Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 160, April/May 2001
A militant, lively demonstration defied the rain on Saturday 10 March to take the message through the streets of Haringey that enough is enough! 300 people united under the slogans Haringey police are out of control, The government’s racist immigration laws encourage racist attacks and The community demands justice and dignity for all people.
The march was called by the Broomfield School 3, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, the Free Winston Silcott campaign, Haringey Solidarity Group, Justice for Roger Sylvester, the Lindo Family Defence Campaign and Justice for Harry Stanley. It was also supported by contingents from Haringey Socialist Alliance, Camden Unison and Haringey Trades Council.
The march halted for a minute’s silence at Summerhill Road, where Roger Sylvester had lived and was brutally arrested by Haringey police. His father Rupert made a moving speech about Roger’s murder, telling the marchers and public that the family would accept ‘Nothing less than criminal charges against the police’.
The march ended with a rally outside the surgery of Barbara Roche, immigration minister. All the family campaigns spoke, followed by speakers from FRFI, Socialist Alliance, Movement for Justice, Detudak, Kilombo, Uhuru and the Nation of Islam. A solidarity message was read out from the Irish Republican Writers Group. All the speakers stressed the need for unity and the importance of continuing to organise together in the future to hound Barbara Roche and Haringey Chief Superintendent Stephen James out of office, to fight for justice for the families of Roger Sylvester and Harry Stanley, and to defend black people who are harassed and attacked by the racist police. It was a genuinely impressive rally that kept people listening and involved up to the end. They left determined to continue to stand up for the rights of all. Below we reproduce extracts from the main speeches, together with updates on the campaigns.
The Lindo Family Campaign
‘From 1985 I’ve been fighting this racist system and up until now in 2001 this system is still racist against black people. Things haven’t changed a bit. There was the Scarman report, which was supposed to have changed things. Then we moved on to the MacPherson report, and that was supposed to have changed things. Now we are in 2001 and they haven’t even implemented all the recommendations in the Lawrence Inquiry, before we have another report -the Lindo report, which was done by the Metropolitan Police. And instead of accepting that they are bloody racists in the way they treat black people and that the system stinks, they want to fight it. So what does that tell you? That the system is racist and they want to keep it. But we are here today to tell you that we want this system to be broken down and to be fair and we want people to be treated like decent human beings.
We want something done about stop-and-search. Half the time they don’t even say it has been a stop-and-search. You could be walking down the road and they stop you and say ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?’ but because they don’t actually search you, it doesn’t count. We want it to count. Every time they stop you, we want the police to give you a ticket to show that they stopped you on reasonable grounds, as they are supposed to….
We need to know our rights, because when we know our rights, we can stand up and fight. We won this battle, we won the Lindo report, by fighting for it. You want rights – you got to fight for them, you got to stand up and be counted.
One of the recommendations in the Lindo report is that the police are supposed to be trained in how to treat bystanders – what I wanted them to call in the report ‘Public Scrutiny Observers’. Everybody has a right to monitor the police. There’s nobody better on the street to monitor the police than us. But they don’t want to be monitored. They expect you just to go on your way. But that isn’t the case. If it were, I would be rotting in gaol, but what saved me was that every time there were witnesses. And one thing I can tell you, if the police want to arrest you, stay around as long as you can without letting them arrest you until people see what they are doing. If you go quietly, they will do it as quickly as they can. Stay there and shout ‘Can you see what they are doing to me?’
We have had 19 charges brought by Haringey police and we have won all 19, and we have the largest civil action against the police for harassment, and they can’t even fight it because the report states that since 1992 they have harassed my family. We want justice and we need to stand together to fight this system!’
Delroy Lindo
Delroy Lindo arrested again!
On Friday 16 March Delroy Lindo was brutally arrested by six Territorial Support Group (TSG) officers who leapt out of a van, smashed him to the pavement and dragged him handcuffed along the ground. We do not yet know whether this was a simple act of thuggery, part of a continuing police vendetta against a black activist, or a deliberate ploy by members of the Police Federation to embarrass their bosses.
