Black Men Can't Run
By Paul Myers
29 July, 2005
The GuardianI'm London-born to Jamaican parents, and like most people I want to stay alive while travelling around my home city. Easier said than done now that terrorists are blowing up buses and tubes, and police have killed a dark-skinned man they thought was on the verge of an atrocity.
Up until Jean Charles de Menezes was shot in Stockwell, I was scared of the explosions. Now there's a double whammy. Do I worry about the Asian with the backpack or the nonchalant white guy?
"De Menezes acted suspiciously by running" is one line that's wheeled out to abrogate responsibility for a catastrophe. But if you're in an ethnic minority the errors seem to hit you thick and fast throughout your life. It really doesn't take that much for a police officer to be suspicious.
I remember Doreen Lawrence telling me that police initially treated her and her husband Neville like they were the criminals after their aspiring architect of a son had been stabbed to death by white racists at a bus stop in south-east London. In 1993 she had to grieve through the bigotry, but the bungled investigation into Stephen's murder forced the Macpherson report, which among other things highlighted the institutional racism within police forces. And to their credit the police have moved to eradicate that blight.So far I've evaded the racist thugs at the bus stops, but I haven't eluded the institutionalised stupidity. Like countless other law-abiding black men in the capital, I've been stopped, questioned and searched by police professing to be doing their utmost to protect the community. When I owned a Golf convertible I'd be tailed or pulled over for driving what they suspected to be a stolen car.
While trying to catch the last bus home from the City a few years back I was stopped by an officer who told me that I was acting suspiciously by running through a high-risk burglary area with a holdall. He looked through the bag, asked me whether the shoes and clothes were mine, and then wanted to know where I'd come from. When I told him the Guardian in Farringdon Road, he asked if I could prove it. I showed him my press card and I thought that would be the end of it.
Wrong. He asked where I lived, and even though the address tallied with the bus that I'd been running to catch, he still radioed my details through. When these were confirmed, the officer's explanation was that he had a job to do, and was sure I'd understand. I was livid because I had understood.
Now what frightens me is that, unlike the Lawrences, the grief of the De Menezes family seems not to be yielding anything positive. The Met commissioner apologises but says police may have to shoot other innocent people to protect the community. And their colour will be ... ?
Giving apparent carte blanche to marksmen to unload bullets into dark-skinned people, while exhorting these targets to trust in the policy's effectiveness, may have pleased the old Special Patrol Group, but it leaves me queasy. Especially when some of the bobbies on the beat can't distinguish the most salient of differences.
You see, the officer who stopped me in the City marked me down on his report sheet as Asian.
