Posts Tagged ‘police racism’

Fossil Fuels, Bradley Manning & Global Racism

Wednesday, July 27th, 2022

Fossil Fuels, Bradley Manning & Global Racism – my Saturday 27th July 2013 began with a “radicalized midsummer cloud forest dream” against the support given to fossil fuels and climate chaos by the banks and the City of London, continued with a vigil for Bradley Manning who exposed US war crimes and ended with a march and rally against and Injustice.

Rev Billy at HSBC – Victoria

Fossil Fuels, Bradley Manning & Global Racism
Golden Toads to the rescue with ice

I met the Rev Billy and his choir on the Stop Shopping Church Tour England in a green open space on Victoria Street, opposite New Scotland Yard (which has since moved to the Embankment.) There they practised their performance as species – monkeys, jaguars and eagles – among those threatened by climate change.

Fossil Fuels, Bradley Manning & Global Racism

Some had heads of Golden Toads, a Costa Rican species already made extinct by climate change. These were hidden away as the group walked towards the HSBC bank at Victoria, and we all walked in trying our best to look like normal customers and going up to the long line of ‘Express Banking’ cash machines.

Fossil Fuels, Bradley Manning & Global Racism

Then the group erupted into dance action, with the Rev Billy using a megaphone to tell bank staff and customers what is happening and why we are in HSBC. Fossil Fuels are killing life on this planet and London banks and the London Stock Exchange play a key role in this – a quarter of all fossil fuel shares are traded on the LSE and in 2010-12 the top five UK banks raised £170 billion for fossil fuel companies, with the HSBC in the lead. He promised that they would leave the bank after the short performance.

Then the Golden Toads arrived to save the species, bringing with them some large eggs of ice to help cool the planet down, and then as promised people left the bank to continue to the end of the performance on the wide pavement outside. Police arrived and went into the bank as the players were leaving to celebrate their action in a nearby cafe and bar.

More at Rev Billy at HSBC

Free Bradley Manning Vigil – St Martin’s, Trafalgar Square

Saturday 27th July 2013 was an international day of action by the Bradley Manning Support Network, and in London they held a vigil on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Bradley Manning’s trial had started on 3rd June in Fort Meade, US, and protests have continued both inside and outside the court, with the ‘gay whistleblower’ being celebrated in countries across the world and awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize. Many see Bradley – later Chelsea Manning as a hero who should be honoured rather than imprisoned. Her trial ended on 30th July with a sentence of 35 years, but in 2017 this was commuted by President Obama to seven years, dating from her arrest in 2010.

Free Bradley Manning Vigil

Against Global Racism and Injustice – US Embassy to Whitehall

Black Activists Rising Against Cuts (BARAC) UK held a rally outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square before marching to Whitehall in solidarity with families of Trayvon Martin, Stephen Lawrence, Azelle Rodney, Jimmy Mubenga and many others to highlight the reality of racism and seek justice, both in the UK and US.

The protest was supported by many anti-racist organisations including Operation Black Vote, the National Black Students Campaign, Global Afrikan Congress, PCS, RMT Black Members, Counterfire, UAF, Love Music Hate Racism, Lambeth TUC and Lambeth People’s Assembly and a number of well-known faces from the British left were among the marchers, some were scheduled to speak at the Downing Street rally.

The US Embassy was chosen as the starting point because of the killing in Florida of Trayvon Martin and the global outcry against the acquittal of his murderer under the Florida ‘Stand Your Ground’ law.

But although this was a protest against global racism and injustice, and it had a particular focus on this country, and as Lee Jasper stated “We march for Jimmy Mubenga, Mark Duggan, Kingsley Burrell, Smiley Culture and Azelle Rodney.” And others also made clear in speeches they were appalled by UK cases, including We march for Jimmy Mubenga, Mark Duggan, Kingsley Burrell, Smiley Culture and Azelle Rodney and many, many other cases.

I followed the march as it went through Mayfair, but then had to leave rather than attend the final rally.

More at Against Global Racism and Injustice.

