Thread by @echetus

Following the death of Chris Kaba, a Guardian editorial and podcast spoke at length about the Met Police's supposed habit of killing unarmed black men. They identified three predecessors:
1) Azelle Rodney
2) Mark Duggan
3) Jermaine Baker
Who were they, and what happened?

All four deaths resulted from a "hard stop" - armed police rapidly containing a vehicle. It should be obvious, but police in the UK are not routinely armed. If cops are smashing into your car and pointing a gun at you, they have an actual reason to think you are armed too.

1) Azelle Rodney was a career criminal. When he was killed, he was already on the run for a double stabbing. One of the men with him would later claim Rodney controlled the crack production operation they ran together.

In 2005, police learned of a plan by an organised crime syndicate to rob Colombian drug traffickers of their cocaine. Three men were to carry out the robbery: Wesley Lovell, Frank Graham, and Azelle Rodney.

Unsurprisingly, gangsters planning to rob Colombian mobsters don't go unarmed. And Rodney, Lovell and Graham weren't unarmed. They had:
A Baikal IZH-79
A double barrelled "fob gun"
A Colt 1911 - found at the rear passenger seat where Rodney sat.

Having put the team under surveillance, and witnessed them loading guns into the car, police stopped the vehicle outside the Railway Tavern on Hale Lane. One of the officers, PC Long, shot Rodney six times, killing him. You can watch what happened here:

This sequence of events started an excruciating decade-long legal process - the inquiry judge examined the necessity of individual shots fired a fifth of a second apart. This process ended in the trial and aquittal of PC Long in 2015.

Frank Graham and Wesley Lovell received sentenced of 7 and 6 years custodial for possession of firearms and supplying crack cocaine. Since then? theargus.co.uk/news/local/193…

Rodney's family claimed he wasn't involved in crime and was in the car with the guns and other gangsters by coincidence. They suggested the gun found were Rodney was sitting had been planted there by police.

2) Mark Duggan was a member of the "Tottenham Mandem Gang". In March 2011, Duggan's cousin Kevin Easton was stabbed to death in a nightclub. Police received intelligence that Duggan was planning to get a gun and take revenge. They put Duggan under surveillance.

In August 2011, Duggan took a cab to the home of Kevin Hutchinson-Foster, who sold or gave him this gun - a converted and loaded BBM Bruni Model 92. Duggan left in the cab, and 12 minutes later, police stopped the car.

Duggan got out of the car with the gun and was shot twice by police, killing him. The riots that followed cost 5 lives and £200 million in property damage.

In January 2013, Hutchinson-Forster was convicted of supplying the gun to Duggan, and received seven years in prison. In 2014 the inquest concluded Duggan was lawfully killed.

Duggan's family said he wasn't a gang member and that the gun had been planted at the scene by police.

3) On 13 October 2015, Izzet Eren and Erwin Amoya-Gyamfi were driving through London on a stolen motorbike, carrying a loaded Skorpion submachine gun and a Tokarev 9mm.
Police tried to stop them, and they made off. Or tried to - they crashed into car and were caught.

The police believed they were on their way to commit a murder, and both men were convicted of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. They were held in prison awaiting sentencing.

Izzet Eren is a senior member of the Turkish mafia - specifically the Tottenham Turks. So is his cousin, Ozcan Eren. Izzet was also wanted in Turkey for murder.
Ozcan decided to rescue Izzet when he appeared at Wood Green Crown Court to be sentenced.

He enlisted three men to do this: Nathan Mason, Gokay Sogucakli and Jermaine Baker. On 11 December 2015, these three men were parked behind Wood Green Court in a stolen audi with an imitation Uzi submachine gun.

Unfortunately for the gang, the cops had got wind of this, and bugged the car. They were recorded cheerfully discussing their plans to point the gun at the Serco guards. When officers went to arrest the three, Baker made a sudden movement, and was shot dead.

Mason, Sogucakli and the Erens recieved between eight and five years in prison. The officer who shot Baker was arrested by the IOPC for murder, but never charged. An inquest found Baker was lawfully killed.

In 2019, Izzet Eren was transferred to Turkish prison to finish his 21 year sentence. He walked out of prison a month later and disappeared. This May, he was tracked down and arrested in Moldova. He awaits extradition.

Remember the careful wording the Guardian used "not holding a weapon". In 17 years, the police have killed four men "not holding a weapon". Each of these were dangerous criminals in the middle of a deadly offence. But how is this presented?

Listen to the podcast here: theguardian.com/news/audio/202…
Pay attention to how these killings are presented:
"parents told me about how they feel fearful of allowing their children to go out because they don't know what's going to happen to them if they're picked up by police"

"This happened in my father's generation, this happened in my generations, and I'm watching it happen in my children's generation"

"every time my child leaves the house there's potential for something like this to take place"

"people told me about how they were tired of constantly having to come out, again and again and again"
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, MP: "People are really angry, yet another unarmed black man killed, when are things gonna change, are things ever gonna change, this is what they always do".

The best way to avoid being shot by police might be:
-Don’t rob drug traffickers
-Don’t do revenge shootings
-Don’t try and free a Turkish mob boss from prison

So why are these journalists and politicians so determined to make martyrs out of gangsters? A charitable interpretation would be they're incompetents who lack basic investigative skills and think they are living in America.

A more cynical view would be this is a deliberate campaign to delegitimize and ultimately abolish the police. If only we knew the journalists’ views on those issues.

There is an ongoing effort to mainstream "abolitionism": getting rid of the police, prisons and borders. It is succeeding. MPs now regularly campaign to free gangsters. This is funded indirectly by your taxes via fake charities and campaign groups run by communists

Absolutely everything I have put in this thread is in the public domain and available to anyone with Google. If it's new to you, it's worth considering why.