news, UK

Mohamud Hassan was allegedly beaten and killed by South Wales police

Mohamud Mohammed Hassan, 24, was arrested by South Wales police last Friday and released without charge on Saturday morning. According to family and friends he left the police station covered in bruises and wounds. He died at home on Saturday night.

Mohamud’s aunt, Zainab Hassan, saw her nephew shortly after his release and confirms he showed signs of having been beaten by the police

“He had lots of wounds on his body and lots of bruises,” she said.

“He didn’t have these wounds when he was arrested and when he came out of Cardiff Bay police station, he had them.

“Nothing we do is going to bring him back, but we will not rest for a second until we have justice.”

Yesterday (Tuesday 12 January) hundreds of people protested angrily at the police station in Butetown, Cardiff, vowing not to rest until justice has been done for Mohamud.

Mohamud’s track suit covered in blood

Reports from neighbours say that Mohamud’s track suit was covered in blood.

The alleged beating that was inflicted on Mohamud is troubling in the extreme.

Solicitor Hilary Brown, director of Virgo Consultancy, said, “We want somebody to try to explain to us why a young, healthy man was arrested by South Wales Police with no apparent injuries to his body and as a result of being released from Cardiff Bay police station he was badly marked with bruising and cuts, and within hours was dead.”

First Minister Mark Drakeford said the reports of Mr Hassan’s death were “deeply concerning”.

For their part, South Wales police say there was no evidence of “excessive force”.

Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price said: “Every effort should be made to seek the truth of what happened.”

“Why did this young man die?,” he added.

The community urgently need to know the answer to that question, and many more.

Where are the videos from inside the police station?

Why was he arrested in the first place, given that he was released without charge?

How did this otherwise healthy young man come by the grievous injuries that witnesses report?

Family, friends and protesters are adamant that South Wales police have blood on their hands. No justice, no peace!

Wales has seen the development of a vibrant Black Lives Matter movement and activists and protesters from across Wales have vowed to fight for justice for Mahmoud.

news, US

Parler data dump ongoing with names of terrorist organisers set to emerge

Its a few years late but social media has booted fascist-enabler-in-chief Donald Trump and now his supporters on Parler are about to be uncovered.

That has thrown up also sorts of real issues about the power of social media over our lives and politics, but the arguments of the right shutting down Trump is an affront to free speech is specious, to say the least.

But there can be no freedom to spread hate and violence, which is what Trump has been doing and to be honest it is what his followers continue to do on Twitter and Facebook.

Trump and assorted racists and fascists thought they would be able to spew their filth on Parler, but after Amazon’s withdrawal of Amazon Web Services hosting and its removal from the Apple and Google app stores, that outlet has been blocked too.

Parler data dump set to expose fascists

Parler is underwritten by Trump billionaire backer’s the Mercer family and has billed itself as the home of the far right.

Today it emerged that the entire content of Parler has been accessed and is currently being downloaded.

So in addition to all their live-streaming and selfies of their criminal conduct on Capitol Hill, we will soon have access to much of the planning and the individuals and organisations responsible.

Obviously relying on the police to bringing any of the far right criminals to justice is a waste of time given the police were accomplices and facilitators, apart from one or two honourable exceptions.

As the Parler planning is uncovered we will have further reports.

If you are wondering about the extent of the collusion and facilitating between cops and fascists, then the video below should help clear things up. Even as a woman laid dying, the police we talking to the far right rioters about calming down so that theey could let them continue on their journey around the Capitol building in search of lawmakers to kidnap, put on trial and execute, as was planned by some of the terrorist elements.

Even after a woman lies dying, police tell far right rioters to calm or you can’t some in! If they were Black their heads would have been blown off by now: “You guys can’t come in here if you are so unruly. You guys got to calm down”

The Daily Kos has more on how the Parler data was accessed here and more from Vice here.

news, US

Trump coup attempt in motion as fascists storm Congress, police watch on

Trump supporters have stormed the US Capitol with reports of shots being heard inside the building.

Congress has gone into lockdown and the police have allowed the assorted fascists to breach all the capitol buildings, according to reports.

The floor of Congress is being evacuated and gas masks distributed to the country’s elected officials

The kid glove treatement of the all-white Trump rabble is in stary contrast to the treatment meted out to BLM or left-wing demonstartors.

It is not lost on those viewing the scenes how different the response of law enforcement would have been if this was a mostly Black crowd.

Earlier ni the day the protesters heard from Trump who egged on the crowd to do their worst inhis hour long diatribe of lies about how the election was supposedly stolen.

The Trump supporters are even more enraged by the events in Georgia where the Democrats are set to win both Senate seats, giving them control of all three branches of the US government.

