Silence over Chris Kaba’s death shows the UK is numb to police killing Black people

Too many believe that those who die at the hands of the police, or in prisons, ‘must have done something’ to deserve it – and are therefore unworthy of our attention

September 12, 2022 6:44 pm(Updated September 13, 2022 12:21 pm)

On Saturday afternoon, a crowd of hundreds of mourners weaved their way around Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square. Many carried placards and chanted together to mark their grief. Spotting the gathering on its rolling coverage following the Queen’s death, Sky News slowly panned across the crowd, a newsreader describing “thousands of people still arriving to pay their respects to the Queen”.

But the droves of people hadn’t come together for the death of the 96-year-old – rather, they were protesting the fatal shooting by police of an unarmed 24-year-old Black man named Chris Kaba, which took place on Monday 5 September. Sky may have since issued a correction, but Black British people have taken this as a damning indictment of Britain’s ambivalent response to yet another police killing of a Black person.

In 2020, when 46-year-old George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, Britain’s press turned its attention to Britain’s own issues with violent institutional racism. Conversations about broader racism in the policing and prison systems, colonialism, empire, our Eurocentric school curricula, disproportionate Covid-19 deaths in Black communities, and all manner of manifestations of Britain’s racism began to spring up everywhere.

That sudden interest in the issue of racism, which Black British organisers, students, academics, writers and broader communities have been trying to draw attention to for over half a century, was unprecedented. And it was mirrored across the country, with Britain’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations taking place across at least 260 towns and cities, making our protest response the largest outside of the United States. As the focus on racism extended from days, to weeks, to months, it felt as if our calls might finally have been heard.

Two years down the line, I am more cynical. The response to Kaba’s death outside Black communities, even in the days before the Queen’s passing, has been muted and slow. I noticed that I didn’t even hear about the shooting – which is now being treated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct as a homicide – until a couple of days after it took place. It wasn’t that the story was not being reported on at all, but that it didn’t seem to be particularly high priority, or to have much “cut-through”, as journalists often put it.

The killing of any person by police officers should be of public interest, causing outrage and grief. Unfortunately, these deaths are routinely normalised – we are told that those who die at the hands of the police, or in prisons, are “criminal”, “thugs”, “must have done something” to deserve it – and are therefore deemed unworthy of our attention.

However, we know by now that young Black men in particular are disproportionately criminalised – 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched on Britain’s streets – and that Black people more broadly are more than twice as likely to die during or following police contact.

The public carries these racialised stereotypes too. The disproportionate public concern for white victims over Black ones has even been immortalised in the phrase “missing white woman syndrome”.

We also routinely underplay the extent of police violence in the UK, in part, because most officers do not carry guns. During a Black Lives Matter protest in London in 2017, following the death of Philando Castile in the US, I remember being pulled aside by an elderly person who insisted that this was not an issue in Britain.

On the contrary, there have been killings in the UK too. There have been 1,833 deaths in or following police contact since 1990 in England and Wales, with “Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnicities” more likely to die disproportionately as a result of use of force or restraint by the police, according to Inquest. We only know of two prosecutions for any of those deaths. Only two months ago, Oladeji Adeyemi Omishore died after being tasered on Chelsea Bridge. The police officers involved are not being investigated for any professional misconduct or criminal charges.

In recent days, I have been thinking about other black people killed by the police: Omishore, Mark Duggan, Lamont Roper, Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, Rashan Charles – people whose full existence won’t ever be clear to us because we have only known them in death. People who have had the headlines slowly turn against them, reassuring us that we should not show empathy, that we can be indifferent, that we can look away.

Sceptics may pore through the personal histories of these people to assess the extent to which their killings were “justified”, but I don’t believe anyone should be killed by the police. In the same vein, mourning these people because of their possible saintly “innocence”, because they were fathers, because they were always kind to their neighbours, because they were studying for a degree or seeing success in their industry, because they had never been to prison, because they had the “right” kind of obituary photograph, because they were the “right” kind of victim – “just like you or me” – is wrong too.

We should mourn them because they were people, because they deserved to live and because they have been for ever deprived of the right to defend themselves. We must force ourselves to look at and name this injustice for what it is.

If we truly believe that Black lives matter, we should be organising and joining demonstrations on the streets, donating to Kaba’s campaign fund, sharing news stories on the case, circulating information in our communities, joining our local cop watch groups and thinking about how we can resist racist state violence as police powers continue to ramp up across Britain.

Next time we protest for Kaba’s death and all the others who have lost their lives at the hands of the police, their names must be heard – and our protest unmistakable.

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a freelance journalist, who is currently writing Mad World, a book on the politics of mental health