Justice for Rashan Charles: On Saturday twenty ninth July 2017 I photographed a protest outdoors Stoke Newington Police Station over the demise of Rashan Charles, who had died after being handcuffed by two police and held on the ground of a store on Kingsland Highway in Dalston within the early morning of Saturday twenty second July.
The images on this publish come from that protest, which was attended by members of his his household as properly of these of Edson da Costa who died after being arrested in Beckton the earlier month.
An inquest into the demise of Charles returned a verdict of {that a} bundle he had swallowed when being chased into the store by an officer had blocked his airway inflicting the demise. But it surely additionally discovered that the officers had didn’t name for an ambulance when they need to, however extra controversially argued that this is able to not have saved his life.
The inquest into Da Costa’s demise revealed quite a lot of errors by police however the jury was advised by the coroner that “there is no such thing as a authorized or factual foundation for reaching a factual conclusion which is vital of the police” and reached a verdict of demise by misadventure primarily attributable to his swallowing a plastic bag of unlawful medication.
In March 2023, Baroness Louise Casey who had been charged with investigating the Metropolitan Police following the homicide of Sarah Everard in 2021, issued her official report with the conclusions that they have been responsible of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia.
It got here as no shock to these of us who had learn the various under-reported tales through the years of individuals – black and white, women and men – who had been picked on and brutally handled and a few killed by police through the years on social media and in minority publications. Nor these of us who had attended protests towards their behaviour or watched them in motion at instances towards protesters.
Our mass media have at all times ignored many of those instances and underplayed others, virtually at all times taking the aspect of the police and performing extra as a PR company for them, at all times eager to unfold the rumours, lies and deceptive press statements the police rush out to excuse their errors and misbehaviour.
We noticed this at its most blatant over Hillsborough, once more with the capturing of Jean Charles de Menezes and the killing of Ian Tomlinson whereas making an attempt to stroll again to his hostel via a protest on the Financial institution of England.
We’ve additionally seen the deliberate actions by the police to pervert the course of justice in excessive profile instances together with the racist killing of Stephen Lawrence, the place they investigated his household and pals whereas treating certainly one of his killers as a witness. Daniel Morgan’s household have simply acquired an apology and compensation over their failure to correctly examine his axing to demise in a Sydenham pub automobile park in 1987 – a panel concluded that the Met’s “first goal was to guard itself” towards the allegations of corruption towards a few of its officers.
Many different campaigners have uncovered deliberate obstruction by police to inquiries into deaths, notably these in police custody, akin to Sean Rigg, which I’ve written about right here earlier than.
In the previous couple of days, 25 years after his racist homicide in Kingston, Lakhvinder Ricky Reel was awarded an honorary diploma by Brunel College, a part of an extended marketing campaign to get justice by his mom Sukhdev Reel.
Ricky and his pals had been victims of a racial assault within the city centre and 6 days later his physique was recovered from the Thames. His household had been urging the police to go looking the river since he disappeared – and his physique was discovered after solely 7 minutes of looking out. The Met refused to deal with his demise as a racist assault and made many failures of their investigation, devoting extra assets to spying on his household by the undercover Particular Demonstration Squad for his or her campaigning.
Tags: black lives matter, Dalston, Daniel Morgan, Dianne Abbott, Edson da Costa, homophobia, institutional racism, London, Louise Casey, MfJ, misogyny, Motion for Justice, peter Marshall, police, police station, protest, Rashan Charles, Sarah Everard, Stafford Scott, Stand As much as Racis, Stephen Lawrence, Stoke Newington, Weyman Bennett
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