Our die-in was about solidarity with black people suffering police brutality

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/12/die-in-solidarity-black-people-police-brutality

Version 0 of 1.

The civil rights activist Assata Shakur said: “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

She is right. That is why we, the London Black Revolutionaries, use direct action to bring about change in our community. One of those actions was the protest that took place on Wednesday at the Westfield White City shopping centre, which we organised in collaboration with other black activist groups.

We came together to protest not only at the death of Eric Garner in New York but at the injustice of the legal system that did not prosecute the police officer involved with his death. We were also protesting over the hundreds of other black people killed all over the world by police officers who often kill with impunity. For instance, in the UK, there has never been a successful prosecution of an officer for the death of a person under custody.

People asked why we would protest about an “American” issue. The answer is that this is not something that happens only in the US. Black people suffer at the hands of people in authority all over the world. This includes the UK – no matter how much many people would like to pretend that we’re a post-racial society.

In the US, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Jones, Trayvon Martin and countless others have lost their lives. Here, we have Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Christopher Alder, and many more. More than 1,500 people have died in the UK during or after police contact since 1990, and 147 of them were black, according to the charity Inquest.

So we exercised our right to protest, which is being eroded more and more by the use of kettling and disproportionate reactions from police. Is this because the government is increasingly afraid of what a free and dissatisfied public could do to alter the status quo?

We protested peacefully, and many of us were arrested as a result. More than 70 people, mostly young black women, were held overnight on charges of violent disorder. Unless being loud is automatically violence, we believe this is a charge without basis.

Those arrested included several teenagers, legal observers and one NUJ-registered journalist: all innocent. We believe these protesters were arrested because we are a young, black-led organisation that fights for justice.

This reaction to what we view as a totally peaceful action highlights the parallels between policing in the US and the UK. Eric Garner, an unarmed man, died in a chokehold during an arrest by the US police. It seems that no matter how defenceless you are, you can still die tragically; and no matter how peaceful young black demonstrators are, they can still be prosecuted with life-changing charges.

The message is clear: the home secretary and the Metropolitan police will not allow the galvanisation of an active movement against racism, police brutality and wider social and economic problems in the UK.