Police and Council (lack of) Relations
We hear that the borough commander has recently decamped from Newham to set up his office in neighbouring Waltham Forest (his command is across the two boroughs). The reasons we have been given are that he found it impossible to work with the current Mayor. It is difficult to get hard facts on this and the police are unlikely to publicly state that the mayor is an arrogant individual with precious little interest in joint working to reduce crime and asb in the area. However, the rumblings we have received, which come from people who should be in-the-know, suggest that this is the case.
For those who are old enough to remember, it sounds like the Labour Party in Newham has returned to the times when the police and not the criminals were the enemy!
That seems to be the case amongst the mayor’s councillor colleagues also. The right-on members for Forest Gate North (Councillors Sasha Das Gupta, Rachel Tripp and Anamul Islam) ended an open letter to the borough commander with the following words. “In the memory of Edson Da Costa, Jean Charles De Menezes, Mark Duggan, George Floyd and countless others, please use your significant influence and public platform to enact real change now.”
Just what “real change” the illustrious three wish to see is not specified. But then the point of this sort of political intervention is not to solve problems, but to signal one’s own virtue. So don’t expect any answers. An open letter rarely seeks effect relevant change, but it is a perfect vehicle for virtue signalling.
We are invited to see the four (“Black”) men named as victims of police brutality and the Met Police as instruments of “racialised police violence”.
It is difficult however, to see what actions or changes the Metropolitan Police could have made that would result in improvements in the relationship between the police and the Black community in Minneapolis. Nor indeed how their actions in any way contributed to the murder of George Floyd, some 4000 miles away.
Mark Duggan was a career criminal, shot by police in 2011. The police believed that he was planning a retaliatory murder in response to the killing of his cousin and were seeking to prevent a cycle of tit-for-tat murders. He was reported to have jumped out of a cab, by the driver, “carrying a handgun”. Interestingly, the man who jumped out with him and who was not carrying a gun was not shot and was arrested. The verdict of the inquest jury was that this was a lawful shooting. So again we ask, what is the point our elected councillors are making here? Perhaps the Met should have sent in unarmed officers to arrest a man they believed to be carrying a gun, or perhaps a PCSO with a cup of tea. Or perhaps they should have just let him go. The latter was perhaps the best option, because then we could have blamed the police when Duggan murdered someone else.
Jean Charles de Menzes seems to have acquired the honorific of being Black in an attempt to prop up their allegation of “racialised police violence” against Black people. The de Menzes case was one of an appalling tragedy by any reckoning. Following the 7/7 tube and bus bombings, an attempt to plant four further devices was foiled by the Met Police on 21st July. The day after (the 22nd) armed police were in Stockwell on the lookout for a man who was believed to be a part of the same terrorist network; de Menzes came out of the property where their target lived and was wrongly identified as the man they were seeking. Readers will be familiar with the tragedy which followed, when police acted to stop what they feared was an imminent terrorist bombing on the tube.
Lastly, and in some ways even more bizarrely, Edson da Costa’s name is prayed in aid of their allegation of “racialised police violence”. This did happen in Newham. Da Costa was seen by police acting suspiciously, he ran from the police and was tackled. In an attempt to hide evidence he swallowed 88 wraps of heroin. It was these which caused his death. But to the Forest Gate councillors, this was evidence of “racialised police violence”, even though to the coroner and the IPCC it was not. We recall that the mayor prior to her elevation, was content to make political capital of the death of Da Costa and a campaign which dishonestly alleged that Da Costa had had his neck broken in two places and injury to his head. He didn’t.
Let us be clear. We at Open Newham absolutely support holding the police to account for any wrongdoings. That is why we have inquests; IPCC reviews; police disciplinary inquiries and criminal prosecutions when officers act illegally. But when these processes have been undertaken and the police have been found to have acted lawfully, there is little merit in asserting that they didn’t. Little merit, but considerable political capital it seems.
Generally speaking, councillors and politicians have little push-back if they state something ludicrous. Alleging racist police brutality will rarely harm the person making the allegation. Most people won’t notice and the ones who do will be the ones who are pretty much anti-police anyway. But this casual attitude to the truth gradually degrades trust and undermines the cohesiveness of the wider community.
It may be that the three councillors do know more than the coroner, the police on the ground, the IPCC and the pathologist and if so they should tell us. But this is sounding more and more like the narrative that they are attempting to spin is aimed at a constituency inside the Labour Party, pandering to their populist base regardless of any harm they may cause to the wider community and the relations between the council and the police.
These ill-considered allegations and the people who recklessly make them are both equally deserving of contempt.