Chris Kaba’s Execution: Is It Possible To Hate The Perpetrator and The Victim of Police Shooting?
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I have always hated the police.
And this has been shaped by my experiences during my formative years in London, where Black boys and men were targets of the profoundly corrupt and useless Metropolitan police.
Working in a number of McDonald’s restaurants in Neasden (Blackbird Hill and Brent Park), Ealing Broadway, Shepherd's Bush and Kingsbury across the capital city as a teenager was something of an eye opener on their extraordinary duplicitousness and overt bigotry.
And it is important to point out that this was before the watershed McPherson report was released in 1999 which stated that the biggest police force in the United Kingdom was institutionally racist.
The McPherson report, itself, was commissioned by Tony Blair’s government, shortly after it won the 1997 elections, to investigate the failings of the force as it related to Stephen Lawrence’s racist murder in 1993.
Stephen Lawrence and his best friend — Dwayne Brooks — were accosted by six (not five as reported in the media) racists at a bus stop in Eltham, South London. Brooks managed to escape but his friend wasn’t so lucky as he was repeatedly stabbed and succumbed to his wounds on…