Wednesday 2 August 2017

Mark Duggan and the Met Police: Lessons not learned.

Image may contain: 1 person, smiling, textNever forget...He was described as the most dangerous criminal in Europe. They initially said he shot a police. They said he had a gun in his hand. They said, they had reasonable belief so they shot him. The inquest jury said, "it's lawful killing"

We said that white police officers subliminal and sometimes overt racial bias results in officers prejudicial imaginations leading to the designation black people as all being designated as "extremely hostile and dangerous".



This racial designation, born of white anxiety, fear and racial animosity to black people, Muslims and anybody else who is demonised into the police imaginations, is routinely deemed a superhuman threat to law and order and officers in particular.

It's the white lack of imagination, that refuses to allow black humanity its place, that leads to the racial profiling and disproportionate police violence that is now visited on our community.

If you're black and an active criminal, or an ex-offender, then you're fair game for overwhelming and disproportionate policeviolence, as far as the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is concerned. The reality is that tensions between MPS and black communities have never been so great as they are now. Today they are approaching levels last saw, in 1981, 1986, 1996, 2011 and given this current prevailing level of deep and abiding institutional police racism, we can speculate when the next explosion will be.

But given absolute refusal of the MPS to accept that institutionalised racism is now resurgent within the the police service, and having discarded the post Lawrence peace dividend arrived at through the acknowledgement and acceptance of the existence of institutionalised racism, we are now back to the future.

That's the problem with the MPS it's not a learning organisation, it doesn't retain institutionalise and promote good practice. Its forst prioroty is to seek to contain, deny, hide and obscure, crtisism and challenge. There is no problem that I have described above, that the MPS at some point in his history has not tackled with with some degree of success. None.

The problem for the MPS is its incapable of retaining its own good practice and simply relies on committed individuals who bring about periodic change. Once these individuals leave the service, the good practice leaves with them and the the MPS simply returns to its default structural setting of institutionalised racism policing practice.

And if one looks at the racism as a disease, for which radical antiracist antibiotics are needed, then the MPS only ever took one third of its required prescription. As a result infection has returned and bceome much more virulent.

As a result, we are bound to repeat history, there are bound to be many more victims, there are bound to be many more deaths and London will surely see, the fire next time.
#Justice4MarkDuggan #BlackLivesMatter #No JusticeNoPeace