Delroy was detained in Hornsey police station for over five hours while over 20 very angry protesters, including RCG supporters, kept up demands for his immediate release. The press were notified and Delroy’s arrest was featured on local TV. Also notified were Chief Superintendent Stephen James and Lee Jasper, the Greater London Authority adviser on equality and policing. Around midnight Delroy was finally released without charge.
This latest arrest follows publication of the internal report by the Metropolitan Police Authority and the Metropolitan Police Service into the unprecedented harassment of Delroy Lindo. The Lindo report was leaked, censored, clumsily published in full on the internet, following protests about its suppression, and withdrawn within 24 hours, following further protest about the family’s full address being included. The report constitutes a major embarrassment to the police because it concludes that there was indeed unwarranted targeting and harassment of the Lindo family, which took the form of 93 intelligence reports, mostly in a six month period, and 38 arrests proven to be wrongful, mostly over the last four years.
Pickets of the Daily Mail newspaper
It is rumoured that the Lindo report has been challenged by over 40 police officers in Haringey through their union the Police Federation. While some top officials at Scotland Yard require policing to be less overtly racist and confrontational, many officers are out of control and clearly racism and brutality best express their interest in the job. These most savage sections have been encouraged and supported by the Daily Mail newspaper, which purports to be the voice of ‘middle Britain’. Leading Mail journalist, Chester Stern, who formerly worked in the Metropolitan police press office, has been fuelling a witch-hunt against the Lindo family and supporting police grievances. Two pickets have been held outside Northcliffe House, the London offices of the Daily Mail. The Mail’s gutter journalism not only targets black people standing up for their rights, but is virulently directed at asylum seekers and other vulnerable minorities. The editor Paul Dacre is paid £727,000 a year for presiding over this filth.
Why arrest Delroy again?
The second picket of the Daily Mail took place on Saturday 17 March as advertised and planned. The Lindo family were there despite being kept waiting at the Whittington Hospital until 6am trying to see a doctor about Delroy’s injuries. Had the police tried to stop the picket going ahead by arresting Delroy 24 hours before it?
The TSG are notoriously brutal and stupid. Had they recognised Delroy when they leapt out to arrest him? Or was he simply a passing black man?
Did Haringey police officers contact their TSG friends to arrest Delroy yet again and annoy their senior officers? Delroy and Sonia Lindo had been at Hornsey police station two days before as witnesses to a brutal arrest in Wood Green that left a man needing an ambulance. Are the police so determined to prevent the Lindos’ principled ‘don’t walk on by’ stand that they will attack every time an injustice is reported?
One thing is clear: the Lindo family will not give up their fight for justice. It is vital that we all support them. An injury to one is an injury to all!
Drop the charges against the Broomfield school students!
In October 2000, some youths went into Broomfield school in North London and attacked a group of black 14-year-old students. Later that day some of the students saw the attackers on the bus in Wood Green and called the police. The police let the attackers go and turned on the black students. Three of them were assaulted, detained in cells and charged with affray. Having had their case postponed twice they are now due to appear in court on 25-29 June.
The young people at the centre of this case, together with their families and black and white friends from school, will continue to campaign against the police racism that resulted in their violent arrest and criminalisation. Everyone is invited to a demonstration of support outside the hearings at Lordship Lane Magistrates Court, Tottenham, although supporters will not be allowed into the juvenile court. There will be daily briefings at 4 o’clock to keep supporters informed.
‘I am the mother of one of the Broomfield three that was arrested and what I have to say is going to be short and sweet. I send my son to school for his GCSEs. I didn’t send him to get a criminal record, so you better drop the charges now!’
‘It was 12:20pm … a couple of my friends were in the queue; they were lining up to have something to eat. They saw a group of youths entering the school and they saw some of them pulling baseball bats from the back of their jackets and knives out of their pockets …After school we reported them by phoning the police. The police get on the bus and they speak to them and then let them go. And then they come to us and start trying to arrest my friends.’
