JUSTICE FOR US
On 7 September 2003 my cousin Michael Powell, or Mikey, as we used to call him, died while in police custody. Mikey was prone to very high highs and very low lows, and could be quite an unpredictable chap. But he was harmless and loved by all who knew him. He once climbed onto the roof of his mother’s house – his mother being my Auntie Claris. Auntie Claris couldn’t get him down, so she called the police. A policewoman turned up, smiled at Mikey, and promised to hang out with him for a while. Basically she chatted him up, and he came down. It was all very light-hearted, with the policewoman telling him to try and behave and be nice to his mum, before she went on her way.
So, a few months later, when Auntie Claris was having problems with Mikey again, she called the police once more, thinking that a nice officer would come round and sweet-talk him again. But this time it was different. This time it was 1am, and the police turned up in riot mode. They weren’t in the mood to try to pacify him; they weren’t interested in talking to him. A loud black man on the streets at that time of the morning could only mean trouble, so the first thing the police did when they saw him was run him over in their car. They did that, they said, because they couldn’t see his hands, and because they couldn’t see his hands they presumed he was armed. After they ran him over they took him away. When they took him away he was alive; two hours later he was dead.
I first heard about it on a radio news report that said a young black man had died in police custody in Birmingham in the middle of the night. Sadly the news of a black person dying in a police station wasn’t news to me. I knew about the deaths of David Oluwale, Joy Gardner and Colin Roach, so I cursed Babylon and went to sleep. I woke up very early the next morning with my phone constantly ringing and various members of my family telling me Mikey was dead.
It was difficult for all of us, but at a time when a seasoned campaigner like me should have sprung into action there was little I could do or say. The police and their lawyers watched everything I did and listened to everything I said in the hope I would say something that would prejudice the case. With the case ongoing we were all subject to the law of subjudice, which meant we had to be very careful. Especially me.
For example, we couldn’t say that Mikey was killed in custody; we could only say that he died in custody. We couldn’t say we knew that something had happened, as that would imply we had evidence; we could only talk about wanting to get to the truth. The police carefully combed through anything I wrote in the press, and everything I said in public was monitored. I suspect that much of what I said in private was also monitored.
We fought a long, hard campaign for justice, and in 2009 we finally heard what we’d known for a long time when we got the verdict from the inquest. It found that the way Mikey had been restrained had resulted in his death from positional asphyxia. Our family had always known how he died; it was very sad that it took us so long to get that official verdict. Mikey’s sister, Sieta Lambrias, campaigned tirelessly for justice for Mikey. She was also pleased that the truth came out, even though it took six years.
The factors that led up to Mikey’s death make for sickening reading: being in contact with a moving vehicle; being sprayed with CS gas; being struck by a baton and being restrained on the ground while suffering a psychosis.
If there was any good that came out of this it was that it united the black community in Birmingham (and other parts of the country) and it united my family too. Relatives who once thought I was too political were now getting political themselves. Their front rooms had become campaign headquarters or meeting rooms; they became activists and organisers; they were marching and lobbying MPs, and working with other activists around the country. They were standing in solidarity with other families that had lost loved ones in institutions around the country, and becoming aware of how the issues that affected them were connected to issues affecting other working-class people. They were awake, and I now took pride in the fact that people didn’t only think of me as a campaigner, they thought of my family as campaigners.
Race relations have changed enormously during my lifetime. In 2015 I did a short film for BBC’s Newsnight to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Race Relations Act, which came into being in 1965 to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of colour, race or ethnic or national origins. The Act wasn’t perfect. For instance, when it was brought into being it was all about outlawing racism in public places. That meant it was perfectly okay to be racist at home or at the local pub, as long as the landlord didn’t mind.
I also thought the title was wrong. It should have been called the Anti-Racism Act rather than the Race Relations Act, which was a typically quaint British way of phrasing it. The Act was initially about stopping black people being beaten up after the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 and it’s since been amended and amended and amended.
The Act was worthwhile, but while you can control people’s actions you can’t control their thoughts. We had come a long way and it would have been wrong to say that things were the same as they’d been when I was a boy. Racism in the first decade of the new century was not as bad as it had been in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s, but that’s not to say things were great. The new racists had learned to be subtler than they used to be. There were plenty of them out there, but their brand of racism was more insidious, more sophisticated, more institutional. It had to be.
The old racists didn’t all die off; they got jobs, and many of them got jobs in our institutions. So we couldn’t let our guard down. We still had work to do. Most gangs of young black kids weren’t scared of young white kids any more. There weren’t gangs of skinheads going out and beating people up as they used to – well, not as often as they used to – but black kids were rightly scared of the police. They were stopped and searched a lot more often than white kids because they had a different colour skin. If you’re a black kid walking home at 1am or 2am, the last thing you want to see is the police. If you’re stopped and searched, it’s frightening. If you’re seventeen or eighteen and don’t know the law, you might not know what could happen. But these kids now knew they could end up like my cousin Mikey Powell.
The racists had grown up; they had put on suits and ties and formed political parties. They were working in the local council, in marketing, banking and in furniture upholstery. They were building websites. They were blending in.
A couple of friends from Peterborough called me one day and asked me to do them a favour. They had put their house on the market and were going to have an open day. They had a young child called Glory, who I know really well, and they asked me if I would look after her while they cleaned the house to make it presentable.
So I went over and took Glory to the park so they could get on with the job and welcome their potential buyers. It was a warm spring day and I was probably enjoying the park rides in the play area more than Glory was. At one point I was pushing Glory on a swing when a woman came to admire her, as ladies sometimes do with children in parks. She asked me the age of the baby and I said she was almost two. She waved to Glory, who paid no attention to her, and then walked away. Ten minutes later the police turned up – one male and one female – and asked if the baby was mine.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s my friend’s baby.’
‘What are you doing with her?’ asked the male officer.
‘Playing. Just like all the other parents, grandparents, uncles and child minders you see around you. Is there something wrong with that?’
A crowd was gathering and it was obvious to everyone present that I was getting hassled because I was a black guy with a white kid, but the police refused to say why they were quizzing me.
‘Can you call the parents?’ asked the male officer.
‘I can but I won’t,’ I replied. ‘That would only upset them and make them worried.’
‘Why don’t you know the age of the little girl? asked the female officer.
‘I don’t remember her birthday, but I know she’s about two.’
I was now holding Glory in my arms, when the female officer reached out and asked if she could hold her. Glory was horrified by this. She turned back to me, putting her arms around my shoulders as she clung onto me for dear life. The crowd was getting bigger. They saw this and began to let the officers know via a series of one-liners and groans, that if the baby feared me she wouldn’t be clinging onto me, she would want to get away.
We were having a standoff. The crowd was getting more vocal, some telling the police directly that they were reacting to a racist call and were being racist. I could have stayed there much longer, but to make peace and defuse the situation I called Glory’s mother and put the phone on speaker. The first thing she said was. ‘Are you two having fun?’
The police realised there was nothing wrong and said we were free to go, but it was 2014 and I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that if I, a black man, am in the company of a white child, I am suspicious. Glory could have been my adopted daughter – my baby. After this event I asked some white people who had adopted black children if they had ever experienced anything like this, and they all said, ‘No.’