The demand for justice is one that is made again and again by virtually every campaign responding to injustice. But what does justice actually mean in the context of state violence? And is it really possible to get any justice, especially in relation to deaths in police custody? That was the topic of discussion in one of the morning sessions at the 2014 conference. Representatives and supporters from various campaigns spoke about the seemingly neverending succession of obstacles the state places in the way of those pursuing justice for their loved ones – but also of the inexhaustible determination of campaigners to continue their fight.
Few people know more than Marcia Rigg about the lengths the state will go to in order to avoid being made accountable for its actions. Her brother, Sean, died in Brixton police station in 2008 – and Marcia and the rest of her family have been battling ever since to find out what happened to him. She started the meeting by declaring that ‘justice should be possible, but the system makes it impossible’. Holding up a poster with the names of the 3180 people who have died in police custody since 1969, she reminded the packed room that not a single state agent has ever been made accountable for any one of those deaths in that time. Marcia argued that for most of the families who have suffered such a loss at the hands of the state the main priority was getting a conviction in the courts - seeing the officers responsible for their loved ones’ death sent to jail, just as any regular member of the public would be if they had killed someone. This was why the forthcoming trial of Anthony Long, the former firearms officer accused of the shooting of Azelle Rodney, was so important – it was a genuinely unprecendented event.
In Sean’s case, serious obstacles were placed in the way of such a scenario right from the beginning. The initial IPCC investigation into Sean’s death (a ‘Mickey Mouse report’, as Marcia put it) found nothing dubious about the surrounding circumstances – a conclusion that was later both rejected by the inquest jury and overturned by an independent review. Marcia spoke of having to fight for everything, from CCTV footage which went ‘missing’ or getting an independent post-mortem. Most bizarrely of all, Marcia recently had to go to court to prevent one of the officers involved from avoiding investigation by leaving the police to become a church minister. She had only found out that he intended to leave the force by chance. One audience member argued that stopping the officer retiring was a tremendous victory for justice campaigns in general, as it set a precedent for future cases, depriving the police of their final ‘get out of jail free card’.
The next speaker was Liberty Louise, representing the Justice for Leon Briggs campaign. Leon died in Luton police station after being detained by police under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act in November 2013. Once again, the task of finding out what had happened to him was hampered from the beginning. Liberty explained that they knew the ambulance that had been called for Leon was turned away by police – but when the campaigners tried to get hold of the ambulance record (made as a matter of course after every ambulance call), the record had mysteriously gone missing. She said that the IPCC investigation into the circumstances of Leon’s death had taken so long – at a cost of £24,000 a month, including the suspension of officers - that even the Police and Crime Commissioner for Bedfordshire had condemned it for being ‘expensive’ and ‘slow’.
Liberty argued that despite everyone being supposedly equal in the eyes of the law, it was clear that there were different rules applied to police officers involved in a death than to anyone else. This even applied to the terminology used to describe the causes of death itself – she had heard people talk of ‘death-in-custody syndrome’, or death from ‘excited delirium’, terms with no basis in medical science whatsoever. ‘Look out for words like that,’ she said, ‘because they want to make it sound like the deaths had nothing to with restraint, that they ‘just happened’ out of nowhere.’ She raised the point of how often deaths in custody involved people with mental health problems, and that a police station was not a fit place for their care. The Justice for Leon campaign had also pushed for body cameras to be worn by police officers, so that the circumstances of an arrest would always be on film. This raised some debate, because police still retained control over when the camera would be turned on. One audience member said that she had recently been to a police public order conference, in which officers had celebrated the fact that the footage filmed by the cameras was ‘grainy’ and of poor quality, because it meant it would be harder for the video to contradict the police’s ‘recollections’ of an event, particular at large protests.
The third speaker was Matt Bolton, a PhD student looking at justice campaigns. He spoke about his research into the Hillsborough campaign, focusing on how evidence in the 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel Report showing the mass alteration of police statements was treated as being ‘shocking’ by the press and parliament, yet had long been known about, not only by the families, but by the judges and politicians involved in various inquires and reviews of the disaster. Justice, he argued, was not an end point, but a process and a constant struggle to force the state to recognise the reality of its own actions. The state deems vast swathes of people unworthy of recognition, both of who they actually were (rather than the ‘yob’ or ‘gangster’ stereotypes it pretends they were) and what had happened to them. The strength of campaigns like the one for Hillsborough was that they made that refusal of recognition impossible, and ensured that connections could be drawn between what happened in 1989 and similar events today.
Liberty Louse agreed that it was crucial to see the patterns in all of these cases – that what the campaigns coming together showed was how the state acted in the same way, again and again. Audience members made further links with their personal experiences of cases as disparate (and yet depressingly similar) as the trial of the Guildford Four, the current prosecution of the G4S guards accused of the manslaughter of Jimmy Mubenga, and the way police had dealt with the Rotherham sex abuse scandal. Marcia Rigg summed up the meeting by underlining that justice is found in the process, in the fight itself - and that the change which has already happened, as well as that which is still so desperately needed, can only come about as a result of the continued struggle of the campaigns themselves.
This is a report from the workshop on deaths in custody held at Sunday’s conference
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