‘We weren’t taken by the hand and told that we were being arrested; we were thrown in the van like a sack of potatoes, twisted up and put in a head lock and handcuffed. Now, I want to know how they would’ve felt if we had of done it to them because if we had have done it to them, straight away we’d be nicked for assaulting a police officer. So why can’t they be arrested for assaulting a pupil? Because I’m only 14 years old and I don’t deserve to be twisted up and thrown in a van. If you were twisted up and thrown in a van like that, you wouldn’t like it, Roger Sylvester – you murdered him but his blood is on your hands, so you can’t get away with it and you won’t get away with it. Now, this isn’t the first time you’ve seen my face or the last time – all right!’
‘My daughter was in a van just feet from me but when I asked to see my daughter they told me that I could not see her. I asked them which police station they were taking her to and they said Hornsey. I went to Hornsey police station but my daughter wasn’t there. I had to get in touch with a lawyer so that the lawyer could tell me that my daughter was in Edmonton police station. She was locked up there for hours and when she got to Edmonton police station they had given her some papers to sign – a 14-year-old with no social worker, no lawyer, no parent. Now we’re here to get justice. We pay the police to protect our children. Just remember that -we pay them they don’t pay we!’
Broomfield 3 Campaign
Justice for Harry Stanley
‘Harry Stanley was a close friend of mine. If he had lived, today would have been his wedding anniversary and I’d have been out celebrating with his family. Harry was a 46-year-old Scottish grandfather who lived in Hackney very close to where I live. He’d been a week out of hospital after an operation and as he had time on his hands he decided to go and mend a coffee table leg. He went to his brother’s house to borrow some tools and on his way back he called in at a pub for a rest. He had half a pint of lemonade. Someone in the pub called the police and said that an Irishman had left the pub with a sawn-off shotgun in a carrier bag. Harry walked 600 yards down the road and two armed officers challenged him from behind. He never even managed to turn the full way round before they murdered him.
We have been through the same sort of thing as the Sylvester family. The PCA report was all about the victim and his criminal convictions, not about the criminals who murdered him.
Winston Silcott is a political prisoner; the Broomfield 3 have been terrorised; the Lindos have been terrorised; Harry Stanley was murdered and Roger Sylvester was terrorised and murdered. Why? It’s to terrorise the rest of us – to keep us down. Well, I refuse to be terrorised and I think that we’ve got to stand up and fight them in the old fashioned way, class against class. Having black coppers won’t alter anything. They had black coppers in the colonies and they implemented racist laws. What we’ve got to do is fight back against the whole system.
Jim – Justice for Harry Stanley
Free Winston Silcott
If ever there was a case of an unfair trial, it was that of Winston Silcott for the death of Anthony Smith. Winston was arrested for stabbing Smith outside a nightclub and was on bail at the time of the Broadwater Farm uprising during which PC Blakelock was killed. He has always maintained that he stabbed Smith in self-defence.
Winston was framed and convicted, along with Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, for the death of Blakelock, solely on the basis of verbal reports gathered under duress, in what Amnesty International was to describe as an ‘unacceptable’ practice. By the time he was tried for the murder of Anthony Smith, Winston Silcott’s name was widely known and the police-loving gutter press had printed mug-shot pictures of him, accompanied by disgusting, racist articles describing him as an ape and a monster.
The convictions of the Tottenham 3 were overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1991. In 1998, when the Metropolitan Police agreed out of court to pay damages to Winston for his frame-up, the Police Federation threatened that it would take civil action against Winston on behalf of Blakelock’s family to win damages from him for Blakelock’s death.
Winston Silcott’s ‘tariff’ (the minimum term a life sentence prisoner must serve) for the killing of Anthony Smith has expired and his continued imprisonment is clearly designed to punish him further for the death of PC Blakelock. Every attempt to get his case re-opened for the killing of Anthony Smith on his plea of self-defence has been denied, and the Parole Board has so far refused to recommend moving him to an open prison or releasing him.
