An external review has harshly criticised the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for its flawed investigation into the death of a black man who died in police custody in 2008. Sean Rigg, who was 40 and suffered from schizophrenia, was arrested as he walked down the road topless and performing martial art manoeuvres. Police restrained him in a prone position with his hands cuffed behind his back for over eight minutes. Still cuffed, he was taken to Brixton police station in south London and left in the van for a further 11 minutes, where he suffered a cardiac arrest. The IPCC found no police misconduct or negligence had contributed to Sean Rigg’s death.
It was only the determination of Sean Rigg’s family to uncover the truth, including painstaking examination of mobile phone and CCTV footage of the incident, that exposed many of the police lies, leading the external review to conclude that police negligence led directly to Rigg’s death, and the IPCC needed to reconsider whether criminal charges should be brought. The review also found it ‘implausible’ that police had not known that Sean had mental health issues, given the number of calls from his hostel about his behaviour that had been logged that day, and the fact that Sean was carrying his passport. With typical racist contempt, police assumed the passport was stolen and arrested him for its theft.
Since 1998, 333 people have died in police custody, yet no police officer has ever been convicted. Meanwhile, the IPCC has a long and shameful history of covering up the truth about those who die at the hands of the police, in custody or on the streets, including the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson and Mark Duggan.
Jimmy Mubenga: G4S murder
The inquest underway into the death of an Angolan man who died on a deportation flight in October 2010 has exposed the casual, racist brutality of Britain’s immigration service. Jimmy Mubenga died while being handcuffed and roughly restrained on a British Airways flight by G4S private security guards, despite begging for help around 50 times. 21 eye witnesses have told the court they heard Mubenga calling out that he couldn’t breath and that they were killing him. Yet the guards have denied hearing him calling for help or knowing Mubenga was in danger of suffocation, despite being handcuffed from behind with his head forced down against the seat in front of him, in a position known to carry a risk of asphyxia, for more than half an hour. Three security guards were arrested at the time of Jimmy Mubenga’s death, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to proceed with the case.
The outsourcing of deportations to private companies makes brutality even more likely: the senior deportation officer, Stuart Tribelnig, had received just four weeks’ training from G4S before being put in charge of other officers – training that mainly involved learning how to subdue deportees using ‘pain control’; guards only received their hourly pay if a deportation went ahead – whatever the state of the deportee. Some of the casual, endemic racism of the deportation service was exposed at the beginning of the inquest, when Tribelnig read from his phone just some of the vicious, racist jokes that, he said, were always ‘doing the rounds’. In 2008 Outsourcing Abuse, a report by Medical Justice, found ‘widespread and systemic’ abuse of deportees by private security companies and detailed 300 cases of serious and horrific injuries. The case of Jimmy Mubenga makes it clear that nothing has changed since then and it is only a matter of time before someone else is killed.
No deportations! Justice for Jimmy Mubenga!
Cat Wiener