Despite the best efforts of Republican white supremacists to suppress the Black vote in the state, it was the turnout of African-Americans that has swung the election in Georgia in the Democrats’ favour.

All the political leaders of the US are in the capitol and the police appear to have lost control of the situation as “protesters”, some alleged to have concealed weapons, roam the buildings.

This is a Trump coup attempt

This is political intimidation that has all the hallmarks of fascism in action.

A republican congressman has described the storming of the capitol as a coup attempt. He is right.

A

A 6pm curfew has been declared by the mayor of Washington DC but many will be asking why the capitol was not properly protected in the first place following days of warnings about violence from Trump loyalists.

It is time for Trump to be arrested for sedition against the republic.

news, US

Kenosha cop who shot Jacob Blake in the back faces no charges

Rusten Sheskey, the police officer in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, who shot Jacob Blake sparking off days of protests which led to white supremacist vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse shooting dead two BLM protesters, will not be charged with any crime.

The news was announced by Kenosha County district attorney Michael Graveley. The announcement was greeted with dismay by Blake family members.

“This decision failed not only Jacob and his family but the community that protested and demanded justice,” said the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump.

The white policeman who shot Blake several times in the back after attending a domestic incident with other officers, has left Blake semi-paralysed and he will never walk again.

Expected protests on Tuesday, many businesses had been boarded up and National Guardsmen were stationed at the court house.

Sheskey has been on administartive leave since the shooting, on full pay. So while he has been on holiday, another Black family has been grieving as a result of racist police violence in the US.

Rittenhouse was arraignment today also, and pleaded not guilty to the six charges against him, which included first degree intentional homicide.

In the protests that turned into an anti-police uprising, the armed Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, was seen colluding with police and even after he killed two protesters was able to depart the scene with no intervention from the police.

news, resources

30% of children held on remand in the UK are Black

Nationally 30% of all children held on remand in the UK are Black. That’s the shocking finding of Transform Justice and the Howard League for Penal Reform.

The data was revealed following a Freedom of Information request.

Director of Transform Justice, Penelope Gibbs said: “This huge racial disparity in the treatment of London’s children cannot be explained away. Remand separates children from their families and disrupts their education, and yet most children who are remanded do not go on to receive a prison sentence. 

The Howard League also reveals in a research briefing that in the past nine years the number of children being arrested has fallen but the figure for Black kids have stayed stubbornly high. Overall there were 71,885 in 2019.

Black kids are four times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts.

Using the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) designator, 51% of children incarcerated were from those backgrounds, as at September 2020.

Children who are victims of county line gangs or trafficking are being treated as criminals by police when they are in fact the victims.

The government as usual has some soothing words to balm the wounds:

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “We are working across government to tackle the deep-rooted causes of BAME children’s over-representation in the criminal justice system. This includes reviewing the disproportionate use of remand, along with improving legal advice and developing schemes for early intervention.”

So yet more reviews, but nothing will happen to free the children ensnared in the British injustice system until radical action is taken to force change.

The findings of the Lammy Review into racial inequality in the justice system have still not been acted upon, despite the government indicating that it would follow through on the review’s recommendations.

Excerpt from the Howard League research briefing:

The large reduction in the numbers of child arrests in the last decade is a success story but the data shows continued inequalities for Black children and those from minority ethnic backgrounds who have not benefitted from efforts to divert children to the same extent as white children. Government figures reveal that Black children are over four times as likely as white children to be arrested. The proportion of
white children arrested has fallen by 13 per cent over the last ten years, whilst the proportion of Black children arrested has doubled to 16 per
cent (Youth Justice Board, 2020).

The disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on Black children and children from ethnic minority backgrounds grows
exponentially as children progress through the system, resulting in huge disparities in the numbers held on remand and serving sentences in child prisons. In September 2020, 51 per cent (273) of the 536 children
held in youth custody were from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (HM Prison and Probation Service, 2020). In Feltham and
Cookham Wood prisons, around two-thirds of children being held on remand are Black or from minority ethnic backgrounds (Howard
League for Penal Reform, 2020a).

Child-Arrests-2019-FINAL-onlineDownload
news, US

Minneapolis police killing of Dolal Idd and raid shows their brutal racism

The shooting dead by police of Dolal Idd last Wednesday in Minneapolis was the first since the murder of George Floyd by the same police force.

Police have released a body cam video they say shows that Mr Idd fired first, but he shows no such thing.

All that is seen in the video is the man’s car window blowing out, but that shot could equally have come from the other side of the car as it could from within the vehicle. The police claim a firearm was found in the car.

No further body cams have been released by the police to help to clarify the situation.

