Guest Blogger #4 - Getting away with murder

The police force is by far the most unaccountable – and out of control - public body in Britain today. While other institutions have been shaken up by successive governments over recent decades, the police have been left virtually untouched. This has culminated in the approach of Tony Blair – the most pro-police prime minister since the war – summed up by these words in a speech on criminal justice a few years ago: “We asked the police what powers they wanted and we gave them to them”.

Indeed it is an irony that this police-worshipping administration is now threatened by a “cash for peerages” scandal pursued with surprising rigour by Inspector John Yates of the Met, who in turn has become the most recent victim of Labour smear tactics.

But at a time when the police appear superficially to be on a collision course with our rulers it is more important than ever to look more closely at the relationship between police and government, and police and people.

Since the Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence labeled the police “institutionally racist”, conventional wisdom has ridiculed the phrase, claiming it was an example of “political correctness gone mad”. This is deeply depressing – and misleading.

For the fact is that the vast majority of people stopped by the police are still from ethnic minorities, and Muslims particularly are being targeted since September 11, 2001. Since then, the number of Muslims stopped is reported to have risen by 300%. Home Office figures for England and Wales show that in 2002/2003 nearly 3,000 Asians were stopped and searched. The total number of stop and searches under new and unprecedentedly overbearing “terror laws” more than doubled in 2002/2003 from 8,550 to 21,577.

Almost unbelievably, a Home Office Minister, Hazel Blears, has not only admitted this but sought to justify it explicitly, saying that the “new” threat means that “some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately experienced by the Muslim community." Just to be clear, she was saying that was a good thing, not a bad one.

Meanwhile the number of people who have died in police custody – many from ethnic minorities - has risen to over a thousand in the last 40 years. How many police officers have been held to account in court for this? 100? A mere 50? Nope: none. Zero. Not one.

And, of course, this is the same police force who followed innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes from his flat in south London to the tube at Stockwell, chased him down the escalators and shot him up to eight times in the head at point blank range. Has the unnamed officer in this case been held to account? No. What has happened since? He has shot dead another man.

For me, the Stockwell shooting was a formative experience. I could tell when it happened that it stank, and that it would come to help prove a point I have always made about police unaccountability. For if the police was subjected to the proper checks and balances that other institutions are, it would surely have not got away with such a case of chronic incompetence bordering on wild vigilante animalism.

A dose of accountability down the years would surely have meant a gang of supposedly anti-terrorism specialists – one of whom was idly urinating in the street as de Menezes emerged from his flat – would have followed a random dark-skinned man onto a bus and onto the Underground and hounded him to his death. At the time, we were told he was running. This has been proved to be untrue. We were told he was wearing a big “bulky” coat. Untrue. We were told he jumped the tube barriers. Untrue. All of this has been disproved, despite the relevant section of CCTV having been mysteriously wiped from the records. I happened to be in Jerusalem at the time, where even the Israelis were dismayed by the shooting. There, they say they prefer to “get their buddies rather than their bodies”, and have their doubts about the shoot-to-kill policy.

And of course it was the red herring of “shoot to kill” that both Blairs – Met chief Sir Iain and his namesake and ally the Prime Minister - waded in on, defending the need to have strong tactics in the wake of the “new” threat. Indeed whenever police and intelligence failures are exposed, the latter Blair never fails to defend them. Let’s not forget the Forest Gate raid - in which a Muslim was shot amid more murky half-truths, reported breathlessly by Rupert Murdoch’s Times as Britain being under chemical attack – after which Blair declared that he supported the forces “110 per cent”. And of course there’s the intelligence used in the run up to Iraq, about which we don’t need a further lesson. Save to note, though, that the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, who signed off on every single one of Alastair Campbell’s “drafting suggestions”, has just been rewarded for his services. Arise, Sir John. I should declare a personal interest in police accountability, which may partly explain why I am on the look out for incidents like Stockwell, one that I could tell perhaps before some of my friends were riddled with smoke and mirrors from the moment Sky News flashed up a breaking news strap-line saying: “SUICIDE BOMBER SHOT ON TUBE”.

In the 1960s my father attended a march against the Vietnam War outside the American Embassy in Grosvesnor Square, London (along with Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali among others). Now, passionate though my father was about Vietnam, he would be reluctant to hurt a wasp, so when I tell you that he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer, I’d ask you to take it from me that this wouldn’t have happened. In fact, I am told, he was himself hit over the head by the police, to the point where his head was bleeding. Apparently at the time protestors were routinely arrested for assaulting officers who had, in fact, assaulted them: it was a little trick of the trade to pull in a few of the unwashed lefties.

The arrest was one thing, but it is what happened next that says it all for me: my grandparents hired a good lawyer, and the case went to court. He was convicted. He was given a criminal record that hung over him in the years to come, preventing him from traveling to America for work. It still hangs over him to a lesser extent.

This is just one of a million stories of police unaccountability: infinitely less serious of course than the deaths in custody that go unexplained every year; and the savage killing of an innocent man in Stockwell. But, nonetheless, part of the same problem.

When is a government going to turn the spotlight of accountability on the police, and stop groveling to, and further empowering, what is – in parts – a band of racist thugs?

Don’t hold your breath.

Dissident Voice

Especially published for 'Doctor's Free Time'