Apparently Brixton Bid been going around warning businesses to shut because there will be riots or something to do with this shooting.
Anyone know any more?
So much knee jerk reaction. It’s embarrassing.
I'd rather not get into it until we know for certain what happened. But it seems a lot of people are already making big assumptions, so here are a few things I would consider.
The police say there was a car chase, which means they had asked him to pull over but he wouldn't. That alone is a crime for which you can be jailed. So it's highly suspicious if you do it....you could be trying to get away with something more serious.
The police also say his vehicle registration was linked by ANPR to a gun incident. If that's true (and it can't be faked) they were right to ram him (which they are trained to do) and to draw their guns in the expectation that he may have had a gun. They would have been in fear for their lives. Stopping a firearms suspect in a car is one of the most dangerous things they do.
This happened at night in a side street, and the car windscreen was almost certainly slightly tinted, because that's standard for modern cars. So visibility was bad. So it's very easy for an officer, when seeing the suspect raise a phone or something, to mistake it for a gun. In these circumstances (failure to stop, ramming, officers with guns drawn, bad visibility, ANPR link to firearms) it's virtually suicidal to be picking up an object and moving your hands. Makes no difference what race you are. You're begging to be shot.
I hate to say all this....a young unarmed man has been shot to death. Some will say he brought it on himself but I know that young black men are right to be scared of the police. If they are stopped they might well be fitted up and/or beaten up and/or die in custody. If I was them I wouldn't stop in a side street, I'd drive slowly, with my hazard lights on (to indicate compliance) to somewhere busy, full of witnesses, for my own protection. Then I'd pull over and sit still.
But maybe he panicked. Maybe he was involved with firearms and threw his gun out of the window during the chase. Maybe the officer panicked. Maybe the ANPR hit was a typo or a glitch. Maybe the car just happened to be seen on video near somebody else's gun crime.
Even if it comes out that he was involved with guns, the vast majority of the black community will say the police are lying, and his death will be added to the tally of murders by racist police. The mistrust will be even deeper and this kind of death will become even more likely to happen.
I don't think relations between the police and the black community will ever recover from all the injustices of the last 50 years. It will just get worse and worse. The only solution is for half the Met to be black. That will never happen.
So much conjecture here. He could have… he might have… if so and so then such and such…. Looks like you’re trying to justify your prejudices to me.
he was a known member of 67 gang who had only just got out of jail, clearly failed to stop when asked and they have witnesses saying he was trying to ram police cars/officers. I don't think the Met will have an issue defending their officers. he was supposedly one of the most 'active' members of a gang who collectively have been sent to jail for large county lines drug operations and multiple murders, stabbings, beatings, so I have trouble with painting him as innocent victim.
Yes the 67 do horrible stuff. And some of them have been caught convicted and sent down. I don’t know what Chris Kaba was sent down for. He did his time and was released. You are making the assumption that because he was previously convicted he remained a dangerous and nasty person. How about the possibility that he decided he didn’t want to stay in the gang, found love, had a child on the way and wanted to be a better person? Maybe he still had some associations with the gang. It would be very weird if he didn’t. The 67 is a complex network round here, not everyone associated with them is criminal. Neither of us know which of these scenarios is closer to the truth. Your automatic assumption that he was still a wrong’un speaks more to your prejudices than it does to anything known about Chris Kaba.
I read it as being a witness on the street cos yeah, if I’d just woken up I’d be useless at saying what happened.
You’re right that the statement contains some pre-baked court-friendly details, though.
The second witness report is much more what I’d expect.
To be fair, whenever I’ve been in a position to witness a serious crime I’ve made sure to note as much detail as possible. When I lived in downtown Brixton there was a murder and an attempted murder within a block of where I lived, plus multiple muggings. I did give statements about the murder and the stabbing, and I was very careful to be as exact and clear as possible, not least because I didn’t want the cops to elide or fudge what I was saying.
On another occasion, with a mugging, they very clumsily tried to get me to fudge and blur what I was saying. It became clear that the person they’d arrested was not the person who had committed the mugging, but because they suspected he had been involved with crime on other occasions they were trying to pin this on him. They tried to change my description (“ when you say his hair was…. do you really mean it was…? the track suit top was grey….could it have been blue…?”) I stopped the interview and refused to sign the pages they’d filled in, and the remaining half a blank page they asked me to sign.
Yeah and I've got lived experience of fucking murderous drug gangs.
And your solution to this problem is to gun down suspects in the street? Your anger may be righteous but that doesn’t justify vigilante retribution dished out by the cops ffs.
if only they could find the gun wrapped in a sock hunderds of yards away from the car
They cordoned off a section of New Park Road across the bottom of Kirkstall Gardens, where there are grassy verges and front gardens. I wondered if they‘d cordoned off such a large area because they were looking for the “flung gun”.
To me, it’s not the verbosity so much as the fact that it so neatly contains every detail required to exonerate the officers.
When you take that into account it’s actually quite concise. But there’s no irrelevant filler, just what is needed to make the cops look good.
Not to say there’s anything iffy about it, but it’s very convenient.
I agree that the statement does seem very convenient but as I said above, when I’ve given a statement about a crime I’ve always tried to be as clear and detailed as I can.
There are upstairs windows.
No there aren’t. In that photo, the houses on both sides of the street at that point have their gable end facing the street. No windows.
ETA Having now seen footage of the scene I’ll correct this and say that there are two small windows on one of the houses at that location. I still think it’s unlikely that someone was in position to witness the entire incident in one of those windows.
en.wikipedia.org
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