, 133, 159, and 250

// Bring banners and something you can make some noise with. Drums, pots, pans, sirens, speakers, megaphones, horns. //

Join LCAPSV and others as we protest the racist prison system in the UK, demand change, and let people on the inside know we haven’t forgotten them. We will assemble on the corner of Jebb Avenue and Brixton Hill at 6pm. Then make our way to Brixton Prison, making as much noise as we can. There will be a speak out against detention and prison, and music and poetry.

Black people are killed by the state on the streets, but they are also killed under incarceration. In the UK, one person a week dies in police custody, or following police contact. Jimmy Mubenga was suffocated by racist G4S security guards on an aeroplane. Sean Rigg was asphyxiated in Brixton police station. Ricky Bishop was also killed in police custody at Brixton police station. Sarah Campbell died within hours of arriving at Styal Prison. 15 year old Garthe Myatt was killed by security guards at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre. Between 1969-2011 3,180 individuals have died in custody, whilst in the care of police or prison officials, those running secure psychiatric units, immigration detention centres or whilst they were being deported.

Where they don’t kill you outright, prison and detention takes time from you, isolates you from your community and your family and does the same to your loved ones on the outside. This is not done at random, but is systematically racist in its intent and practice. It is another side of state racism that is elsewhere seen in the racist application of stop and search, immigration law, and extra-judicial killings.

The proportion of people of African-Caribbean and African descent incarcerated here is almost seven times greater to their share of the population. In the United States, the proportion of black prisoners to population is about four times greater.

Incarceration is not only destructive of the lives of black men and women, but also the men, women and children who make up their families, their friends, their lovers and their lives. Every life destroyed inside prison includes many other lives destroyed outside of it.

Noise demos outside of prisons are a continuing tradition across the world. A way of expressing solidarity for people imprisoned during the New Year, remembering those held captive by the state. A noise demo breaks the isolation and alienation of the cells our enemies create, but it does not have to stop at that.

 

Today is the international day of migrants, while some rightly celebrate the contributions that migrants bring to these shores. For many of us, today is a day of mourning and remembrance.

There is a demonstration today at 6:30pm outside the Home Office Building (2 Marsham Street, SW1P 4DF) in solidarity with Jimmy Mubenga’s family. It has been organised by Movement for Justice which we and Black Revs support. The details are here

We mourn the individuals, the parents, the children and the babies who have drowned or were killed by traffickers in attempting migrate across the Mediterranean sea to safety in Europe.

Our tears carry a promise to end this suffering.

We mourn the deaths of Joy Gardner, Jimmy Mubenga, Prince Ofosu, Christine Case, Rubel Ahmed and the many others who died in state custody due to migrating to Britain without regular documents, we will organise with their loved ones towards justice.

Our tears carry a promise to end this suffering.

We mourn those whose names are not known, those who died in humble circumstances not deemed horrific enough to capture media interest.

Our tears carry a promise to end this suffering.

We remember those like Isa Muazu who have been demonised, disgraced and deported by successive governments.

We remember the hundreds of thousands who migrate to Europe, the tens of thousands stranded at tent strewn refugee camps and the many thousands locked up in immigration detention centres.

We remember the Harmondsworth hunger strikers, the uprisings at four detention centres and the resistance and solidarity that is being built in defence of migrants.

Their actions sustain a growing movement. It transforms our promise from a hope to a reality. May it continue until the victory.

—-

London Campaign against Police & State Violence as a group currently focusses our efforts on police brutality but we work with other organisations where state sponsored violence overlap with this and other issues.

We recommend the following organisations that work on specifically on defending the rights of migrants:

Anti-Raids Network
Migrants Rights Network
Movement for Justice
RAMFEL Charity
Right to Remain

 

Today, Wednesday 17th December is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.

The London Campaign against Police and State Violence stands in solidarity with sex workers who face violence often in their work. Last year on the 4th December, the Metropolitan Police using 250 police officers, invited Sky News, BBC and the London Evening standard to watch and photograph the intimidation and violence that accompanied the mass arrest in Soho.

We acknowledge that these raids did very little to help or “rescue” these workers but instead publicly shamed these women, legitimised evictions and put them into greater risk and vulnerability. As we have seen in Brixton earlier this year, this gentrification, by which we mean the displacement of settled working class communities, is performed through orchestrated violence and the combined efforts of selective capital disinvestment and investment. The motive was neither a moral crusade for “values” nor a protective effort to “save” trafficked women, this was about capitalist revanchism. The eviction of marginalised women, the seizure of property and land was in order to increase profitability of rents. For this reason, the spectacle of violence was meted out by the State. The attacks that these sex workers endured and continue to endure, imperilled not only their safety and physical bodies but also their ability to survive.

We support the statement and pledge to end violence against sex workers written by the Safety First Initiative and the candle-lit march today called by the Prostitutes Collective which starts at Soho Square at 6:45pm, more details here.