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Line of Duty really is that show
Highlighting the murders of journalists Daphne Caruana Galizia and Jill Dando, Operation Yewtree on child sexual exploitation and highlighting institutional racism (Christopher Lawrence) which is based on Stephen Lawrence and Christopher Alder.
The black former soldier choked to death on the floor of a British police station in 1998
The black former soldier choked to death in handcuffs on the floor of a British police station in 1998. CCTV footage taken from the police station showed the 37 year-old father of two gasping for air as officers chatted and joked around him. It took 11 minutes for him to stop breathing. An inquest found he was unlawfully killed but no-one has been held accountable for his death. Farhana Haider speaks to Janet Alder about her long fight to get justice for her brother. Photo:Christopher Alder an ex paratrooper who died in a police station in Hull on 1 April 1998.
Listen here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszmpl
The story of Christopher Alder's death is full of shocking twists ands turns
In 1998 my brother, Christopher Alder, died in police custody surrounded by officer from Humberside Police.
I know we’ve all given a lot this year, and the year just keeps getting worse. Every day there’s something terrible that has happened and good people I want to support, but this...
The injustice of what happened to Christopher Alder and just family is breathtaking.
In the words of Janet, his sister:
In 1998 my brother, Christopher Alder, died in police custody surrounded by officer from Humberside Police. An inquest followed but despite a finding of unlawful killing at the Inquest that followed to date nobody has been held to account for his death...
On 25 November 2000, over two years following his death, we were finally allowed to put his body to rest, or so we thought...
On 5 November 2011, 11 years after we believed to have buried him, his body was discovered in a mortuary in Hull. For 11 years he laid, wrapped in numerous body bags, in the mortuary. Instead of my beloved brother, father and son we had buried a 77 year old lady.
CrowdJustice raises money to fund lawyers. Please help Janet fund her legal challenge to the inadequate investigations that have held no one to account.
Surveillance operation targeting sister of former paratrooper 'not properly authorised'.
Surveillance operation targeting sister of former paratrooper ‘not properly authorised’.
The sister of a former paratrooper who was unlawfully killed in a police station has described how she felt “terrorised by the state” after it was revealed that up to 14 police officers were deployed to spy on her. The police operation targeting Janet Alder, which included surveillance and allegedly at least one attempt to eavesdrop on a conversation with her barrister, was not properly…
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Christopher Alder
On the 1st of April 1998, Christopher Ibikunle Alder, a black British man of Nigerian descent, trainee computer programmer and ex-paratrooper, who served in the Falklands War, was the victim of an assault outside a nightclub, suffering a haematoma to the rear of his head.
Having been taken to the Hull Royal Infirmary, staff there said that his behaviour was “extremely troublesome”, likely as a result of his injuries. He was then escorted under arrest from the hospital to the Queen’s Gardens Police Station, Kingston upon Hull by two officers in order to prevent a breach of the peace.
The video above shows what happened in the minutes after his arrival at the police station. You can hear the officers discussing amongst themselves that Alder is simply faking illness. The section which is fast forwarded on the CCTV footage is believed to have shown officers making monkey noises around the dying man.
A post mortem indicated that his head injury alone would not have killed him.
In 2000, a coroner’s jury declared that Alder was unlawfully killed.
Five officers were put on trial charged with manslaughter and misconduct in public office.
They were all acquitted by order of the judge to the jury.
Read more here.
11 years later, it came to light that the body that was buried at Alder’s funeral was actually the body of a 77 year old woman.
I’d never heard this story until Akala brought it up on BBC Free Speech in 2013.
I noticed that there only two posts about this story on tumblr, and with all that is happening in the U.S. at the moment, I thought it would be positive to increase the level of exposure on this story.
When fusilier, Lee Rigby, was murdered on the street in 2013, the media shit storm that ensued was phenomenal. Of course this is a tragic story as well. However, although many of you will have heard Rigby’s name, I’m sure many of you, like myself, have never heard Alder’s name mentioned. Will Rigby’s name be brought up in years to come? Yes. Will Alder’s? No.
Yes, I will accept that the issues are far more severe in America at the moment, but this serves as a reminder that, corruption and racial and cultural prejudices are apparent all over the world.
Discrimination is a worldwide problem.
My love goes out to all the families in the world, especially in America, who are have been, or are victims of racial profiling, and racially motivated violence.
#BlackLivesMatter
Singing Monks from Italy Top the Charts With "Benedicta"
Singing Monks from Italy Top the Charts With “Benedicta”
Choirmaster Father Basil Nixen conducts The Monks of Norcia for recording of ‘Benedicta’ with Father Cassian Folsom, right, and Brother Ignatius of Indonesia. (Photo: De Montfort Music) The ancient city of Norcia in central Italy is known for its wild boar sausages and black truffles, but now it’s known for something else: Its singing monks. (more…)
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Britons following the news of protests against police killings of black people in the US should not feel too smug about the situation in the UK.
Not for the first time, our outrage at American racism goes hand in hand with complacency about Britain’s own history of institutional racism and its manifestations in police violence.
The surging protest movement in the US centres upon two cases of black men killed by the police: Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who was shot dead by police in August, and Eric Garner, the Staten Island man killed in July in a chokehold by New York Police Department officers, who had arrested him on suspicion of selling cigarettes.
