Jasper Woman Forced to Go Out in Public Dressed
WE'RE SO tired of living our lives being subject to the worst imaginations of racist white police officers.
It's 3.30 on a warm Wednesday afternoon in May, and all around are noisy, excited children spilling out of school, filling up local shops and making their way home.
Now imagine Lambeth Schools Police Officer PC Paul Bamber publicly arresting on suspicion of burglary a 16-year-old Black Muslim girl, dressed in full school uniform and wearing a hijab, being arrested and placed in handcuffs?
Now I'm no detective, but this makes no sense Sherlock. I mean, really?
How many hijab-wearing school-age burglars who work in broad daylight in full school uniforms do you know?
Is this some new Lambeth crime trend with the good burghers of Stockwell returning home from a hard day's work only to find they've been cleared out by a crack team of hijab-wearing burglar schoolgirls?
This is precisely what happened on the 27th of April 2022 in Stockwell Lambeth. A 16-year-old girl was arrested by PC Bamber, a Platanos College Schools Officer on suspicion of burglary and forcibly placed in handcuffs and bundled into a local shop.
The subsequent furore of the school kids, all of whom were telling the officer he'd got this utterly wrong, and the public's anger at what took place caused major scenes that went viral.
PC Bamber, feeling threatened, having grievously misjudged the situation pressed his panic button, and in response, fourteen Police vans and cars and over 60 police officers turned up to this incident. They immediately placed a protective cordon around the officer and the girl and then tried to disperse the crowd.
Her parents, who attended the scene, were refused access to their daughter who was detained in a local shop. Instead, the Police insisted that a teacher from the school act as an appropriate adult. This is bizarre and another example of how black women, in this case, the girl's mother, was summarily dismissed.
In the end, PC Bamber couldn't find any evidence to support his burglary suspicions, and the schoolgirl was eventually de-arrested. But not before having suffered humiliation and subjected to a heavy-handed policing suffering severe bruising to her wrists and leaving a community reeling in shock.
With strong echoes of the Hackney Child Q case, this incident raises important questions about the Met's interaction with London's Black children. This recurring issue of Adultification is real, with officers' common sense being overwhelmed by the worst imaginations of their racist stereotypes and assumptions. Racism is nothing if not utterly irrational.
But there are huge dangers of allowing a culture of racist oppressive policing to continue. There are enormous pressures between African Caribbean descent communities and the Met Police due to catastrophically low Black public confidence rates. These types of critical incidents could be the spark that, in the immortal words of renaissance man, civil rights icon, and African America author James Baldwin…ignites the fire next time.
We need an urgent safeguarding review of the Met's interaction with Black children , a review contextualised by the realities of institutional racism in the Met and the actual harm and trauma such incidents inflict on our children. That's why the work of Lambeth Schools Patrol developed by local charity Code 7 in partnership with communities is so important.
The project provides a self-policing public health initiative that acts as a positive befriending service to young people, protects children from violence, and acts as a police community intermediary in intense situations.
LBC recently reported that 5. 279 children searched in the past three years, 3,939 (75%) were from ethnically diverse backgrounds. That's 75% African, Asian and non-white children, the vast majority of whom will be African Caribbean. A total of 16 of them were aged between 10 and 12 years old.
And the shocking thing is the data only relates to children who were strip-searched after an arrest, including over 2,000 for drug offences, meaning the number of youths strip-searched in London will be even higher.
The figures wouldn't include the case of Child Q, for instance, as she was never arrested.
Those suspected of 'drug offences' would have been subjected to what the police euphemistically call MTIP. I'm always staggered at the practice of white institutions' using depoliticised clinical abbreviations in an attempt to mask their racism.
MTIP means More Thorough, Intimate Parts Exposed or intimate strip search to you and I.
Today we see black women and girls being dragged into the front line of a racist policing agenda that sees us being targeted and subjected to increased police racism, hostility and violence.
The growing tensions between Lambeth's African Caribbean communities and the Metropolitan Police Service continue to grow at pace. Today, some 41 years after the 1981 Brixton Uprisings, these tensions are now even worse than they were all those years ago.
The simple truth is objective facts don't lie. Lambeth Police's record of racist complaints, disproportionate stop and search and police use of unnecessary violence and aggression continues to make Lambeth London's number one borough for recorded incidents of Police racism and excessive use of police powers (commonly known to you) me as institutional racism) and aggression.
Parents and the community need to patrol our streets to keep our children safe from the sickening violence of their peers and the institutionalised violence and racism of the police.
That's why we're holding this important meeting. We want to hold Lambeth Police to account and to recruit more parents to be as trained Lambeth School Patrol Officers.
Let's work together to keep our children safe.
Source: https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2022/05/13/lee-jasper-apa-1/
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