Joseph Fallon in 1987 and Patrick Quinn in 1990 are part of a long list of people who have died, during the last 30 years, in police custody.
In the last year in which figures are available, for 2002 – 2003, a record 104 people died while in police custody or in accidents involving police cars. Of these twenty two were of people from ethnic minorities, a significant jump on the previous year when the figure was 7.
A total of 40 people died in custody or soon after being released in 2002 – 2003, almost double the previous year when the figure was 22. The total figure for the last six years thus rose to nearly 200, at 198. The death of people in police custody has become commonplace in Britain today.
One group who have sought to highlight the issue of ‘Deaths in police custody’ and to record the resistance of the families of those who have died has been Migrant Media. The group has courted controversy by refusing to be intimidated by the Police Federation’s attempts to prevent showings of their film INJUSTICE.
Ken Fero, a director at Migrant Media, agreed to be interviewed for this issue of RPM, and what he had to say was not for the faint hearted.
When and why did you set up Migrant Media?
It was established in 1989 in Hackney. It is a film collective of people who were doing social and political work in their own communities. We had nothing, we had no training, but we had commitment and a passion for making films
We started applying for small grants. We took some inspiration from others in their communities overseas, all following social movements.
The first thing we decided to do was a series called communities of resistance, which was about trying to document resistance including that to oppose racist attacks. We then did some work with Arab communities, then television got interested and we were given occasional commissions.
The film INJUSTICE was part of the history of Britain’s black legacy, self-defence, deaths in custody. The film we did before INJUSTICE was about Joy Gardner, called REDEMPTION, about deaths at the hands of the state. Some things never end and they never will do, and one of the things we wanted to do was to document things, whether they would turn into a film we never really knew, and even when we started INJUSTICE we didn’t know
When did you start making the film?
It started with the filming of the demo in December 1994 in support of Shiji Lapite, who was killed by officers from Stoke Newington Police Station.
What did you want to show in the film?
At first we had no set idea, we did want to show that there was resistance to deaths in police custody, over 30 years there have been 1,000 deaths in custody and no police officer has been convicted for any of these deaths. However, what we didn’t want was a film just about victims.
So, we set out to make a film about the resistance, and to do this by showing the points of view of the families involved. It started with Shiji Lapite, a few months later Brian Douglas was killed in Clapham and his family started organising and then Ibrahim Sey was killed 1996 in Newham Police Station.
These were the three main cases we used in the film, we concentrated on the three as part of the ongoing struggle, but we also examined other cases as well such as the death of Harry Stanley, who was shot dead by Hackney Police.
We got to know the families, we got involved politically in their work, we wanted to not only expose what happened, which is what television does, we also wanted to oppose it as well, and when you take decisions like that then you have to stay involved.
It is not the normal way of making television documentaries, if we had to be paid for the seven years of work we have put into INJUSTICE then it would have been one of the biggest budgets ever spent on a documentary, it should be like that if you want to make social and political documentaries.
Our work also meant we were able to get people in similar situations together, not just bringing them together to speak at a public meeting, but working together, sharing experiences, issuing joint statements and being prepared to speak out publicly in support of one another.
One of the problems is that there are lots of opportunists who get involved and attempt to mediate between the families and the police, but it should be the families speaking directly to the police.
Has the film achieved what you wanted?
We wanted to document the fight and show what the families went through. In this we have succeeded.
During its making we had gone to BBC TV and Channel 4 and they refused to give it any support, and that’s one of the reasons why the police didn’t know we were making the film. What happens is that when a piece such as ours is made for television there is a process of negotiation between the BBC or Channel 4 and the police about what can and can’t be said. Depending on those negotiations will decide what is said in the programme.
But the television companies couldn’t understand the programme, it wasn’t just about the investigation into the people’s deaths, it was also about a social movement and the facts in the cases aren’t in dispute, they aren’t in most of these cases, they killed them, there is no doubt about it, they covered it up, and how is the only contentious issue. When it was completed BBC and Channel 4 refused to show it.
However, it was selected for the closing night of the Human Rights Film Festival in April 2001. This took place at the Ritzy in Brixton, they had to organise a second screening because it was sold out, it was an important area for us because that was the area Brian Douglas was from, and it was a very successful event
We actually finished the film on the Wednesday and it was shown on the Friday. We had no idea the work would take 7 years, or whether it was ever going to be shown, but we were determined to finish it, we took the responsibility of making a film to show what was going on, so we owed it to the families and the people who were killed, so we knew we would finish it. When you make those sorts of commitments then you’ve got to do it. INJUSTICE went down very well at the Human Rights Film Festival.
Not so, of course, amongst the police. Because the police didn’t know the film was coming out, and this was the first film ever made on this issue, then it was a direct challenge to the police, and in it we named them, we showed their faces and we accused them directly of murder. That sort of thing isn’t done on television, which is why it has never been shown on BBC or Channel 4, although we did project it onto Channel 4.
Because the film was very confrontational the police reacted against it. What we wanted to do after the first showing was to push forward the idea of a private prosecution by the families and start raising money for it. The launch of the film was at the Metro Cinema in central London in July 2001, at which we were due to announce that any profits would be used to establish a fund for private prosecutions. We said this to the press and the police heard about.