Justice for Roger Sylvester
‘Why were you restraining him for so long? The CPS decided not to prosecute the police officers. We will settle for nothing less than criminal charges against the police. An inquest gives the police the right to say nothing. They have never been challenged in a court of law. We want justice for Roger’s death and them to have to answer in a court of law. We are black people and when our loved ones die we want to give them a good send off. We couldn’t do that for Roger. Roger was buried in two body-bags and every time we think about the way he died and the way he was buried it pains us. Let us stand together, black and white. It could be you tomorrow. We must not let the prison officers and the police get away with murder. Enough is enough.’ Rupert Sylvester (Roger Sylvester’s father)
On 11 January 1999, Roger Sylvester, a 30-year-old black man, was restrained outside his home by eight police officers from Tottenham police station. He suffered numerous injuries and died after seven days on a life-support system.
The report of the investigation into Roger’s death is the property of the Metropolitan Police, which has refused to disclose the contents, even though all police authorities have signed up to a new Home Office voluntary code on disclosure. The family of Roger Sylvester continue to fight for justice for all those killed in custody, for the rights of their families to legal aid and full disclosure, to independent investigation, to prosecution where an unlawful killing verdict is returned and to the suspension of police officers involved until investigations are completed.
The police officers involved in Roger’s murder are still walking the streets in the name of law and order. The Justice for Roger Sylvester campaign will continue.
Family demands proof!
At the Haringey Police Community Consultative Group meeting on 21 March, Chief Superintendent James, in response to Mrs Sylvester’s demand for real answers about her son’s murder, brazenly announced to a packed room that he had written to the family solicitor two months previously giving the names of the police officers involved in Roger Sylvester’s death. He continued to say that these officers had agreed to give oral evidence at the inquest, adjourned to the end of the year. This was immediately challenged by the family who made it clear that they knew nothing about such a letter and that they would be contacting their solicitor the next day. In addition, Victor Sylvester, Roger’s cousin, explained that the police have agreed to give evidence only from behind a screen and that they are still protected by Coroner’s Rule 22 which allows them to refuse to answer any question which might incriminate them.
The family’s solicitor told FRFI that, having made enquiries, ‘he is absolutely certain he has received no letter’ from Chief Superintendent James. And on 26 March, the Justice for Roger Sylvester campaign gave the following statement to FRFI; ‘No letter was received. Perhaps he should supply proof. He may have deliberately said it to drive a wedge between ourselves and our solicitors, maybe in an attempt to discredit Hickman and Rose.’
The police murdered Roger Sylvester and his family are demanding the truth.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!
‘FRFI is proud to be here marching… Britain is an imperialist country. The western democracies were founded on slavery. Britain’s racism is not a policy decision; it is part and parcel of its imperialist history. It doesn’t matter which political party is in power, they will always be racist because they protect the capitalist system and the capitalist system is founded on exploitation. It breeds on divisions; it breeds on disunity, and that is why it is so important that we are here united today against the criminalisation of young black people and against the murder of black people in the streets. We are also here to oppose the criminalisation of people coming into this country; fleeing oppressive regimes like the one in Turkey, which is murdering political prisoners. It was a good demo today; it was lively; it should have been bigger but this is just the start – next time it will be bigger.
Helen, Revolutionary Communist Group
Solidarity with Turkish political prisoners!
‘On 19 December 2000 the fascist Turkish state commenced a massive brutal operation against the prisons in Turkey… at least 32 prisoners were killed and over 400 injured. The fascist state, which hides its ugly inhuman nature behind the fig leaf of democracy and human rights, has laid bare its true evil nature by openly attacking the prisoners. These attacks are carried out in order to break the heroic resistance of the political prisoners who are fighting against the policy of isolation cells and other tyrannical policies conducted against them. This resistance is against imperialism, fascism and world reaction that have enslaved humanity everywhere. This resistance is against organisations like the IMF, World Bank and NATO, the tools of the imperialist system which drive world toilers into poverty and destitution. We call upon all democratic and freedom loving people and all those who are concerned about human rights, to support the struggle of the political prisoners and to take every possible measure to ensure the safety of the prisoners and to stop this brutal massacre.’
Musa – Detudak
Report compiled by Nicki Jameson, Susan Davidson and Rebekka Jameson