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UFFC Annual Rally & Procession

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Next Saturday, 30th September 2021, I hope to be photographing this years United Families and Friends Campaign annual remembrance procession. Meeting from noon in Trafalgar Square, at 1pm they will march in silent procession along Whitehall, followed by a noisy protest outside Downing Street.

Janet Alder, the sister of Christopher, killed by police in Hull in 1998

“The United Families and Friends Campaign (UFFC) mission is to work collaboratively as a network of independent campaigns to address common issues and concerns related to deaths and abuse in police, penal, mental health and immigration detention; and to organise events and activities that promote awareness and support for affected families across the UK. “

Marcia RIgg, whose brother Sean was killed in Brixton Police station in 2008

This procession has taken place on the last Saturday of October every year since 1999 to “to remember loved ones who have died in custody” and the UFFC invite all to “Come and support the families of those who have died at the hands of police, prison and secure medical units in the United Kingdom.”

Among the victims are Christopher Alder, Ibrahim Sey, Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Seni Lewis, Adrian McDonald, Darren Cumberbatch, Rashan Charles, Sean Rigg, Jack Susianta, Sheku Bayoh, Mikey Powell, Paul Coker and Cameron Whelan, and many others whose families are among those involved in organising the event.

Seni Lewis, killed in 2010

The invitation to attend states “The UFFC annual procession is supported by: Black Lives Matter UK, 4WardEverUK, Migrant Media, INQUEST, UNISON, RMT, FBU, UNITE, Tottenham Rights, Sisters Uncut, London Campaign Against Police & State Violence, LARAG, Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), Pan African Society Community Forum, Institute of Race Relations, Edge Fund, National Union of Students and DTRTP.”

I’ve photographed this event, and been deeply moved by it, most years since I first heard about it in 2003. The pictures with this post are all from nine years ago in 2012 when the protest was on 27th October.

The procession ends with a rally opposite Downing St where family members speak

That year as in all years there were new names to add to the list of 3,180 known custody deaths since 1969, chosen as the date when David Oluwale was killed – and two officers convicted of several assault charges. Since then many of those over three thousand have died in situations where foul play seems obvious, but a Full Fact investigation has found only one single police or prison officer has been convicted of murder or manslaughter or assault related to a death in custody – Sergeant Alwyn Sawyer, convicted in 1986 for the manslaughter of Henry Foley. A few other police officers have been prosecuted but the cases against them have collapsed or they have been found not guilty.

Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennet whose twin Leon Patterson was beaten to death by Manchester Police in 1992

Clearly police and others have difficult jobs, but there needs to be transparency and an intention, still sadly lacking, to get at the truth. The immediate response of the police is still normally to deliberately mislead about the circumstances and to cover up on behalf of the officers involved. It has taken years of dogged and dedicated action by family members, often having to do work the police should have done, overcoming obstacles put in their way for a few families to get to the truth about how their family members died – and sometimes to get inquest verdicts which reflect this. But still not to get justice.

Jan Butler holding a photograph of her son Lloyd, who died in a police cell

As the invitation to the event ends “We look forward to seeing you – No Justice No Peace“. No Justice No Peace is a sentiment that will fill Whitehall on Saturday, echoing from the offices which line the street, but which as in previous years will sadly fall on the deaf ears of our establishment.

More from 2012 at No More Police Killings, Time For Justice.

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Reclaim Brixton 2015

Sunday, April 25th, 2021

Brixton has been in the news again recently, with various analyses published on the 40th anniversary of the 1981 Brixton uprising (aka Brixton riots) which began on 10th April. Official reports put the 3 days of unrest which caused £7.5m of damage and left almost three hundred police (and an impossible to estimate number of the local community) injured down to poor housing, unemployment, and police harassment.

It was largely the actions of the police that led to the events. Their failure to effectively investigate the arson attack on a party in New Cross which killed 13 young black people in January 1981 scandalised much of the nation and the racist reaction of the mass media to a protest march about this raised tension, exacerbated by the police arrests of the march organisers who were charged with riot – and later acquitted. But the final straw was when police at the beginning of April began ‘Operation Swamp 81’ with large numbers of officers coming into Brixton and stopping an searching almost a thousand people – almost entirely African-Caribbean – under the ‘Sus law’, the 1824 Vagrancy Act which allowed police to stop and search anyone they believed was acting suspiciously.

