On 29 June 2021, PC Benjamin Monk was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for the vicious killing of ex-footballer Dalian Atkinson in August 2016. This was the first successful conviction of a serving police officer for any killing in 35 years, despite more than 1,700 people having died following police contact since 1990, showing the culture of impunity for all repressive arms of the state including police, prisons and mental health detention. DESPINE DOHMAN reports.
PCs Monk and Mary Ellen Bettley-Smith of West Mercia Police were called to a house in Telford where Atkinson was experiencing a mental health crisis. In the following six minutes, Monk discharged his taser into Atkinson three times and kicked him in the head twice; Bettley-Smith beat Atkinson with her baton while he was on the ground. Despite one taser discharge being 33 seconds long – more than six times longer than standard and requiring an override of the automatic cut-off – and the kicks being forceful enough to leave impressions of his laces in Atkinson’s head, Monk was found not guilty of murder; evidently this is not enough to show intent to cause serious harm when a cop does it. Monk’s eight-year sentence for manslaughter was the shortest term the judge could get away with giving him for what was a racist killing by an agent of the state. Bettley-Smith will face a retrial for assault occasioning actual bodily harm after her jury was unable to reach a verdict.
State sexism
Meanwhile, Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens pleaded guilty to the murder of Sarah Everard on 9 July, having earlier pleaded guilty to her kidnap and rape. Couzens was nicknamed ‘The Rapist’ when he was serving with Kent Police and was reported for multiple incidents of indecent exposure just weeks before he murdered Everard; the Met can shed all the crocodile tears it likes, the fact remains that its very structure protects and nurtures the most vicious aspects of British state racism and sexism.
Racist policing
Three members of the ‘Stockwell Six’, Courtney Harriot, Paul Green and Cleveland Davidson, had their attempted robbery convictions overturned by the Court of Appeal on 6 July. All black men, they were set upon at Stockwell Station on the London Underground in 1972 by Derek Ridgewell and other officers of the British Transport Police and imprisoned on his testimony. This same Ridgewell, who served in the white supremacist South Rhodesian Police, similarly set upon the ‘Oval Four’ in 1972 (who only had their sentences overturned in late 2019) and was eventually imprisoned for conspiracy to steal mailbags. Even now, the British Transport Police continues to cover up for its dead former member, claiming that no other cases which he was involved in need reviewing, clearly fearing the fallout a thorough review could cause.
A racist system
British prisons and policing are social and political tools for the repression and control of the working class. In an imperialist country like Britain, they must take on a racist form to ensure that racialised minorities continue to occupy an oppressed position in the social relations of production. Black and minority ethnic (BAME) people make up 14% of the general population but 27% of the prison population. In 2018, White prisoners had an average sentence length of 18.3 months compared to 29.1 months for Asian and 28 months for Black prisoners.
Prisons are themselves factories of alienation; drug use, self-harm and suicide rates have consistently been higher on the inside and have grown rapidly over the last few years. Since 2000, there have been 4,580 deaths in prison, 2,588 of which were ‘self-inflicted’ and 1,670 from ‘natural causes’. So-called ‘natural cause’ deaths often include instances where prison staff flatly refuse to respond to a prisoner’s obvious medical distress. Official government statistics on prison deaths do not include data on ethnicity, but a 2020 report by the charity INQUEST said that out of 61 inquests in 2018-19, 11 (or 18%) were of BAME people. Of the remainder, one was White Irish/Gypsy Traveller, four were White Irish, two White Other and two Other, bringing the actual total for racialised groups to a total of 20 deaths or 33% of inquests. Each death in prison is a murder, directly or indirectly, by the violence of the British state.
Deaths in custody include not just those sentenced by courts but also those held under powers of the Mental Health Act for treatment and supervision. From 2000-2013, of the 7,630 custody deaths, 4,573 (60%) were mental health detainees. As with prison deaths, data on ethnicity is not published but it is important to note that black people are four times more likely to be detained under Mental Health powers than white people. Even when their mental health crises are recognised, black people continue to face the same racist and sexist disregard and violence that they receive in the criminal ‘justice’ system.
Worse than ever
On 30 July the parliamentary Home Affairs Committee published The Macpherson Report: Twenty-two years on – the results of its inquiry into whether policing had improved since the original Macpherson Report into the mishandling of the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, found the entire criminal justice system to be riddled with institutional racism. The new report highlights how in some areas, things are even worse than in the 1990s, particularly in relation to stop-and-search: ‘In the year to 31 March 2020, Black people were over nine and a half times more likely to be stopped and searched than White people. Despite the serious concerns raised and recommendations made in the Macpherson Report and other reports since, the disproportionality is greater now than it was twenty-two years ago.’
The repressive apparatus of the British state is necessary to ensure its continued functioning; in the context of imperialism this repression must take on racist and sexist characteristics. As the capitalist crisis deepens, this repression will take on an increasingly barbaric form. Only an anti-imperialist struggle which defends the right of people to resist state repression will be able to resolve the traumas which afflict our class.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
