“There is no justice. Just us.”
A quote attributed to the legendary comedian Richard Pryor.
Fans of the novelist Terry Pratchett will recognise it from his 1991 offering, Reaper Man.
A year previously, however, it was coined by British hip hop group the Ruthless Rap Assassins.
Regardless of who was first, the words continue to ring painfully true for Black and Asian Brits.
Take the family of Oladeji ‘Deji’ Omishore, who died following contact with two Metropolitan Police Officers on June 4.
He’d been tasered multiple times on London’s Chelsea Bridge in harrowing footage widely shared on social media.
The Met initially insisted they’d been called to reports of a man clutching a screwdriver, causing a disturbance. It turned out vulnerable, 41-year-old Omishore had a firelighter and was suffering a mental health crisis.
You’d think the police watchdog might want to investigate the officers involved in the incident. Not so, as things stand. Instead they are looking into the circumstances with the officers at this stage being treated as witnesses.
The family of Olympic athlete Ricardo dos Santos will understand that frustration, albeit to a lesser extent.
The 27-year-old complained last week that he’d been continually pulled over since the high-profile stop two years ago that resulted in officers facing gross misconduct proceedings.
On the latest occasion, Dos Santos used video footage on social media to illustrate his claim that one officer had brandished his baton “out of frustration ready to smash the glass” after not knowing how to open his car door.
They thought he’d been using his mobile phone.
They backed down after accepting they were wrong.
Might the watchdog want to look at that? Nope. Scotland Yard made a voluntary referral to the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC), but the complaint has been sent back.
Perhaps the IOPC might want to look into the police handling of 24-year-old Owami Davies, missing for seven weeks until last week when she was discovered safe and well, thanks to a member of the public.
Police, it turned out, had come into contact with her on the day she was reported missing, only to take no action.
Last week they offered an apology for initially releasing the wrong picture in the search to find her.
Surely the IOPC would want to take a peek at that?
Nope. Instead the Met will be allowed to mark their own homework with an “open and transparent” review to see if improvements can be made for future cases.
All this, remember, in just one week.
And then we had Alex Beresford’s ITV documentary on the disproportionate numbers of innocent Black and Asian people stopped and searched on the UK’s streets without further action or arrests.
As he pointed out, it is a tactic leaving many young men with trauma and a lasting distrust of the people they could (and should) be working with to get knives, guns and drugs off our streets.
Can you see now what Pryor, Pratchett and the Ruthless Rap Assassins were driving at now?
