Written by: Vic Motune
The Voice reflects on our coverage of policing over 40 years
BACK IN 1982 Voice founder Val McCalla had a goal to create a newspaper that provided a platform for Britain’s rapidly growing black community to help challenge what it saw as overt racism in policing.
When black people clashed with the police during riots in Brixton and Toxteth in 1981, only one side of the story was reflected in the mainstream British media.
News reports largely ignored many of the issues behind the uprisings as they were referred to in the black community, including deep anger at years of harassment by police officers and their extensive use of stop and search tactics under the Sus laws.
In the 1970s and early 80s politicians, senior police chiefs and other leading public figures regularly made openly racist statements under the guise of ‘telling it like it is’.
Comments which would force an immediate resignation if made today, often went unchallenged when they were published in newspapers or broadcast on TV or radio.
Inevitably, the extent of racism in Britain was reflected in its police forces.
So, by the time The Voice was launched in August 1982, feelings of mistrust, resentment and suspicion between the black community and the police were strong.
Right from its launch The Voice’s journalism was quite unlike anything that existed in the media landscape at that time.
It regularly carried reports of abuses of police power which included black people being brutally assaulted after raids on their homes by officers in search of drugs or stolen goods, racially motivated stop and search tactics and wrongful arrests and detentions.
One of The Voice’s earliest campaigns highlighted the importance of McCalla’s vision in creating a newspaper that challenged the police and other institutions to listen to the concerns of the community.
On January 12 1983 Colin Roach, a 21-year-old black man died after receiving a fatal gunshot wound while in the custody of Stoke Newington police station, London.
The Metropolitan Police said he had committed suicide soon after entering the station. They also said there were no witnesses when he died.
As news of Roach’s death quickly spread, The Voice provided a platform for his family and the black community who were suspicious of the official explanation of his death and accused the police of a cover-up.
The Voice was the first publication to interview his family who strongly rejected the official explanation of his death. And an exclusive investigation published in its January 22 edition revealed police and coroners reports which raised the prospect that Roach’s death was not suicide.
In the weeks that followed The Voice was relentless in demanding answers to the questions many in the black community had about the case.
An exclusive story in its February 5 edition under the headline ‘Police admitted shooting Colin’ considerably stepped up the pressure on the police.
The story centred on an exclusive interview with 18-year-old Delores Williams, a voluntary worker who was arrested and detained by the Stoke Newington police for allegedly receiving stolen goods. She was later released when no stolen items were found at her home.
Williams told The Voice that during her interrogation a plain clothes detective claimed to have shot Roach after a protracted struggle inside the police station after he refused to give evidence to the police.
Under pressure following Williams’ explosive claims and a growing number of demonstrations Borough Commander Bill Taylor agreed to an exclusive interview with The Voice.
He strenuously denied the police had said Roach’s death was suicide. “Let me emphasise that because it is not our position to make decision of that kind that’s a decision for the coroner,” he told The Voice. “What we have said is that we are not looking for any second person in connection with the matter.”
Taylor’s interview spurred growing calls for an independent public inquiry into Roach’s death. This did not happen, although the Met did conduct an inquest which controversially concluded that Roach had committed suicide.
Following the 1981 Brixton riots the Scarman Report, which resulted from an official inquiry, sought to understand the causes of the violence.
However, it could only go so far in helping to improve relations between the police and the black community. While its author Lord Scarman acknowledged the “ill considered, immature and racially prejudiced actions of some officers” he stopped short of apportioning blame to the police.
He firmly rejected “the allegation that the police are the oppressive arm of a racist state” and went on to say that this notion was “an injustice to the senior officers of the force”.
Scarman’s failure to acknowledge the fact that racism was widespread in the Met meant the black community’s mistrust of the police, so evident in its response to Colin Roach’s death, deepened as the 1980s went on.
And the unwillingness of the authorities to address discriminatory law enforcement meant that police harassment of black communities continued sowing the seeds for a repeat of what happened in 1981.
On September 28 1985 Brixton resident Cherry Groce was shot and seriously injured after police officers raided her house searching for her son Michael.