They threatened the Metro Cinema, they sent a fax saying that it libelled their officers and that if the cinema showed the film it may result in legal action against the cinema and it may result in substantial damages, basically it was threat for financial ruin for that and any other cinema considering showing the film.
There was a very tense situation, this was a culmination of 7 years of work and also the launch of the fund for the families, a lot of tension was in the air.
The cinema got the letter, there was a discussion as to what to do, we could have taken control of the cinema and thrown those in charge out and projected it, but it wasn’t our cinema and we don’t work with friends like that, so we didn’t show it, our fight was against the police and the Police Federation. Don’t forget the police have got a very, very successful record of winning libel actions and constantly win cases.
The next screening was at Conway Hall, a bastion of free speech, they got the letter from the Police Federation, now it named 8 officers, up from 2, they were all pilling in thinking they were going to get money out of the libel, the audience took over the cinema and threw out the management and projected the film. It got into the Evening Standard newspaper, who said ‘audience hijacks hall to see deaths in custody film”. That was great from our point of view because at last people were starting to talk about the issue.
The police have tried to kill the film, but every time they’ve done that someone in the audience has said they’d show it in their house, or in the pub and we’ve gone and shown it there. There have been several hundred public showings, possibly over 1,000. The Observer newspaper called it ‘The film that refuses to die’.
Three years down the line the film hasn’t been shown on television here in Britain, but obviously it has had an impact, which was one of our objectives. But the prime objective was to help people organise, we want to use it as a weapon, and that can only be where there is a debate and that can either be a public debate after the showing of the film, whether that’s 5, 50 or 500 people there.
The film has been shown abroad, in America CNN showed a half hour piece, it was shown on Japanese television and it was also shown on Iranian television. When we went to Iran around 30 million saw it, we showed clips of the film, and when we talked about resisting state brutality that was a very very important message. Now we know the state run television station was only broadcasting what we’re saying because it suits them to attack western imperialism, and as such they got something out of what we were saying, but we also get something, especially as it highlights resistance to the state and shows how women organise.
We have travelled across the world to show this film, but it doesn’t matter if people don’t see it, the important thing is that there are human rights abuses happening in Britain, the police are murdering people, the state are covering it up, and there’s a fight back, and we always get that across whether we show 5 minutes or the whole film. That’s important, because for the first time ever millions of people have been challenged about their perceptions of the British police, and the judicial system, which for years has been paraded as the finest in the world.
Your film highlighted the issues of deaths in police custody, but it hasn’t
stopped them has it?
We felt that there had been a big focus on the inquest system by families in the past.
We felt that was a tactical and political mistake, because the key thing is that these people killed in police custody are being murdered and there have been an awful lot of them. Officers should be tried for murder.
The state had set down the parameters in the first case, which was that of David Olowade in 1969, that was under a Labour government, led by Harold Wilson. In that case two police officers did get sent to trial and they were found guilty of grievous bodily harm [GBH] and sent to prison. The officers had systematically and brutally beaten Olowade, and finally chased him into the river, and during that case the other police officers testified against the other officers.
The state and the police made sure that didn’t happen again.
At the start of the trial the Judge said that he would not have police officers being found guilty of murder, but in spite of this the Jury still found the 2 officers guilty of GBH.
Because the officers did go to prison a lot of the media then descended on Leeds and started to ask a lot of questions, there was a call for a public enquiry, and the reports showed that the police were involved in a lot of illegal activities, people began to ask questions about what the police were doing.
Because this happened in 1969 they wanted to make sure it never happened again
So a decision was taken to take these cases to a very quaint English institution, the inquest. This occurs where it is recognised that there is or may be something suspicious about someone’s death, but where the Crown refuses to prosecute and so they send it to an inquest.
The families and some of the campaign groups now use the inquest to gather information on how their loved ones were killed. There would be no need for an inquest if there was a trial.
I think what is happened is that with the state being so determined not to prosecute when someone is killed in police custody then some people involved around deaths in custody have concentrated too much on trying to reform the inquest system and have lost sight of the facts that these police officers have murdered people. The focus really should be on prosecuting the officers.
From my point of view if you start a struggle and from the word go, you immediately decide that you are never going to get a prosecution because there hasn’t been one in the past, then you’re starting from a defeatist position. There is a liberal tradition and that is part of the problem.
People are killed by the police, there is an investigation by the police, there is enough evidence to convict, why waste time on the inquest? If the state is refusing to prosecute then the main focus of the challenge should be on that.
The only thing that is going to stop police officers killing people is if they think they are going to go to jail. We need to get the stage whereby if the state won’t prosecute then families will have to take out private prosecutions.
Once that happens there needs to be a discussion about what the police are for; are they there to solve crimes or to impose public order? At the moment they are using the need to impose public order in order to get away with murder. If they spent as much time investigating rapes and burglaries as they did in covering up their own crimes then society would be a safer place.
Migrant Media
PO Box 47412
London N13 5WG
020 8 889 6160
http://www.injusticefilm.co.uk