FRFI 162 August / September 2001
On Friday 6 July 2001, Police Federation solicitors threatened to sue a central London cinema if it showed the documentary film Injustice about deaths in police custody in Britain and subsequent cover-ups by police, the law courts and the government, because it named the police involved in the deaths.
In response, the United Friends and Family Campaign (UFFC) decided to show the film during its public People’s Tribunal into deaths in custody, held in London’s Conway Hall, on 11-12 July. Again the venue management was threatened to prevent the film being shown in public. However, the 200-strong audience, including the loved ones of police victims featured in the film, refused to leave the hall until Injustice was shown, despite the police being called. It is planned to show Injustice around the country.
The People’s Tribunal was called because, despite the fact that someone in Britain dies violently or through neglect every two or three days, in a prison, a mental hospital or in police custody, both Tory and Labour governments have refused to hold an inquiry. Few of the officers involved have been charged and none has ever been convicted.
The Tribunal panel heard 18 cases, every one a harrowing tale of violence or neglect. Common threads of civil rights abuse, lack of humanity, injustice, cruelty, character assassination of the victim and often racism were revealed.
Murdered on his doorstep
Roger Sylvester’s family told how, after he was murdered on his own doorstep by eight cops, the police told the press he was a cocaine addict. But the toxicology report found no drugs in his blood. Two weeks after the Tribunal on 24 July, the family were barred from a disciplinary hearing where one of the officers admitted destroying two pages of his notes about Roger’s death.
Time and again the Tribunal heard of poor families refused legal aid to be represented at inquests, of police or prison officials refusing to answer questions at inquests to avoid incriminating themselves and of coroners forbidding juries to give verdicts of unlawful killing.
Even when inquests have returned verdicts of unlawful killing, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refuses to prosecute. This happened in the case of black prisoner Alton Manning, killed in privatised Blakenhurst prison on 8 December 1995. Three times High Court judges have ruled that the CPS decision not to prosecute is unsustainable in law, after an unlawful killing inquest verdict, and four times the CPS has refused to prosecute, most recently on 1 June 2001. Who else in the land can defy a judge?
Christopher Alder died in Hull police custody and the inquest verdict was unlawful killing. Yet the thugs who murdered him have only been charged with committing a misfeasance whilst holding public office. His sister Janet Alder told FRFI: ‘This will happen time and time again until people really start opening their mouths and not taking any more of this.’ Janet has a video showing police officers joking while her brother died on the floor of the police station. ‘We will show the video to the whole country and show just much denial the government itself has been in’, she said.
Barry Howard explained how his brother, Glenn Howard, a 44-year-old white man with mental health problems, was killed by police. When the inquest jury defied the coroner and returned an unlawful killing verdict the coroner sent them back, instructing them to come up with a verdict of accidental death.
The jury returned with a defiant statement: ‘On the evening of 10 December 1997 at Sherbourne Court, Cavendish Road, Sutton, Surrey, an incident took place during which Glenn Howard was subject to excessive restraint followed by an immediate and subsequent neglect of medical care and attention which resulted in a brain injury, as a result of which he later died. Glenn Howard died of an accident.’
Black people are seven times more likely to be killed in police custody than whites. This is because, apart from being exploited as workers, black people suffer the extra oppression of racism. However it is also a class question and a black woman, Sonia Coley, who had earlier told how her brother Curtis died through neglect in Pentonville prison, interjected at one point: ‘This is not just about black people or white people, this is about poor people. The rich never get killed in prison.’
Jim Wills
