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This is a good post.
I'm your common or garden Northern white bloke so I don't envisage ever being racially profiled by the Met Police.
He either feared for his life (justifiably when he is four times more likely to be killed than I would be in that situation before you add on the weapons intel for the car or his history)
We'll never know, but I wonder what caused the flight response more: his race (and the history of the Met's actions with black men); or his pastimes? As a white bloke, I can't answer that.
Ben689908
stevo_com
I don't see the relevance of people saying "why didn't he just stop?" or "I would have done X" or at least I think it's easy to say when they don't have the same background or set of circumstances as Chris Kaba. Fuck knows what he was thinking when he tried to get away. He either feared for his life (justifiably when he is four times more likely to be killed than I would be in that situation before you add on the weapons intel for the car or his history - which I feel was released tactically as the officers couldn't have known who he was at the time, unless I've missed that they did somehow in the reporting) or he just didn't want to get caught and thought he could get away. Saying things like that implies more than a small amount of victim blaming and whatever he was guilty of at the time or previously, he was unarmed and we haven't had the death penalty in this country for a while.
I was always brought up to respect the police (the RUC as they were then). And that was easy to say and do, coming from a very typical Protestant family in a very typical Protestant town. I couldn't understand why they got bad press. Until I actually left NI and started learning more about what it was like to be Catholic and/or Irish in the same place I grew up. Border or random road checkpoints were fine for us. The peeler or the soldier would see my Dad's nice Protestant surname or clock his post code and wave us through. Former RUC or squaddies that I have met since have told that they were ordered to make life difficult for anyone of an opposite persuasion to us; get everyone out of the car in all weathers, empty the boot, make them wait around, etc. Knowing this it's easy to see why people would at the very least, dislike the police back home. And that's the soft stuff. I worked in a 24hr garage during university, across the road from one of the last army barracks in South Belfast. One guy from up the country started working there. Proper culchie name, GAA tops and hold all etc. As soon as he realised the army land rovers would do laps of the petrol station on their patrols, he quit as he was paranoid that "the Brits would get him". As an ignorant prod, I thought he was daft. And I'm ashamed of that now as it it very likely the Brits did get someone he knew or someone in his family in living memory.