News of the shooting spread quickly leading to crowds gathering outside the district police station. Local people had already been very critical of police tactics in the area and a mood of tension exploded into violence as night fell.
‘Brixton Burns Again’ was the dramatic headline that dominated the front page of The Voice’s October 5 edition which covered the riots. The accompanying story on the inside cover included several eyewitness accounts from local people.
Once again, the newspaper allowed a community long ignored by the mainstream media to vent its frustrations. Angry residents told The Voice they were planning to arm and protect themselves against the police because they were “sick and tired” of officers bursting into their homes and treating them “like animals”.
One woman who spoke to The Voice said: “The police have no respect for our homes, they think they can just drop in at any time. I get confused now when I see the police because I don’t know whether they have come to protect me or kill me.”
The edition also carried interviews with Cherry Groce’s children. Her 21-year-old daughter Juliet told The Voice: “They just came to shoot anyone indiscriminately. My mum was harmless. It’s just sheer madness and it could easily have been one of the children.”
Tensions between the black community and the police were already high when violence broke out again a week later at the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, north London.
Local resident Cynthia Jarret died from a heart attack during a police search at her home. It was later alleged that officers, in search of her son Floyd, pushed her causing her to fall.
What began as a protest outside Tottenham Police station as news of her death spread quickly escalated into a riot as the community expressed its anger just a week after Groce’s shooting. The violence resulted in the death of PC Keith Blakelock.
In its October 26 edition of that year The Voice used its front page to call for a Day of Action following Jarret’s death and Groce’s shooting.
In the accompanying story, the newspaper revealed that it had taken part in a hastily convened summit along with several other leading black organisations in central London to formulate a response from the black community to the recent events.
In the years that followed the 1985 riots relations between the police and the black community continued to decline.
Despite the Met’s continued emphasis on disproportionately stopping and searching black youths or the fact that racial attacks on black people rarely led to convictions it was the black community that was consistently blamed for tense relations with police officers.
In the summer of 1995, then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon controversially stated that 80 percent of muggings in some parts of the capital were committed by young black men.
The Voice’s response was both swift and unprecedented. In its front-page splash, it superimposed a pair of donkey’s ears onto a photo of the Commissioner under the headline ‘Condon, you’re an ass’.
Unsurprisingly, the coverage angered Condon. The fallout became a major media story and later prompted the Met to send a representative to The Voice’s offices in Brixton.
Some observers at the time claimed the move was an attempt at damage limitation. However, the row between Condon and The Voice escalated when, in January 1996, the newspaper ran an investigation into Black deaths in custody following the death of music promoter Brian Douglas. The story was highly critical of the Met.
Condon accused The Voice of being “inflammatory” and “irresponsible”. Again, the newspaper was equally forthright in its response.
A picture of the Commissioner was splashed across the front page of the January 30 edition with the headline ‘If this man were Black…’
“Met Chief Sir Paul Condon attacks The Voice as being ‘inflammatory’ and ‘irresponsible’” the front-page story began. “His claims are not just a slur on The Voice which, after all, is your paper. When he accuses us of fueling discontent, he inadvertently attacks the whole black community.”
The story went on to say that had Condon been a black Londoner he would be three times more likely to be mugged, and five times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police.
As with so many other issues, the objections of the Met Police Commissioner and other senior police leaders did little to dissuade The Voice from continuing to campaign about the deaths of black people in police custody.
In 2014 friends and family of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man who was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, north London gathered at a vigil outside Tottenham Police station. They were there to protest the findings of an inquest which had concluded that Duggan had been lawfully killed by police.
His death sparked nationwide riots three years earlier.
Community activist Stafford Scott, who was supporting the Duggan family said: “For generations [the police] have been killing black people all over the country, killing poor and working-class people. We will not and we cannot accept the perverse verdict that [Mark Duggan was lawfully killed].”
That anger was reflected in a powerful Voice front page of the January 16 2014 edition.
Under the headline ‘Who is Next?’ it featured the names and pictures of many of those who, like Duggan, had died in police custody over the previous two decades and whose tragic cases have been highlighted on the pages of The Voice.
