FRFI 165 February / March 2002
David Oluwale died on 18 April 1969, aged 39, having been habitually abused by Inspector Ellerker and Sergeant Kitching of Leeds police for several years. They framed him on false charges, urinated on him, beat him and even kidnapped him, taking him miles into the countryside and dumping him ‘down in the jungle where he belonged’. His body was recovered from the river Aire. The two racist criminals got a derisory two and three years in prison.
Thirty-three years, many deaths and two major inquiries later, nothing has changed. Poor people, particularly black people, are still being killed by racist thugs in blue uniforms, and the judiciary is still covering up for them. The judge at the trial of lumpen white yob professional footballers, Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, decided that the words ‘Do you want some, Paki?’ were not proof of a racist motive.
The London Borough of Lambeth has a large Afro-Caribbean community. Poverty exists cheek by jowl with the relative opulence of a mainly white middle class. People on meagre incomes, living in substandard housing, have images of wealth and the ‘virtues’ of greed and desire flaunted in their faces. Like other black areas, Lambeth is coercively over-policed, and last year the borough saw three deaths in four months; the last two within three days of each other.
• Derek Bennett On 16 July 2001, black 28-year-old father of four Derek Bennett was shot repeatedly in the back by a SO19 firearms officer on the Angel Town estate (see FRFI 162). Police claimed he was ‘armed’ with a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter. However, eyewitnesses claim Mr Bennett was carrying a book or Bible.
• Ricky Bishop On 22 November, a 25-year-old black man Ricky Bishop was a passenger in a car that was stopped for ‘driving erratically’. The police account of what happened changed as holes were punched through their story. According to a Scotland Yard press release, Mr Bishop ‘was detained – not arrested’. However, they encountered a problem as you cannot be detained against your will without being arrested. So now they say he was arrested. There is a dispute about the timing of the arrest, which they blame on the police station clock being slow. First it was two officers involved, now it could have been eight. What is clear is that Ricky Bishop was taken through the custody suite straight past two interview rooms, all of which were monitored by CCTV, into an interview room which had no CCTV. Police make the ludicrous claim that he then managed to break free from his handcuffs and attack them. Ricky Bishop was arrested at around 3pm; at 10.30pm he died in King’s College Hospital.
• Joseph Crensil, an immigrant, jumped, fell or was pushed from a third-floor window during a joint police and Immigration Services raid. There have been at least three other similar deaths on such raids, including that of Joseph Nnalue, who fell from his second-floor flat in neighbouring Stockwell in October 1994.
Lambeth Community Police Consultative Group (CPCG)
The December CPCG meeting was attended by an unusually large group of black teenagers, protesting against the deaths in custody and their own treatment by the police under stop and search. Lambeth Police Commander Paddick was questioned about the death of Ricky Bishop and refused to suspend an officer who had been caught trying to swap his baton, handcuffs and their carrying pouches, prior to handing them in for forensic examination, for attempting to pervert the course of justice. Paddick said that there was no evidence that the cuffs and baton were evidence!
Immigration Service director Peter Higgins told the CPCG meeting that, in London alone, there are 80 immigration raids a day! Add those that occur in other British cities and you get an idea of the unrelenting state harassment immigrants face. Not to mention the racist abuse and violence which led to murder in Sighthill, Glasgow (see FRFI 163).
Higgins was challenged on the racism behind these raids, and crassly replied that they weren’t racist because one of the immigration officers was black. This is crass nonsense. The blood-drenched, racist, evil British empire was held together by black and Asian cops and troops oppressing their own people.
Sherman Thomas
The Crown Prosecution Service has announced that no officers are to be charged over the maiming of 18-year-old Sherman Thomas, who in July 2000 was challenged by the police while having a try-out of his mate’s moped. As he had no paperwork for the bike, he jumped off and ran. A policewoman shouted ‘Stop or I shoot!’ – she wasn’t armed, it was a bluff. Sherman stopped on the pavement with his hands in the air. A police car accelerated, knocking Sherman through a brick wall. His leg was smashed so badly the bone disintegrated and he lost six pints of blood. Before moving the car off him, they handcuffed him. Whilst waiting for the ambulance they joked ‘This will teach him to nick mopeds.’
Sherman’s life has been ruined: he had been offered the chance of becoming a professional basketball player.
Fightback
In Lambeth there have been demonstrations and pickets, even a disrupted council meeting. Four days after the shooting of Derek Bennett, there was a demonstration in Brixton, which was followed by disturbances throughout that part of south London. In the early hours of the morning, police picked on any young black man on the streets. A middle-class white couple witnessed up to 13 cops attacking one youth. They tried to intervene and were beaten up themselves; the man’s arm was broken. They complained and got nowhere. So they went to the press. CCTV footage was found of the whole incident. One cop has been suspended and 12 put on desk duty.
After Ricky Bishop’s death his mother Doreen led a protest outside Brixton police station, placing flowers in his memory, only to have the police callously rip them down again.
Racist Labour council
The racism of the Lambeth police appears to be matched by that of the local council. UNISON shop stewards claim that 97% of Lambeth council disciplinary hearings and 99% of disciplinary sackings involve black people. And the council has now revealed the connection between its own racism and its desire to ensure that opposition to that of the police is kept to a minimum by sacking Alex Olowade, a Unison steward and chair of the Movement for Justice, on trumped-up charges. Olowade has been at the forefront of protest against racism and police brutality for years. Lambeth Labour Party is following the racist tradition of the party.
End immigration raids! Lock up the killer cops! Reinstate Alex Olowade! No justice, no peace!
Jim Wills