Little changed after the official reports came out, and it was only 19 years later, following another scandalous police failure to properly investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 that the Macpherson report found that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist. Although some changes have been made, there are still plenty of signs that this continues to be deeply embedded in the ethos of the force.

The publication of ‘The report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ on 31st March this year (2021) came at perhaps a particularly insensitive time for a report that is widely seen as a whitewash by a commission set up to reflect particular views. Set up in opposition to the protests by the Black Lives Matter movement over the death of George Floyd (and three weeks before the trial of his killer ended in three guilty verdicts) it evoked fury from many experts in the field as well as the millions who still experience discrimination.

More recently is has been condemned in remarkably forthright terms by the independent experts of the Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council who state “In 2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent” and call on the British government to categorically reject its findings.

Brixton has changed since 1981 and some of those changes are very much for the worse for the local population. There were further riots, and there have been deaths at the hands of police – such as those of Ricky Bishop in 2001 and Sean Rigg in 2008 – but the main threat facing the local communities is gentrification as Brixton is changing from a working class area home particularly to migrant communities to a trendy up-market suburb. Its a change which is in part inspired by the vibrant communities which it is displacing, but also driven by the excellent transport links the area enjoys.

25 April 2015 saw Reclaim Brixton, a day long protest against gentrification which saw several thousands gathering at various events in what is still so far as I’m aware the largest protest of its kind. One major blow to local people has been the decision by Network Rail, backed by Lambeth Council to redevelop the railway arches in the centre of the town, home for many years to some of Brixton’s best loved – and cheapest – businesses. The current tenants, one of which came here in 1932 – are being evicted and after renovation the rents will be triple and their places largely taken by the same chains and franchises that we see in so many other high streets.

Soon after I left Brixton – in what seemed like a quiet period and I thought things had probably ended, activists took direct action against some of the major players they hold responsible for gentrification, breaking a large window Soon after I left Brixton – in what seemed like a quiet period and I thought things had probably ended, activists took direct action against some of the major players they hold responsible for gentrification, breaking a large window at Foxton’s estate agents, going into Brixton Village with their banners and briefly occupying Lambeth Town Hall.

More at:
London Black Revs ‘Reclaim Brixton ‘march
Reclaim Brixton celebrates Brixton
Take Back Brixton against gentrification
Brixton Arches tenants protest eviction

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Marching for Justice

Friday, January 22nd, 2021


21 years ago on 22 Jan 2000 I photographed a March against police racism organised by the Movement For Justice in Wood Green, and it is one of the earlier protests that I featured on my web site My London Diary.

It wasn’t of course the first protest that I had photographed, which had been around 25 years earlier, and through the 1990s I had increasingly begun to attend and photograph various political events, although the bulk of my work was still in other areas.

My London Diary didn’t exist in January 2000, but when I set up the site a year or two later I scanned some of my 8×10″ file prints from 1999 and 2000 to put some content on the site from the start.

At the time I was still working mainly in black and white and sending prints to the library that handled my work; they also worked with colour transparencies, but I had given up taking these 15 years earlier and moved to colour negative. The library then couldn’t handle digital files, and also my flatbed scanner was only black and white. At the start there was little or no colour work on My London Diary, though things soon changed as I first used a consumer digital camera as a personal notebook, then moved to working with a Nikon DSLR.

The earliest protest to be featured on My London Diary was from Brixton in February 1999, and over a similar issue, a National Civil Rights march calling for the release of Winston Silcott. So many years later things perhaps have changed very little – just the names, as the recent death of Mohamud Mohammed Hassan shows.

It wasn’t in 2000 easy to find out when and where protests other than the big national events organised by groups such as CND and the anti-war protests were taking place, but in June 1999 Indymedia had been founded around the global justice anticapitalist protest Carnival Against Capital and around this time many groups involved in protests were beginning to use the web to communicate through e-mail and web sites.