They included Sean Rigg, Leon Briggs, Shekou Bayoh, Roger Sylvester, Kingsley Burrell, Rashan Charles, and reggae singer Smiley Culture among others.
If the anger felt by black Britons about racial disparities in policing remained a fairly low priority for many politicians and much of the mainstream media, one tragic event served to catapult the issue of endemic police racism right to the top of the national agenda.
On April 22 1993, black teenager Stephen Lawrence was cruelly murdered in a racially motivated attack by a group of white youths while waiting for a bus in Eltham, south London.
The Voice was one of the first newspapers to report Stephen’s tragic death.
And the family’s fight for justice formed a central part of the newspaper’s campaign for race equality to be at the heart of policing.
‘Murdered for being black’ was the headline that dominated the front page of the April 27 1993 edition.
The accompanying story revealed the depth of pain of the Lawrence family. His father Neville told The Voice he wanted to see a return of the death penalty for the killers.
“It doesn’t take a genius to see it was a racial murder” he said. “He was chased down the street for no other reason than he was black.”
In the days following Lawrence’s murder, several residents came forward to provide names of the suspects – Gary Dobson, brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight, and David Norris.
However, no arrests were made, however, until over two weeks after the murder.
Stephen’s family went public with the anger they felt that the police were not doing enough to capture his killers.
It was a meeting with a family and revered former South African president Nelson Mandela arranged by the National Black Caucus and the Anti-Racist Alliance that brought worldwide attention to the police’s shoddy treatment of the Lawrence family.
‘You just don’t give a damn’ was the headline of The Voice’s report of the meeting in its May 11 edition.
Mandela told the family: “I am deeply touched by the brutality of this murder even though it is commonplace in my country. It seems like Black lives here have been become cheap.”
After the meeting, Stephen’s mother Doreen told The Voice that Mandela’s comments showed that “people from abroad are more concerned about the death of Black children than the Prime Minister of our own country, the Queen and all the ministers”.
Following the huge national attention that Mandela’s comments received, the incompetent policing that governed the investigation into Stephen’s murder – and the wider issue of police racism – became a leading story in the British press.
Furious with police failures, the Lawrence family decided to launch a private prosecution.
But the case failed in 1996. The charges against Jamie Acourt and David Norris were dropped before the trial for lack of evidence. The three remaining suspects, Neil Acourt, Luke Knight and Dobson were later formally acquitted.
But the decision in July 1997 of then Home Secretary Jack Straw to launch a judicial review into Stephen’s murder and the subsequent police investigation marked a major shift.
The report of the review, chaired by retired High Court judge Sir William Macpherson, produced one of the hardest hitting official statements on racism in policing in British history.
In stark contrast to the Scarman report nearly two decades earlier, Macpherson concluded that the unsuccessful Met Police investigation into Stephen’s murder was due to institutional racism, which he defined as: ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’.
Although hailed as a watershed moment upon its publication in February 1999, race equality campaigners The Voice spoke to in its March 1 edition expressed disappointment that Macpherson didn’t go even further.
“I’m glad that it’s a hard hitting report” Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott told the newspaper. “But I’m disappointed that nobody has lost their job or been disciplined about it. I think Condon should have gone.”
Lee Jasper, Secretary of the National Assembly Against Racism agreed. He said the black community wanted “clear, decisive and exemplary disciplinary action against the police officers who failed Stephen Lawrence’s family” and other victims of racist violence.
On the front page of that edition, under the headline ‘I Have A Dream’ The Voice said it was adding its weight to calls for a special day to mark Stephen’s memory. Then editor Annie Stewart said: “The idea of a Stephen Lawrence Day is a good one. It will be huge symbolic gesture and a lasting testament to Stephen.”
It was a dream that was eventually fulfilled in April 2018 when former Conservative prime Theresa May launched the annual Stephen Lawrence Day.
In May 2011, Gary Dobson and David Norris finally faced trial for Stephen’s murder following a review of forensic evidence that found the victim’s DNA on the defendants’ clothes.
The double jeopardy legal principle had been dropped in 2005 allowing the killers to stand trial for the second time for the same crime.
On January 3, 2012 both men received life sentences with Dobson jailed for a minimum of 15 years and Norris for 14 years.
