As in 2011, anti-racist protests are being criminalised – while nothing is done to address injustices for black communities
Last week marked a decade since an undercover Metropolitan police officer, known only by his codename V53, shot and killed Mark Duggan, an unarmed 29-year-old father, following a “hard stop” on Ferry Lane in Tottenham. The disturbances that ensued constituted the most serious unrest for a generation. In the four nights that followed Duggan’s killing, police recorded a total of 5,175 individual riot-related offences, 300 police officers injured and five people killed.
Immediately, politicians from all sides were united in condemnation, swiftly foreclosing the possibility of reading the unrest as political. “Criminality pure and simple,” was prime minister David Cameron’s verdict. “The only cause of a crime is a criminal,” stated the then home secretary, Theresa May. The unrest was “not a genuine outlet of political angst, nor a reaction to police conduct”, according to the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, but “simply criminality on a devastating scale”. That framing licensed the harshest crackdown on public demonstrations in public memory.
