There has been fierce outcry in the wake of Chris Kaba’s death, after the police marksman who shot him – Martyn Blake – was acquitted of his murder.
But if you’re wondering why there is such an outpouring of grief, shock and emotion – after all, Kaba, it has since been revealed, was a “core member” of one of London’s most dangerous gangs and would have stood trial for attempted murder over a nightclub shooting – it’s because this was an entirely avoidable tragedy, both for his family and the police.
And to stop this happening again, we now need to take an uncomfortable look at the way the force – and society at large – treat young Black men.
That’s because the confrontation between the police and Kaba, 24, is symptomatic of a system in which Black men in the UK are set up to fail. I don’t for a moment condone Kaba’s attempt to ram his way out of the police blockade; or the gang violence in his criminal record. The officer who shot him said he feared for his life and his fellow officer’s safety (though he was later found to be unarmed).
But it is a system in which, according to 2022 figures, officers stop Black drivers 56 per cent more than white drivers (though those are the most recent figures we have, because the Met opted to stop recording that data a month after Kaba was shot).
The police are also four times more likely to use violence against Black people. This was illustrated in the case of Huugo Boateng, the 13-year-old boy who was chased down by police and threatened with Tasers while on a charity bike ride with his father. This happened because he matched the description of “Black man on a bike”. Can you imagine the police ever going out and threatening to Taser the first white boy they saw riding a bike?
So, regardless of what you think of Kaba’s case in particular, it would be wrong to pretend that this increased willingness on the part of the police to pursue and use force against Black people played no part in the story of how we got here.
But let’s step back further. Why are Black communities overpoliced in ways that make tragedies like this more likely? The previous government’s Beating Crime Plan reported the link between poverty, a lack of opportunity to escape poverty and turning to crime. Not only are Black households statistically the poorest in the country, but having a recognisably Black name on your CV makes it 80 per cent harder to get a job to escape poverty, according to Oxford University research.
That means racism in society creates racism in employment, which traps many Black people in poverty. Many young Black men therefore grow up in areas that are disproportionately policed by a police force with an institutional bias against Black people. Chris Kaba is just the most recent chapter in a long story.
But fixing this problem requires the political will to take Black people out of poverty and out of the crosshairs of the police – and it helps no-one to have Tory leadership hopefuls like Robert Jenrick trying to score political points over the Kaba case, calling Blake a “hero” and saying he did “nothing wrong”. The facts remain: regardless of Kaba’s previous criminal record, he was unarmed at the time of his death. And his family have lost a son.
Labour must do better to address the root causes that lead to the deaths of Black people on our streets, whether through gang violence or at the hands of the police – and that means looking closely at systemic racism and the consistent underfunding of deprived areas.
It means addressing targeted racial profiling and it means mandating that job applications be anonymised, so Black people have the exact same opportunities as everyone else. It means better police vetting and improving the culture within the force, to address the institutional problems laid bare in the Casey Report. How do you rebuild trust in our police system? By ensuring that Black people can trust the police to treat them fairly.
Officer Blake defended his decision to shoot Chris Kaba in the head by arguing that he feared Kaba would use his car to kill his fellow officers. But there is a serious conversation to be had about bias – and whether officers from a police force that was recently certified as “institutionally racist” is best placed to assess the danger posed by Black citizens.
But we’re coming in at the end of the story. As Kaba’s family have already implied, if you just focus on the shooting, you’re missing the point.