In both cases, anger has been fuelled by the failure of the system to prosecute the officers involved and the callous indifference with which officers stood around while a man lay dying or dead – in Michael Brown’s case, his body lay uncovered on the street for over four hours. Together, Michael Brown and Eric Garner – along with the dozens of other recent similar cases circulated on social media – have come to symbolise the disposability of working-class black lives.
Yet it is not hard to find similar scenes playing out on the streets of Britain. Take, for example, Azelle Rodney, a 24-year-old black man who was killed by the police in north London in April 2005. He was shot six times – in the arm, the back and four times in the head – within two seconds of police officers ramming the vehicle in which he was traveling. His body was then left on the pavement for sixteen hours. Like Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Azelle Rodney was unarmed.
As with Michael Brown, after Rodney’s death, police sought to justify their actions by presenting him as a demonic criminal. Legal powers granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) were also used to keep secret details of the police operation, hampering a proper inquest into his death. After nearly ten years of campaigning by Azelle Rodney’s mother, Susan Alexander, an officer is now facing a murder charge for the shooting.
Millions of people have watched the video of Eric Garner being placed in a chokehold on the streets of Staten Island, New York City. A second video showing the aftermath of the chokehold is in some ways more disturbing. It shows how, for seven minutes, Garner lay apparently unconscious on the pavement while police officers mill around and make no attempt to revive him. As Harry Siegel wrote in the New York Daily News: ‘Had Garner been treated with basic human dignity after he was violently, and needlessly, taken down, he might not be dead.’
Fewer people have watched the video of Christopher Alder dying on the floor of the Queen’s Road police station in Hull, as officers stand around him laughing and joking. Alder was a 37-year-old father of two, a trainee computer programmer and an ex-paratrooper. After receiving a head injury during a fight at a nightclub, he was taken to Hull Royal Infirmary, where doctors claimed he was troublesome and discharged him, deciding the lump on his head was not serious. He refused to leave and was arrested. On arrival at the police station, he was unresponsive and officers dragged him from a police van by his arms, laying him face down in the charge room and not bothering to pull up his jeans, which had fallen down as they dragged him.
CCTV footage of the twelve minutes Christopher Alder lay on the floor of the custody suite shows that no officer checked him or questioned him, as he lay gasping for breath, with his trousers and pants around his ankles, hands cuffed behind him. Instead, five police officers stood around making comments such as: ‘He’s as right as rain, this is just a show’, ‘He kept doing a dying swan act falling off the trolley’, and even making monkey noises.
At the inquest into the 1998 death, the five police officers declined to answer 150 potentially incriminating questions. Unusually, the jury recorded a unanimous verdict of unlawful killing. But a 2002 prosecution of the five officers for manslaughter and misconduct in public office ended in an acquittal at the judge’s direction. Most of the pathologists who were instructed in the case agreed that the position he was placed in caused asphyxia and, although they did not agree as to whether this caused his death, it is clear that Christopher Alder was denied at least the chance of life.
There is no video record of the death of Shiji Lapite in east London in December 1994. But it is clear that he died in similar circumstances to Eric Garner. A Nigerian asylum seeker, 34-year-old Lapite was stopped by Stoke Newington police for acting suspiciously and arrested on unspecified drugs charges – though no drugs were ever found in his possession. A struggle occurred, during which Lapite was injured. He collapsed and died after being placed in a police van.
The post-mortem found that the bones in Lapite’s voice-box had been broken and he had died of asphyxiation, suggesting that police officers had used a choke-hold. The inquest into the death recorded a verdict of unlawful killing but the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to proceed with a prosecution of the officers involved.
Eric Garner’s last words – ‘I can’t breathe’ – have become a slogan of the new protest movement that has swept US cities. It describes not just the last minutes of Garner’s life but the suffocation of an entire people by a racist society. ‘I can’t breathe,’ were also reported to be the last words of Jimmy Mubenga as three security guards restrained him at the back of a British Airways aircraft on the runway at Heathrow Airport in October 2010. The guards were employed by security firm G4S, which had been contracted to deport Jimmy Mubenga to Angola; they are currently facing manslaughter charges.
In a forthcoming Institute of Race Relations report, entitled Dying for Justice, over 500 cases are documented in which a black or Minority Ethnic person dies as a result of interaction with police officers, immigration officers, or other state officials. Yet the last time a police officer was convicted of criminal charges for involvement in the death of someone in their custody was in 1971.
There are significant differences between the criminal justice systems in the US and Britain. But in both countries, you are more likely to be killed by the police if you are black. According to statistics compiled by the INQUEST campaign group, between 1996 and 2011 there were 643 deaths in England and Wales that occurred in the custody of police officers; 110 were from BME communities – 17 per cent of the total. This means that black and minority eEthnic people were approximately twice as likely as whites to die in police custody over this period. An analysis by ProPublica focusing on young men in the US found that, from 2010 to 2012, young black males aged 15 to 19 were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by the police than white males of that age.
In the US, a new generation of young campaigners has developed its own repertoire of protest – such as die-ins at major street junctions and highly mobile demonstrations that spontaneously plot a path through cities. The use of such tactics is spreading to England.
Over the last two weeks, groups such as London Black Revs have organised solidarity protests in London to support the growing US movement against police racist violence. These protests have been joined by longer established campaigners such as the United Families and Friends Campaign, an umbrella group of families of those killed in police and prison custody. Those families know only too well that Britain has its own Eric Garners and Michael Browns.