Following the killing, police officers descended on the family home of Mr Idd in a raid that has left the Somali-American family shell shocked.

The police forced their way into the home screaming orders, putting teenagers into handcuffs as well as Dolal’s father Bayle Gelle when he came rushing down the stairs after hearing his wife screaming.

The only ones not put into cuffs were the young children. The police did not say what they were searching for and it was only as they were leaving the home that they saw fit to inform the family that Dolal had been killed by police.

The killing by police of Dolal Idd
https://youtu.be/-gKyaZ7d9xs
Raid by militarised police on the family home
news, UK

Tory MP Richard Drax refuses to pay reparations for his slave wealth

The Tory MP for South Dorset, Richard Drax, omitted to include in the UK parliamentary register of members interests the fact that he owned a plantation on the Caribbean island of Barbados.

That’s right – the landowning Tory’s family wealth is based on slavery. Indeed, according to the Observer newspaper he is the richest landowner in the House of Commons.

His family owns the 250 hectare Drax Hall plantation, which has been in the family as a slave-worked plantation since 1640, right up until 1836 – in other words since the beginning of Britain’s colonial slave-trading shame, which was one of the greatest crimes against humanity ever.

Drax Hall Barbados

The  Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission has demanded that Drax acknowledge his ill-gotten gains and pays reparations, but he has refused to do so.

Richard Drax inherited the plantation after the death of his father in 2017.

Drax omitted to add to the register thousands of acres of land that he owns in the UK. He has only now chosen to rectify those omissions and that of the Barbados plantation following an investigation by the Observer newspaper.

Vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies Sir Hilary Beckles estimates that 30,000 people were worked to death on the Barbados plantation over a 200 years period, with around 300 people ensalve on the estate at any one time. It was the largest sugar plantation on the island.

The Drax planter-merchant family went on to establish their sugar plantation model in Jamaica, which the British took from the Spanish and established as a colony in 1655. It was a model that was replicated across the Caribbean and north America.

Drax Hall Jamaica
If anyone is wondering where the Drax family got the money from to build Charborough Park in Dorset, it came from working Africans to death over two centuries in the Caribbean. The average life expectancy of a slave in the British Caribbean was around seven years.

Drax, not surprisingly is no friend of the Black lives Matter movement.

In June he jumped on the exaggerated media reports of the BLM protests at the time, saying: “The desecration of the Cenotaph by rioters two weeks ago, on the actual D-Day anniversary, was beyond ironic.”

Drax is also in favour of racist immigration controls. In 2013, he voted to increase restrictions: “I believe, as do many of my constituents, that this country is full.”

The Barbados government should requisition the Drax property immediately with no compensation. They should also send a bill to the UK government demanding payment of reparations, given the “compensation” paid to slave owners upon emancipation – the cost of which UK taxpayers incredibly only finished paying off in 2015.

The Slave Compensation Act of 1837 distributed around £20 million to slavers. The compensation in today’s money is estimated at £50 billion, not including reinvestment of capital and the attendant compounding effect. The enslaved people got nothing.

news, US

Breonna Taylor statue smashed but $25k raised for bronze replacement

In a little less than two weeks after the installation of the memorial statue to Breonna Tayor, racists vandals have attacked and smashed it.

The memorial was sculpted by white artist Leo Carson, taking him several months to complete the work.

Breonna – an emergency room medical technician – was killed by police in Louisville Kentucky upon exercising a so-called “no knock” warrant in March 2020.

The bust took pride of place near Oakland town hall, California.

Protests to demand justice for Breonna took place all over the world, including in the UK.

Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor

This latest act of racist vandalism sadly follows similar incidents across the US, notably in Washington DC when Trump supporters and fascist from the Proud Boys racists street gang sought out and destroyed memorials to other African American individuals killed by police officers.

Leo Carston said of the attack: “I built it to support the Black Lives Matter movement, but that also makes it a target for racist aggression.”

Since the attack took place, $25,000 has been raised to fund a bronze replacement The original was made from less sturdy clay with ceramic finish.

Donate today: Breonna Taylor statue gofundme page

Three Breonna cops now fired but still walking free

In other news, of the three officers involved in the killing of Breonna, one has been fired (detective Brett Hankison) and another two are slated for termination – Detective Myles Cosgrove (one of the shooters) and Detective Joshua Jaynes (who got the search warrant from the judge).

None of the police have been charged with the actual killing of Breonna. Hankison was found guilty of wanton endangerment because one of his bullets entered a neighbouring apartment.

action, news, UK

Tottenham protesters demand justice for Black youth assaulted by police

Two hundred people turned out to protest in Tottenham this Saturday (19 December) against the violent assault on Black children in Tottenham by police last Tuesday.

