FEATURE: Campaigning against police brutality The Voice reflects on our coverage of policing over 40 years. By Vic Motune TheVoiceAt40 Voice40 longread
Protesters took to the streets after Colin Roach’s controversial death in custody while he was under the watch of the Met Police
In the 1970s and early 80s politicians, senior police chiefs and other leading public figures regularly made openly racist statements under the guise of ‘telling it like it is’. It regularly carried reports of abuses of police power which included black people being brutally assaulted after raids on their homes by officers in search of drugs or stolen goods, racially motivated stop and search tactics and wrongful arrests and detentions.
As news of Roach’s death quickly spread, The Voice provided a platform for his family and the black community who were suspicious of the official explanation of his death and accused the police of a cover-up.The Voice was the first publication to interview his family who strongly rejected the official explanation of his death. And an exclusive investigation published in its January 22 edition revealed police and coroners reports which raised the prospect that Roach’s death was not suicide.
Williams told The Voice that during her interrogation a plain clothes detective claimed to have shot Roach after a protracted struggle inside the police station after he refused to give evidence to the police. Following the 1981 Brixton riots the Scarman Report, which resulted from an official inquiry, sought to understand the causes of the violence.
On September 28 1985 Brixton resident Cherry Groce was shot and seriously injured after police officers raided her house searching for her son Michael. One woman who spoke to The Voice said: “The police have no respect for our homes, they think they can just drop in at any time. I get confused now when I see the police because I don’t know whether they have come to protect me or kill me.”
In its October 26 edition of that year The Voice used its front page to call for a Day of Action following Jarret’s death and Groce’s shooting. Despite the Met’s continued emphasis on disproportionately stopping and searching black youths or the fact that racial attacks on black people rarely led to convictions it was the black community that was consistently blamed for tense relations with police officers.
Some observers at the time claimed the move was an attempt at damage limitation. However, the row between Condon and The Voice escalated when, in January 1996, the newspaper ran an investigation into Black deaths in custody following the death of music promoter Brian Douglas. The story was highly critical of the Met.
As with so many other issues, the objections of the Met Police Commissioner and other senior police leaders did little to dissuade The Voice from continuing to campaign about the deaths of black people in police custody.In 2014 friends and family of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man who was shot and killed by police in Tottenham, north London gathered at a vigil outside Tottenham Police station.
The accompanying story revealed the depth of pain of the Lawrence family. His father Neville told The Voice he wanted to see a return of the death penalty for the killers. ‘You just don’t give a damn’ was the headline of The Voice’s report of the meeting in its May 11 edition. But the case failed in 1996. The charges against Jamie Acourt and David Norris were dropped before the trial for lack of evidence. The three remaining suspects, Neil Acourt, Luke Knight and Dobson were later formally acquitted.
“I’m glad that it’s a hard hitting report” Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott told the newspaper. “But I’m disappointed that nobody has lost their job or been disciplined about it. I think Condon should have gone.” The double jeopardy legal principle had been dropped in 2005 allowing the killers to stand trial for the second time for the same crime.
However the special edition also included the results of an exclusive Voice online reader survey which revealed that 83 percent of participants felt that race relations or policing had not got better in the wake of Macpherson. In the days immediately after Floyd’s death, The Voice’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages quickly signposted readers to information about planned demonstrations across the UK campaign while also posting news stories, comment pieces and video footage on Voice Online.
The 2010s saw the newspaper highlight an emerging trend – people using mobile devices to document racial disparities in policing in real time and post the resulting videos to social media platforms. Voice columnist Samuel Brooksworth drew attention to this trend. Since being physically assaulted by a police officer as a 14-year-old he has been stopped and searched over 30 times.
It was the same month that she had told MPs that she didn’t think institutional racism in the police force was not a significant systemic issue. But added: “It would be a racist thing to withdraw police officers from an area which has both high violence and minority communities. We wouldn’t ever do that. We are trying to protect people.”
The editorial continued: ‘…..systemic racism in policing is not just an American problem. We are still five times more likely to be stopped by police than white Britons, more likely to be Tasered and a disproportionate number of black people die after use of force or restraint by officers.’ as Met Police Commissioner in February 2022 following a series of racism and sexism scandals came as a relief for many who had been calling for a reform of policing.
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