Esme Choonara | ukwatch.net

Stop the demonisation of Britain’s young people

William Benzies — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:53:26 +0000

The Tories and the tabloid press have waded into the debate on knife crime with demands for mandatory and longer prison sentences for those found carrying knives.

The Sun, the Mirror and the News of the World all now have their own online petitions calling for more government crackdowns over knife crime. The News of the World is even running a roadshow to garner support for longer sentencing, more police and the building of more prisons. Labour has responded by announcing a review into sentencing. It has also publicised the appointment of a new lord chief justice, Sir Igor Judge. He is writing to every magistrate in England and Wales to warn them that they should apply tougher sentences to deal with knife crime.

But simply pouring more police onto the streets or locking people up for longer will not address the problem – it will make the situation worse. Britain’s jails are already overflowing and more young people are locked up here than anywhere in western Europe. There is already a huge police crackdown underway. The London Metropolitan Police force launched its latest operation in May. Known as Operation Blunt 2, the high profile operation has led to an astonishing 27,000 people being searched since May. This uncovered only 500 knives – from less than 2 percent of those searched.

But as children’s commissioner Al Aynsley-Green has pointed out, policies like this simply antagonise and further alienate young people. Stop and search is also disproportionately used against black and Asian people and increases the racist harassment that young black people face.

Threat

Underlying New Labour’s approach is the assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with young people, that they are a threat to society. Policing minister Tony McNulty made this clear last week when he said that knife crime among young people “is apparently a generational, almost cultural thing that’s getting into the collective DNA”. There is no serious attempt to understand why young people may carry knives – to consider the fear, poverty, alienation, anger and frustration that may lead to violence or crime.

Worrying statistics show that while overall deaths from stabbings have remained fairly consistent at around 200-250 a year for the past decade, the victims of knife crime are getting younger. Knife injuries also seem to be rising. The number of children admitted to hospitals in England and Wales with wounds from a knife or other sharp instrument has risen 62 percent in just three years.

Racism is one of the issues connected to knife crime. Yet politicians ignore this. In London, for example, 19 teenagers have been stabbed or beaten to death this year – 16 of those are black or Asian. Young black men are disproportionately excluded from schools, discriminated against in jobs and training, more likely to be stopped or arrested by the police or to end up in prison.

There is a worrying development in the reporting of those killed by knives. There is a growing division between those (usually white people) who are depicted as innocent victims and those (predominantly black people) who are portrayed as being gang members and violent thugs and therefore partly to blame for their own death.

We should reject this division. The rising number of young people carrying knives is a damning indictment of a society that demonises and alienates the majority of young people instead of listening to them and offering them a decent future.

Labour may grab headlines with its increasingly punitive policies, but it is badly failing young people.

Colombia: vicious friend of the West

JamieSW — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:54:47 +0000

Colombia’s government is not just a vicious regime that targets trade unionists and civil activists. It is also George Bush’s key ally in Latin America and on the front line of his intervention in that region.

Bush recently declared uncritical support for Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.

He sees Uribe as a bulwark against the radical anti-US governments of Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

The US has been channelling huge amounts of money and military assistance to Colombia for years – first under the cover of the “war on drugs”, then under the “war on terror”.

Britain is the second biggest donor of aid to Colombia. New Labour refuses to say exactly how much military aid and assistance it has given to Colombia, but it is thought to be over £1 million a year.

This comes in addition to military training and granting export licences for the sale of arms to Colombia.

Bush and his defence secretary Robert Gates are trying to push a controversial free trade agreement through the US Congress.

Bush says this agreement is “pivotal” to countering the influence of Chavez in Latin America.

Meanwhile the Colombian national army and right wing paramilitaries that operate with the collusion of the state are waging a brutal war on the poor and left wing activists in the country.

Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a trade unionist. More than 4,000 union activists have been murdered in the last 15 years, as have thousands of human rights campaigners, journalists, students and opposition politicians. Torture and “disappearances” are common.

The links between the Colombian state and paramilitary death squads are widely documented. In 2003 Uribe’s government claimed it was “dismantling” the paramilitary groups. But an investigation by Amnesty International found that “paramilitarism has not been dismantled – it has simply been re-engineered”.

Amnesty pointed out that many paramilitaries were encouraged to join “civilian informer networks” to provide military intelligence to the security forces, or to become “civic guards”. It concluded that “many paramilitary structures remain virtually intact and that paramilitaries continue to kill, often in collusion with the security forces”.

State repression is often carried out under the pretence of stopping the “terrorism” of left wing guerrilla groups.

Colombia recently launched a raid into neighbouring Ecuador and murdered several members of the left wing Farc guerrilla organisation.

Guerillas

This is just the latest in a 40 year war that the Colombian state has waged against leftist guerrilla groups such as Farc and the smaller ELN group.

These groups emerged in the 1960s in response to state violence against the poor and political opposition. They have been fighting corrupt and elitist governments for decades.