The event was organised by local activists and supported by Tottenham BLM, Enfield BLM, Haringey Stand Up To Racism, Haringey Extinction Rebellion and BLMM.

The mixed crowd heard from Andrew Boateng (his son was assaulted by police while on a charity ride for a community-police charity), Deliah Mattis (Enfield BLM), Sasha (from UK Black Panther), Vivek Lehal (from Stand Up To Racism), Tottenham activists Ken Hinds and Gary McFarlane, Nathaniel from the the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, local black activists Empress (and AAPRP member), to name a few.

Local Labour councillor Matt White also spoke and sent solidarity greetings of support from the Labour group on Haringey Council.

Local MP David Lammy was absent (again).

news, UK

Tottenham police backtrack – admit boy punched, no mention of headlock

Further statement from Detective Chief Superintendent Treena Fleming, North Area BCU Commander:

“I am deeply sorry for the upset and distress that our communities and residents have felt when viewing the video footage that is circulating on social media in relation to a young person being punched by a police officer on West Green Road, outside Parkview School on Tuesday, 8th December.

“No-one wishes to see such encounters escalate to the point where any members of the community or police officers are injured. This type of situation is distressing for all involved, both for the public and the police, and I sincerely apologise to the young persons and others who witnessed this incident.

“The videos that are circulating on social media are moments in time during a much longer incident and as distressing as these individual clips may appear I would respectfully ask that we allow the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) the time and space to thoroughly consider all of the information available. I do understand the need for our communities to be clear on what happened during the incident but this will only be established with an independent and fulsome investigation where all available material is viewed and scrutinised. I hope our communities understand that for all parties involved it would be unfair of me to comment any further on the incident itself until that process has taken place by the IOPC.

“Two of the officers involved in the incident have been redeployed away from frontline policing operations.

“My Senior Leadership Team and I are committed to strong community relations and engagement. We will continue to reach out to community leaders and members to hear your views and work with you all to move forward from this incident.

“I absolutely acknowledge the strength of community feeling about this particular incident, especially from our youngsters and parents on the Borough. It is right that we are held fully accountable for our actions, which is the reason why we voluntarily referred the public complaint to the IOPC and they are conducting an independent investigation. We fully support this.

“While this takes place I am determined to continually improve the policing service that we provide to you all locally, particularly involving the use of stop and search. I therefore want to bring forward, without delay, our plans to ensure more community scrutiny of such powers and to involve community representatives in our training.”

Press release from the IOPC:

For immediate release: 16 December 2020
 
Appeal for witnesses following the use of force on a 16-year-old boy in West Green Road, Tottenham

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is investigating the use of force by Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) police officers on a 16-year-old boy in Tottenham, north London.

The use of force by officers occurred outside Parkview School in West Green Road, N15 around 4.45pm on Tuesday, 8 December. During the incident, the boy sustained facial injuries and was subsequently taken to hospital. Three officers suffered injuries during the altercation. Two of the officers were taken to hospital and subsequently discharged.
Our investigation follows a voluntary referral from MPS on 11 December, after a formal complaint was made alleging the boy was assaulted by a police officer.

IOPC Regional Director Sal Naseem said: “We are aware of the significant community concerns raised as a result of this incident and have decided to independently investigate the complaint about the boy’s interactions with the police.
“Our independent investigation is in its early stages and in the coming days we will establish the scope of the investigation. We have already started gathering evidence, including mobile phone footage posted on social media, police officers’ body-worn video and eye-witness accounts.
“It is our job to oversee and investigate any complaints made about the police independently and impartially.

If you were in the area that evening and saw this incident, please get in touch with us. We are aware of a number of people nearby who may have photographed or filmed the incident on their mobile phones and would ask that they please come forward to help us with any information they may have.

“We will be investigating the police force’s use of stop and search tactics during this incident and whether the actions of those officers were appropriate, proportionate and followed approved police policies.
“We will also investigate if racial profiling or discrimination played a part in the incident.

“I would also stress that we are independent and make our decisions entirely independently of the police.”

Did you see anything? If so, witnesses can call 0300 303 5735 or email [email protected]

ENDS

Protest at Tottenham police station on Saturday 19 December 12 noon, Tottenham High Road

Tottenham police now admit the black boy at the centre of the videos was punched by a police officer, although there is no mention of the headlock or the alleged kicking of a youth on the ground – so are the media that parroted the initial lies in the first statement going to issue an apology to the boys and the wider the community?

The authorities will now try and drag out the IOPC investigation and hope everyone forgets about this appalling incident – make sure that doesn’t happen by joining the protest on Saturday 12 noon at Tottenham police station (19 December)