FRFI 162 August / September 2001
On Friday 20 July, a protest outside Brixton police station in south London about the fatal shooting of Derek Bennett the previous Monday exploded into an uprising of local youth. Derek Bennett had a gun-shaped cigarette lighter when he was shot dead by police. During the protest, police provoked local youth asking them for a light and laughing; the youth turned on them in anger.
Derek Bennett was the 28th person shot dead by police in England and Wales since 1990. The 27th victim, Andrew Kernan, was shot dead just four days earlier in Liverpool.
On 12 July 2001, 37-year-old Liverpudlian, Andrew Kernan, a schizophrenic, became unstable. His family contacted Broadoak Hospital but instead of sending a doctor they sent the police. Among the units deployed was an Armed Response Unit (ARU). Andrew got away from the officers on to the street with an ornamental Samurai sword. Mrs Kernan heard her son cry out ‘Mum, Mum’, then two shots rang out and he was dead. Mrs Kernan, who is demanding justice, said: ‘You don’t just kill someone with a mental illness. What kind of society does that?’
Four days later, in the afternoon on 16 July, an ARU officer gunned down 28-year-old black traffic warden and father of four children Derek Bennett on a housing estate in Brixton. Police say they had reports of a man brandishing a gun. Derek was challenged by armed cops, he dropped his gun-shaped cigarette lighter and ran. One of the cops fired six shots at his back. Three rounds hit his back and one hit him in the shoulder. The highly trained marksman missed twice!
There were young schoolchildren and their mothers at the scene. What were they in danger from? Derek’s cigarette lighter or the cop’s Glock 17 pistol?
The following day was the AGM of the local Police Community Consultative Group. Hundreds of people turned up and local youth leaders and the Movement For Justice voiced the community’s outrage about the killing. Lee Jasper, race relations advisor to both the Metropolitan police force and Mayor Ken Livingstone, attacked, patronised and dismissed the protesters as ‘revolutionaries’. Jasper demanded that the Police Complaints Authority be allowed ‘to do its job’ and claimed the credit for settling Delroy Lindo’s case about racist police harassment. Jasper, who recently called for segregated black schools, certainly remembers who pays his wages when he is called on to help the police control a situation.
Two killings in four days shocked the liberal bourgeoisie into calling for ‘non-deadly force’, stun guns and dart guns. But the nationalist working class in Ireland can tell you about ‘non-deadly’ force. For decades, rubber and plastic baton rounds have been fired at unarmed people at 170 km/h, maiming and blinding hundreds and killing dozens, including children.
A person is shot in Britain every seven to eight weeks. In the last ten years, 43 unarmed people have been shot by the police. In 1991 police carried out 3,722 armed deployments. Between 1998 and 1999 this had risen nearly threefold to 10,928, far higher than the rise in armed crime. Even these figures exclude Scotland, and all officers who are routinely armed like the Flying Squad, VIP guards, Anti-terrorist Squad and ARUs.
The statistics reveal the use of a shoot-to-kill policy, sanctioned by the government and legislature. The only two officers ever to have been charged with murder were acquitted. The shoot-to-kill policy is a terror tactic imported from the Six Counties of Ireland where British imperialism has used it to repress the Republican movement for years. No surprise then that the official firearms policy advisor to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) is Superintendent Colin Burrows of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Although there is no revolutionary movement in Britain, the lives of black and working class people are regarded as worthless.
Irene Stanley, whose husband was killed by police in January 1998, told a national newspaper that ‘this would never have happened in Hampstead. It’s because we are working class and live in Hackney’. Harry Stanley, who was Scottish, was shot in the back of the head as he walked home carrying a wooden chair leg in a bag. The police decided he was Irish and carrying a sawn-off shotgun.
In the same month, Jim Ashley, unarmed and also innocent, was shot dead whilst naked in his bed with his girlfriend in Hastings during a police raid. In May 1996, in Hammersmith, London, unarmed IRA volunteer Diarmuid O’Neil was shot repeatedly, whilst naked except for his underpants. He was giving himself up and obeying police instructions. In nearby Barnes the previous summer, unarmed David Ewin, a 38-year-old prisoner on day release was shot dead whilst he sat in a stolen car.
These shootings are designed to inflict fear and terror on black and working class people, the poor and oppressed. At the end of last year, police in the St Ann’s and Meadows area in Nottingham began routine armed patrols. On 6 November 2000, armed police were deployed on the roof of Hackney Town Hall during a demonstration by Unison and local residents against cuts in the London borough. At the same time, local campaigners complaining about police racism at the Haringey Police Community Consultative Committee were intimidated by the presence of armed police. The examples go on…
Gaol the killer cops! Gaol their senior officers, including Chief Superintendent Robbinson, head of the Metropolitan Police SO19 firearms unit! Dissolve the ARUs! m
Jim Wills
