Last Monday I watched a BBC documentary on Mark Duggan. I think people with an objective mind, who watched that documentary would conclude that the Metropolitan Police Service have some serious questions to answer in relation to the circumstances surrounding the shooting of Mark Duggan.
Mark Duggan was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, North London, England, on 4th August 2011. He was only a 29 years old.
I call it murder, because that is what it is, or at least that’s what I believe the evidence points to.
Let me explain.
I suspect there is an extraordinary strong likelihood, that the Metropolitan Police Trident Squad used an active criminal informer to entrap Mark Duggan.
Kevin Hutchinson, the man who it is said supplied the gun, had an extensive and long record of serious criminality.
Following the inquest, a Metropolitan Police officer was seriously disciplined for failing to arrest Hutchinson for pistol whipping a man in a hairdressing shop, weeks before he is said to have supplied that gun to Mark Duggan.
I have witnessed how the Metropolitan Police Service handles active criminal informers and how they are deployed on behalf of the police to entice, entrap and aggravate local criminal networks.
Such activity means the number of black, paid police informers, which was reported to me in 1999, as being over 10,000 registered individuals, must have grown exponentially in the last 17 years, since that figure was reported.
Mr Lee Meta Jasper, Co-Chair of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts (BARAC) UK
The Metropolitan Police has a long and disgraceful record of employing criminals to set up and criminalise anyone, that they have determined, regardless of the evidence in their possession, should be shot by them or others or falsely imprisoned in jail.
The Metropolitan Police recognise that they have no effective relationship with London’s black community, and as a result they have defaulted to their standard modus operandi, which relies upon criminal informants.
The police would rather develop their relationship with criminals rather than invest in the development of effective community relations, based on non-discriminatory policing and the rule of law.
The community trust dividend, accorded them in the aftermath of the publication of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report, has long been squandered by a police force that cannot resist the pervasive culture of racism that infects almost every aspect of operational policing delivery in the capital.
The Met’s involvement in the documentary was no doubt intended to bring to an end the strong speculation within the black community about the circumstances surrounding Mark Duggan’s death.
In my view, it did precisely the opposite and reinforced in the public’s mind that their reported version of events was hugely inaccurate and inconsistent.
This is why we need multiracial juries on cases where racism is alleged to have been a significant factor. Majority all white juries are just as affected by societal racism, prejudice and bigotry as are the police.
In some senses there is a common culture of racism shared among many members of the white British public and white professionals in a number of public services.
None of these is as pernicious and dangerous as the culture of racism that exists within the police service and the British criminal justice system.
That is why in my view, we have not seen the last of major civil disturbances in the United Kingdom. The issue of the shooting of Mark Duggan will remain hugely contested as a contemporary example of police racism, corruption and criminality.
By Lee Meta Jasper,
Co-Chair of Black Activists Rising Against the Cuts (BARAC) UK
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The AfroNews
