Great post
@Heam44.
I don’t normally like weighing in on this sort of stuff as it’s such a delicate subject, there’s real grief involved for the families and none of us know the circumstances or people involved. Plus this is a fun football messageboard.
But - I’m not having these characterisations of a “innocent, unarmed father-to-be” who was beloved in his community. Be real, tell the truth about who the guy was. It shouldn’t diminish the tragedy if your real issue is out of control policing. If it does diminish the tragedy, isn’t it hypocritical not to say “the guy was a gangster, doing gangster stuff when this happened, but his parents still loved him and the police should face consequences if this wasn’t lawful”? Why hide the truth of it if you feel this will get less sympathy from people, aren’t you demonstrating in the first place to get the truth?
The circumstances and context are important, and neither party involved should hide facts which don’t suit their narrative. Same with the death of the guy which sparked the London riots, who achieved martyr status. That wasn’t the police deciding to execute a young black man for no reason, it was on the surface a similar situation to this - police chase of a known, pretty high level gangster with a very high suspicion of firearms involvement.
It’s also disappointing when people try to drive a false equivalence with the serious issues America has with racism and guns which sparked the BLM movement.
The police in this country, for all their myriad faults, simply do not go around gunning people down in cold blood, regardless of their race. There’s always so many mitigating factors, as outlined in Heam’s earlier post. Which, when you look past the headline you start to understand how the police involved made the calculations to pull the trigger as a worst case, split second last resort. Which, whether it’s right or wrong, and it’s unquestionably sad and tragic, has life-changing consequences for everyone involved. I’m 100% sure they would never do it lightly, in this country.
Even with Jean Charles de Menezes, the most egregious example of a police shooting in the UK that I can think of. When you put that in context and read about how that situation panned out - failed Tube bombing the day before, armed police on maximum high alert on public transport, mistaken identification of a guy with backpack as one of the suspects, runs from police and jumps ticket gate running towards packed train - you start to understand how the calculations they made were actually reasonable. Incredibly tragic in this case, because he truly was innocent of everything, but reasonable.
I was also curious about Chris Kaba from this thread, so googled the rap/drill band 67 he was in, and the first lyrics of the first song were about how the rapper stabbed someone in the face over and over again, it was disgusting.
Of course a lot of this is YouTube bravado. Of course, no one in the world deserves to be killed by police for the music they make, or the lifestyle they lead, or the previous convictions they have, or even for running from a police stop whilst being wanted for a firearms offence the day before or anything. It’s horribly sad. You play stupid games and you win stupid prizes, but no-one ever deserves that prize.
But let’s not make these people out to be angels and martyrs, they are far from it. Let’s not make out like we’re the USA because we’re far, far from it. Also let’s not make out that the Met police are saints, because they’re also far from it and institutional racism is a massive issue down there both for trust and controlling crime - it has a compounding effect with only negative consequences.
Sometimes I think people try too hard to draw parallels between this kind of thing and the police shootings in the US to be able to align with the BLM movement that everyone knows and understands. It’s a vitally important movement and the US is disgraceful on this issue, as it is on anything to do with guns. Totally out of control and tragic. But it’s not like that here, never has been. Shame, I normally quite like Zara Sultana as well, but she’s backing the wrong horse here.