On 26 November, the families of two black men murdered by the British state took part in a mass demonstration in London in solidarity with Ferguson. Sean Rigg and Mark Duggan are just two of the more than 1,500 people killed in Britain since 1993 after some kind of contact with the police. A disproportionate number of those killed are black. Yet no police officer has ever been convicted.
What justice?
Sean Rigg, a black musician suffering from schizophrenia, died at Brixton police station, south London in 2008 after being left handcuffed and prone on the floor of a police van for eleven minutes, before being dumped barely conscious in the ‘cage’ area of the custody suite. In October 2014, the CPS decided not to bring charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice against two officers whose evidence on oath at Sean Rigg’s inquest had been contradicted by CCTV footage. Custody sergeant Paul White had claimed he went outside to check on Sean in the police van – testimony backed up by PC Mark Harratt. Confronted by CCTV showing no-one had checked on Sean, White admitted what he had said was not true. However, CPS said there was no evidence that he had lied as he suffered from a ‘medical condition that impacts on his memory’!
This failure to hold anyone accountable for Sean’s death is the latest in the series of cover-ups that the Rigg family has had to fight to expose as they attempt to achieve justice. The initial IPCC investigation judged police treatment of Sean as ‘reasonable’ and ‘proportionate’. It was only because the family painstakingly went through evidence ignored by the IPCC that the 2010 inquest jury was able to consider the truth and found that ‘unsuitable and unnecessary’ police force had contributed to Sean’s death. An independent review of the original IPCC investigation accused the organisation of ‘blunder after blunder’. As a result, the IPCC launched a new investigation, arresting three officers on suspicion of perjury. One was cleared by the IPCC; now White and Harratt have also walked free.
However, there has been one victory for the Rigg family in preventing another officer under investigation by the IPCC from resigning to avoid being answerable for his crimes: PC Andrew Birks has now been suspended.
Cat Wiener