‘Justice At Last; was the headline that dominated the front page of The Voice’s January 5 special edition.
“It has been almost two decades since bright teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs” the accompanying story began. “Three court cases later and, at last, his parents Neville and Doreen have seen two men jailed.”
However the special edition also included the results of an exclusive Voice online reader survey which revealed that 83 percent of participants felt that race relations or policing had not got better in the wake of Macpherson.
In the second decade of the 21st Century that radical campaigning platform that McCalla envisioned back in 1982 adapted to the digital communication age.
And following the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the UK in 2020 following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers that platform became even more important in providing black people with a voice to challenge racism in policing.
Thousands defied lockdown to join the largest anti-racism rallies ever seen in this country, easily exceeding the 80,000 who attended the Rock Against Racism concert in East London in April 1978.
Floyd’s death resonated deeply with black Britons.
Longstanding concerns about the deaths of black people in police custody and discriminatory use of stop and searches meant that many marchers wanted to challenge the view held by much of the mainstream media, that the UK is more progressive on race than America.
In the days immediately after Floyd’s death, The Voice’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages quickly signposted readers to information about planned demonstrations across the UK campaign while also posting news stories, comment pieces and video footage on Voice Online.
A May 31 2020 Voice Online story about one of the first big demonstrations in the week following Floyd’s tragic death reflected the anger of protestors who defied strict lockdown regulations.
The report was accompanied by a dramatic photo of a young man crouching, his head in his hands in seeming despair and being comforted by a fellow protestor.
If the use of technology and social media was key to helping campaigners quickly organise mass protests it also empowered black people who, despite the recommendations of the Macpherson report, were still experiencing racial disparities in policing.
The 2010s saw the newspaper highlight an emerging trend – people using mobile devices to document racial disparities in policing in real time and post the resulting videos to social media platforms.
In some instances, this has led to officers being suspended or sacked.
Voice columnist Samuel Brooksworth drew attention to this trend.
“Let’s start off by saying racism isn’t getting worse, it’s simply getting captured” he wrote in the August 2020 edition of The Voice. “The Ahmaud Arbery murder (a 25-year-old Black man killed while jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia) shows the pivotal role that footage plays in bringing justice after what is basically murder in broad daylight. Incidents like this, which most black people can relate to, are finally also being filmed. No longer are these injustices simply things happening ‘in our heads’.”
That year, several stories featured in the pages of The Voice and online about stop and searches captured on mobile phone.
Among them was one involving charity founder Sayce Holmes-Lewis.
One morning in early May 2020 during lockdown, he was driving through south London on his way to deliver food to a friend who had recently lost a loved one to Covid 19 when he was pulled over by police officers. They suspected he was carrying drugs.
“After the officers pulled up alongside me they asked me to get out of the car” he told The Voice in an interview for its YouTube channel. “When I asked them what the reason was, one of the officers told me they were stopping me under the Section 23 Misuse of Drugs Act. I told them they had got the wrong person. At that point one of the officers became very aggressive telling me they needed to see what was in my car.”
Since being physically assaulted by a police officer as a 14-year-old he has been stopped and searched over 30 times.
This time however, he decided to do something different. After getting out of the car and agreeing to be searched, he took his phone and began filming the encounter with the officers.
“I just thought ‘enough is enough’” he said. “I just wanted to document what they were doing to me as an upstanding black man in the community.”
The resulting video went viral after Holmes-Lewis uploaded it online. He later received an apology from the Metropolitan Police.
Faced with increasingly strident criticisms of its policing of diverse communities in the wake of the huge outcry that followed George Floyd’s death, Met Commissioner Dick reached out to The Voice in July 2020 for an exclusive interview.
It was the same month that she had told MPs that she didn’t think institutional racism in the police force was not a significant systemic issue.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Voice, Commissioner Dick answered questions from community organisations such as StopWatch and Access UK and collated by the newspaper’s editorial team.
Asked if the force was institutionally racist Dick said she recognised that “racism has existed and does exist” but stopped short of admitting the force was institutionally racist.