Chavez has called on Colombia to recognise Farc as a legitimate political force and enter peace negotiations. Any serious peace process in Colombia must involve negotiations with both Farc and the ELN.

But Uribe is desperate not to give credit to Chavez or make any concessions to Farc. Instead he continues to attempt to defeat the opposition groups by brute force.

Farc and the ELN offer some protection for farmers in the areas they control. These farmers face chemical crop spraying and violence from US-backed “counter-insurgency” programmes.

However, the guerilla groups are not based on mass democratic movements. Nor are the social and economic conditions in areas they control significantly better for the poor.

Farc and the ELN have been locked into a bloody war for decades against a highly armed state that is backed, financially and militarily, by the US and Britain.

Their guerilla strategy will not offer the political progress ordinary Colombians need so badly.

But against all the odds – and in the face of brutal repression – Colombian trade unions, students and social movements are resisting and fighting for fundamental change.

The Persecution of David Oluwale

Alex Doherty — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:29:53 +0000

David Oluwale was last seen alive on the night of 17 April 1969, being beaten by two police officers in Leeds.

Two weeks later his body was pulled out of a river. A subsequent investigation led to the only time British police officers have been convicted for a police-related death.

Historian Kester Aspden has researched the life and death of Oluwale. He spoke to Esme Choonara about the case and why it resonates to this day.

Can you tell me about your motivations for writing the book?

I was in an archive on some other business when I stumbled across the David Oluwale case files. I’d heard the name when I was working at Leeds University.

I knew it was about a homeless man who had drowned in a river, but that was all I knew.

I pulled up a file, and within a couple of hours I realised that this was a really interesting story. The first thing I saw were photographs of the exhumation.

Then I found the police charge sheets where someone had added in “wog” under the nationality – I’d never heard of this before.

I had no idea at that point that the repercussions of the case are still felt in Leeds today, or that the case was more widely known.

I started to try and trace the police officers who had been involved, the lawyers and people who had known David Oluwale.

My first motivation was that this was a strange and compelling human story about a man who came here as a stowaway.

I had romantic ideas about that – in fact it was a hard and arduous trip.

That led me to research the experience of other stowaways who came over at that time, and also the experience of West Africans in England.

There’s a lot about the Windrush generation coming to Britain from the Caribbean, but I knew nothing about the experience of Nigerians.

I was lucky to meet a man who knew David Oluwale and who had stowed away himself.

Gayb Adams came from Lagos the year before David and then settled in Leeds. So I got a first hand account of what it was like at that time.

So I suppose I went into it as a human story, not a political one.

But as I looked into it more I saw the significance of the case – that it was the first and only time that police officers have been prosecuted for charges relating to this sort of police-related death.

You interviewed many police officers for the book. Were they willing to talk about the case?

The police were happy to talk to me about the background to policing at that time and other generalities.

Some of them also wanted to talk to me about what David Oluwale was like from their point of view – that he was a social nuisance, that he was filthy and violent.

Getting to speak to some of the police officers over a long period of time gave me an insight that I never would have had from reading books about policing, or from my own assumptions about what police are like.

We talk today about institutional racism. I think you can see from this case how an institution can exert a kind of power over an individual.

A lot of the officers I spoke to had retired, which maybe meant they were more willing to talk now. But when they are in the police, officers tend to think and act and see the world in a particular kind of way.

I met some police who did have some sympathy for David at the time. Some of them would take him a cup of tea or throw him some change.

They were also keen to say that what happened was down to these two police officers and a rogue shift, rather than anything to do with the institution.

But I think it went much wider than that. The whole of the police station knew about what was happening to David and didn’t do anything.

Coppers like to pride themselves on having an enquiring mind, but in this case there was no enquiring – nobody wanted to probe too deeply. People were more worried about their careers.

I think that 35 years on people can be more reflective. At the time, it would have been impossible for someone like me to have told the story.

Now, because it looks like a distant piece of social history, you can ask the questions and get a bit more honesty.

A lot of the brutality was seen as part of the mundane business of policing a tough city, something that lawyers and magistrates’ courts didn’t want to look at.

So it wasn’t just that the police were all in it together, but that David had no recourse to the law in any other way. No magistrate, no judge would give him a hearing.

You build up a picture of the racism that David Oluwale faced throughout his time in Britain. Yet at the trial there was no mention of racism at all. What did this tell you?

I found it amazing that the criminal investigation didn’t probe the attitudes of officers to black people, whereas there was a lot about the attitudes towards vagrants. That seemed telling.

The charge sheets on which someone had changed David Oluwale’s nationality to “wog” were interesting enough for the police investigation to look at, but it wasn’t something that was raised in court.

I think there was a decision – either conscious or unconscious – not to look into this too deeply.

It would have been more damaging for the police if this had been seen as an act of racist brutality even in 1970 and 1971, rather than as a pathological hatred two officers held towards vagrants.

