The institutional racism of the police repeatedly goes unchecked, but united mass protest is the strongest weapon against the racism of the British state, argues Shabbir Lakha 

Two years after Chris Kaba was shot to death, the Metropolitan Police officer responsible, Martyn Blake, was cleared of murder at the Old Bailey on Monday. The verdict has reaffirmed for many that there isn’t much justice for black people in the justice system. 

Hundreds of people gathered outside the central London Crown Court with just a few hours’ notice to register their outrage and to express their determination to keep fighting for real justice. Protesters heard from Chris Kaba’s grieving family and the organisers of the justice campaign, and chanted ‘No justice, no peace’. 

Since the acquittal, the principal coverage of the case in the mainstream media has typically been focused on revelations of Chris Kaba’s criminal history, as if that justifies the use of lethal force against him. 

The Tories and the Metropolitan Police Federation have turned their fire onto the CPS for ever pursuing the prosecution of Martyn Blake. But behind the racist vitriol and the Met Police chief Mark Rowley’s self-congratulation that his officers are not above the law, the reality of institutional racism is laid bare. 

According to the CPS, out of 26 investigations they’ve carried out into fatal police shootings over the last decade, this was only the second case to have been prosecuted. The vast majority of police officers that have killed or been implicated in the deaths of people in their custody, overwhelmingly black people, have never faced any kind of prosecution. 

Following Blake’s acquittal, the media has paraded the exonerated police officer from the only other police murder trial in the last decade, Tony Long, to explain why it is legitimate for armed police officers to use lethal force. Long shot Azelle Rodney six times at point-blank range within one second of contact. An inquiry found that the killing was unlawful, but that fact was withheld from the jury who acquitted him during the murder trial. 

Institutional racism 

The Metropolitan Police has repeatedly been found to be institutionally racist, from the Macpherson report after the killing of Stephen Lawrence (where the police sent undercover officers to spy on the justice campaign) to, more recently, the Casey report following Wayne Couzens’ abduction and murder of Sarah Everard. 

It is abundantly clear: from the over-policing of working-class black people, the use of stop and search, the only recently scrapped gangs matrix, the strip searching of black children in schools, the unearthed vile racist messages officers send to each other in WhatsApp groups, and the killing of too many black people to list. 

Chris Kaba’s criminal history, like that of Azelle Rodney or Mark Duggan or anyone else, is irrelevant. Martyn Blake shot Chris Kaba in his forehead while his car was boxed in by the police. This is not an isolated incident. The innocence of the victim, like Oladeji Omishore or Jean Charles de Menezes, hasn’t stopped the police using lethal force before. 

This is a question not of individual biases among cops, nor is it simply a question of the training officers receive. It is a fundamental question of the role the police play in society and the authority that is afforded to them. It is not one of public safety but of maintaining a class-based order. It necessitates the concentration of the oppression against working class people, black people, women and LGBT people built into the system within their ranks. 

This is something to remember when the police think that they have any legitimate authority in deciding what placards or chants on a Palestine protest are racist or not, or which protesters are a threat to public safety. We haven’t forgotten the Met Police’s own advice to women in the capital to flee from police and ‘flag down a bus’ because the officers in their ranks are the threat. 

This case is a reminder of the structural and institutional racism in this country, and what we must do to combat it. And our best hope of doing so is through mass united action. That the CPS even pursued Blake’s conviction was undoubtedly a result of their gauge of ‘public interest’ in the aftermath of the mass Black Lives Matter protests, and the immediate mobilisations of thousands calling for justice for Chris Kaba. 

It was a positive sign to see many on the emergency protest outside the Old Bailey were wearing keffiyehs and a number of them I recognised to be people who have been newly politicised in the last year of opposing the genocide in Gaza. The Palestine movement is an anti-racist movement and joining together opposition to genocidal Israeli racism and the racism of the British state is how we can build the kind of movements we need to win real justice and real liberation. 

Join the UFFC and SUTR protests this Saturday in London.