From around 2000 I began to cover many more protests, partly because I left full-time teaching and could attend more, but also because it became easier to find out about them. It was some time later that I began to put my pictures from protests on Indymedia, as a way of sharing my work with those I had photographed. I was also sending them to photo agencies in order to finance the work, as well as working as a writer on photography. I began My London Diary as a way to get my work to a wider audience, and hoped it would generate enough direct sales to at least cover the costs involved.

It has managed to do that and has also provided a great deal of feedback over the years, but hasn’t been a huge financial success.

My London Diary 2000

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November 2014 (2)

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

The Wednesday of the final week of November in 2014 was an easier day for me as I was able to spend most of it at home and catching up on various things including a little shopping and visiting the library to borrow new books to occupy me on my train rides to London. I only had to leave home around 5pm to arrive in Aldgate for the Class War Xmas Ceasefire Special outside the tower with separate entrances for its wealthy and its social housing tenants.

After 19 weekly protests outside the ‘rich door’ the tower owners had finally agreed to talk with Class War and try to reach a solution to the problem, and in response Class War had agreed to call off further protests unless the talks failed. So this was more of a celebration than a protest, although the talks, when they took place didn’t really reach a satisfactory conclusion.

But there were some concessions and the protests did lead to some real improvements including new paving and lighting and better cleaning for the side alley which lead to the ‘poor door’, and perhaps more importantly they raised the whole issue of segregated entrances very much into the national agenda.

I was sorry to have to rush away from the celebrations, which I suspect continued afterwards in one of the local pubs.

A tube ride took me across town to the US Embassy, still then in Grosvenor Square, and the Candlelit Vigil for Michael Brown.

In August, police officer Darren Wilson had shot and killed Michael Brown Jr, an 18-year-old black man in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s companion said that Wilson had grabbed Brown through his car window after calling on them to stop as they walked down the street; Brown, who was unarmed, tried to grab the officer’s gun as he threatened him and two shots were fired, one hitting Brown’s hand. Brown and his friend fled and when Wilson fired again, Brown turned around, raised his hands in surrender and shouted ‘Don’t Shoot!’ and Wilson fired six more bullets into his body. Wilson’s account differed greatly and a grand jury having heard decided not to indict him.

Riots followed the shooting, continuing for over a week in Ferguson, and there were protests across America and worldwide against the shooting, using the slogan ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!’ There were further protests in 170 cities after the grand jury verdict was announced, and elsewhere across the world including this candlelit vigil in London called by London Black Revolutionaries and the NUS Black Students Campaign. Among those who spoke at the event were the Chair of London Campaign Against State & Police Violence, Malia Bouattia of NUS Black Students Campaign, Zita Holbourne of BARAC (above), Marcia Rigg, Carole Duggan, the RMT Paddington Branch Secretary, Wail Qaisim of Defend the Right to Protest and some people from London Black Revs.

Whatever actually happened in Ferguson, it is clear that US policing is racist, killing black people disproportionately, and acting – as Wilson did – out of fear due often due to racist stereotyping. Black Lives Matter – but not very much to some US Police forces and officers.

There was little or no street lighting in the area in front of the US Embassy where this protest took place, and for most of these pictures the main light present came from the candles and nightlights that were held by the protesters. A very tightly packed crowd made working in it difficult. When I got to the front of the protest there were some videographers at times using lighting which I took advantage of, but it seldom produces an attractive effect.

It was unfortunate the the Socialist Workers Party had decided to hold their own separate protest before this, probably because the organising groups had declined to let them take it over, but at least they did allow this vigil to use the public address equipment they had brought for their event. And many of those taking part are holding the placards that they provided in very large numbers.

When covering events at night I usually carry a small LED light which can illuminate people or objects a up to a few metres from the camera, usually holding it high and away from my body in my left hand while holding the camera to my eye with my right hand to give better lighting than using it in the hot shoe. If I have to, I’ll use my Nikon SB800 flash in the hot shoe, still using high ISOs to try and avoid a black background, usually with the camera on manual or shutter priority with speeds around 1/30s.

More on both events:
Candlelit Vigil for Michael Brown
Class War Xmas Ceasefire Special

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