You talk in the book about how the crime of “disorderly conduct” was used in Leeds against those who didn’t fit in. Do you see a contemporary equivalent?

Today’s “disorderly” people are shoved out of the way with Asbos and dispersal orders. Contemporary Leeds tries to show itself in a shiny light to attract investment – it portrays an image of a prosperous, cosmopolitan, vibrant city at the vanguard of the urban renaissance.

There are certain people who don’t fit into that picture – homeless people, rough sleepers – who bear the brunt of the law. But it’s done in a very different way now, with Asbos rather than a kicking.

“Disorderly” people tended to be those who were poor or didn’t fit the idea of a productive human being – someone unemployed, or someone who hangs around seemingly with no purpose. The police see it as their job to clear the streets of these people, more than it is to solve crime actually.

So I went back to the origins of the police in the early 19th century when early industrial society was beginning. Respectable society needed a more orderly industrious workforce.

One of the police’s jobs was to root out the unproductive elements and make sure they were productive people.

So I think there’s a link between today and David Oluwale’s time – but also going further back to the whole purpose of the police.

What does the David Oluwale case tell you about institutional racism – and do you think things have changed in the police today?

It’s always been the case that if police are found guilty of criminal behaviour, there are attempts to portray their behaviour as nothing to do with the ordinary conduct or working of the police.

But I think the behaviour of the two officers is unsurprising in the context of normal urban policing.

David Oluwale’s case was surprising and extreme – but I don’t think that it was so far away from the ordinary experiences of black people.

Today, after Stephen Lawrence, the police make sure that their officers have more training and are more sensitive in their language and their behaviour.

In Merseyside, for example, they made a great play of bringing Anthony Walker’s killers to justice and registering it as a racist crime straight away.

So if David Oluwale’s case happened today, it would maybe be handled differently. But at the same time, I wonder how much things have really changed.

I think the telling area is deaths in custody. With the exception of David’s case, it is a stark fact that since 1970, when the records start, there has not been one officer convicted of an offence for a death in custody.

Black people figure disproportionately in the figures of those who have died in police custody.

The recent case of Mikey Powell in Birmingham who died in police custody in 2003, is a contemporary issue that many who are interested in David Oluwale’s case are concerned with today.

Mikey Powell was not a criminal, but he did have a mental illness. He was treated as someone who needed to be controlled.

I think that comes from stereotypes of black people. It will take a long time to change that attitude, and I don’t think training courses will do that. It’s something more deeply rooted.

Many people have died suspicious deaths in police custody since 1970. Even though there has often been compelling evidence that officers were to blame, it seems that the whole judicial system doesn’t want to believe that it was the police or accept that this happens.

In the David Oluwale case there was partial justice, even if it is not the justice that we may think the case deserved. That was in 1971, when Britain was supposedly not as racially aware as it is today.

This brings into stark relief the complete absence of any convictions in latter day cases.

For most of the families and friends who have lost people in these circumstances there has been no justice.

What did you discover about David Oluwale’s experience at the hands of the mental health system?

I wanted to look beyond the police. To begin to know why David Oluwale was an easy prey for these police officers, you have to know why he was seen as a worthless being.

It’s only when someone is seen as worthless that people can get away with this sort of brutality.

The gates of the Menston asylum were a place to start for me. The psychiatry of the period tended to see Africans as impulsive, aggressive, prone to persecution, childish, paranoid and dangerous.

And that kind of psychiatry goes back to older prejudices – you could say back to the slave trade and to 19th century “science”, which categorised Africans as irrational.

Today black people are over-

represented in the mental health system. They are more likely to be sectioned, to be diagnosed as schizophrenic and to be given higher doses of anti-psychotic drugs.

I had that contemporary debate very much in mind and I wanted to get to its roots.

It was difficult to write about in many ways. David’s basic records weren’t made available to me – Leeds mental health trust told me they didn’t think it was in his best interests.

But I managed to piece together a chapter with what was around that gave a wider context. It broadens the story from one of just police institutional racism, which is something we know a lot about.

I don’t think the mental health system has had its Stephen Lawrence moment. And I hope that the book raises a few questions about this.

What was the significance of including recollections such as the visits to the Mecca ballrooms?

David Oluwale did have friends who lived long and happy lives. Some of them are still around today.

The ballrooms were great places for mixing and I guess one of the few places where black people in Britain at that time felt more comfortable.

Many of David’s friends met their wives at the Mecca, so I was pleased to introduce that into the story. I think it’s important.

Hopefully one day histories will be written that do more than just concentrating on the colour bar and what an intolerant place England was. But unfortunately David Oluwale’s was not one of those stories.

Kester Aspden is talking about ‘Nationality: Wog – The Hounding Of David Oluwale’ at Waterstone’s in Leeds on Tuesday 12 June, 7pm, with Tom Palmer. To reserve a ticket phone 0113 244 4588. The book is published by Jonathan Cape for £12.99 and available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, phone 020 7637 1848.