UK: PCA censor victims' families
01 September 1998
The Police Complaints Authority (PCA), supported by the Association of Police Authorities, held a conference on "Deaths in Police Custody: Reducing the Risks" on October 16. The advance press release was provocatively addressed to:
"everybody concerned with deaths in police custody - police officers, doctors, police authorities, lawyers, coroners, action groups, charities and Government."
The PCAs decision to exclude the families of those killed in police custody because, as they informed them later, "they were not professional and would be too emotional", was criticised for being little more than censorship. It caused outrage among relatives and their supporters who pointed out that: "Above all others it is these families who have the right to speak, as well as to the answers to many of the questions that will be posed."
The United Families and Friends Campaign (a coalition run by relatives and friends of Brian Douglas, Joy Gardner, Shiji Lapite, Ibrahim Sey, Aseta Simms, Wayne Douglas and Orville Blackwood and supported by Justice for Ricky Reel, Black Unity and Freedom Party, Newham Monitoring Project, Southall Monitoring Group, Inquest and Migrant Media) condemned the PCA "insensitivity":
"As the families of those who have died in police custody under suspicious circumstances we are concerned not only at our exclusion and the denial of a right to speak but at the fact that the PCA itself continues to resist our demands for a more accountable system of investigating deaths in custody."
A spokesman for the families' insisted that they had a right to speak at the conference. At 9am they placed a picket on the venue in central London until Brenda Weinberg, the sister of Brian Douglas who died after being arrested in south London in 1995, was admitted. She told the conference that:
"The persistent failure of the Crown Prosecution Service and the PCA or the police to bring any charges or suspension, or even dismissal, following a death in custody appears to confirm that truth and justice are entirely separate when a black person is killed."
She demanded that the PCA be abolished, and replaced by a truly independent body to examine complaints against the police, and that a public inquiry should be held into deaths in custody. The United Families and Friends Campaign can be contacted for more information at PO Box 9501, London N17 6EG, Tel: 0370 432 439.hd