Asked about ethnic disparity in Stop and Search, Commissioner Dick again acknowledged the black community’s concerns.
But added: “It would be a racist thing to withdraw police officers from an area which has both high violence and minority communities. We wouldn’t ever do that. We are trying to protect people.”
Following the interview, The Voice put the Commissioner’s responses to the community groups whose concerns it had shared with her.
A consensus quickly emerged, one that was reflected in the uncompromising headline that dominated the front page of the July 2020 edition.
‘The police continue to fail us’ it said. ‘Met chief says things are improving but where’s the evidence?’
The editorial continued: ‘…..systemic racism in policing is not just an American problem. We are still five times more likely to be stopped by police than white Britons, more likely to be Tasered and a disproportionate number of black people die after use of force or restraint by officers.’
Following that interview calls for policing reform continued.
Dick’s resignation as Met Police Commissioner in February 2022 following a series of racism and sexism scandals came as a relief for many who had been calling for a reform of policing.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who made it clear he had no confidence in her leadership in the wake of growing dissatisfaction with the Met, saw her departure as an opportunity for a fresh approach that would win the confidence of Londoners and minority communities.
“It’s clear that the only way to start to deliver the scale of the change required is to have new leadership right at the top of the Metropolitan Police” he told The Voice.
Throughout its 40-year history, The Voice has documented the anger that black people feel about racial disparities in policing.
But as it marks this key milestone the need for campaigning on this issue is as urgent as ever.
A March 2022 Voice investigation into policing found the need for the fresh approach that Khan talked about doesn’t stop with the Metropolitan Police.
The report found that Greater Manchester Police are also facing demands from black police officers, equality campaigners and the public, to get to grips with a culture of racism in its ranks.
Former Home Office criminologist and Manchester resident David Dalgleish told the newspaper: “The most recent data in Manchester shows that despite white British people representing over 80 per cent of the city-region’s population, they make up less than half of those stopped and searched by police.
“Greater Manchester’s latest stop and search figures will do little to assure people that much has changed since recording was introduced as a result of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.”
The greatest tragedy and failing of Her Majesty African and African Caribbean-heritage Subject in the last forty years is our collective failure as a people to produce an English Dr Martin Luther King junior or a Malcolm X and most grievous of all, a politically independent Advocacy Council of any kind.
Reading the Voice’s forty-year reporting of Police; Parliamentary, Public Institutional and Corporate, Broadsheet Reporters & Editors and Judicial refusal to acknowledge skin-colour prejudice; segregation and racism against Caribbean-heritage youth since the Brixton; Handsworth and Liverpool Protest in 1981, and honest Voice readers will conclude that the position of Her Majesty’s African-heritage Subjects in England continue to deteriorate in the last forty years; and we still have not created a dedicated Advocacy Council that is desperately required today.
Indeed, I believe the position of African-heritage Subjects in England in 2022 is worse than forty years ago, because our high profile African-Heritage Parliamentarians and celebrities appear to just want to copy and emulate all thing middle-class, liberal and Caucasian.
These middle-class African-heritage high profile people preach their Labour and Liberal Left-wing Politically Correct Marxist Creed, that offers no remedy for the skin-colour prejudice; segregation and racism experienced by African-heritage people; even in Labour circles and the Labour Party.
Reading this week’s Voice Newspaper’s “We are Forty,” one is immediately upset that high profile people who have betrayed African-heritage people for Social Status; Wealth and Royal Titles are reported as “black” heroes and heroine; people such as Baroness Amos, Lord Woolley, Bishop Sentamu, Rev Rose Hudson-Wilson are the reason why Her Majesty’s African-heritage Subjects are leaderless and have made little political progress in the last forty years.
Without leadership, the people perish. The betrayal by high profile African-heritage people is the reason why Her Majesty’s African-Heritage people are leaderless and we are declining and becoming insignificant as an identifiable “ethnic” minority people in England today.
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The Voice Newspaper is committed to celebrating black excellence, campaigning for positive change and informing the black community on important issues. Your financial contributions are essential to protect the future of the publication as we strive to help raise the profile of the black communities across the UK. Any size donation is welcome and we thank you for your continued support.
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