INQUEST slams 3 deaths in 8 days during contact with police

‘Police must be reminded they cannot act with impunity following alarming rise in deaths after the use of force’

The campaigning charity INQUEST issued a press release (pdf) 24th August following the 3 deaths of men during contact with the police in the period 16 to 23 August. All the deaths involved the use of a taser and/or pepper spray and/or restraint. The dead men were Philip Hulmes, Jacob Michael, and Dale Burns. Helen Shaw, INQUEST Co-Director, said:
“The shocking reports about three tragic deaths in eight days following the use of force by police highlights INQUEST’s growing concern about deaths following contact with the police. For too long there has been a pattern of cases where inquest juries have found overwhelming evidence of unlawful and excessive use of force or gross neglect yet the police do not seem to have learnt the lessons from these previous deaths. Whilst we await the outcome of the inquests and investigations into these recent deaths it is imperative that the police are reminded that they cannot act with impunity.”

Anti-repression round up

So two weeks after the wave of disturbances swept across England, and the state’s blinkered response is clear to one and all – revenge against all those that stepped outside the accepted norms of of our disfunctional society. Unless of course you are a politician, media tycoon, corporation, or cop, in which case the normal rules dont apply and you are free to get away with just about anything – like stealing £’s thousands and millions, and of course shooting people dead.

What we are seeing is naked class justice from the ruling class directed at the working class, as they break all the rules they expect us to abide by and make up new ones to suit themselves along the way. Or to look at it another way, on the 10th August they were scared, very scared, and they didn’t like it one bit. So thousands arrested, over 1600 so far railroaded through emergency courts, hundreds of images of people published by the media before any sort of trial, unusually long prison sentences and irregular bail conditions handed down, and so on. With the prisons & police cells full to bursting with both remanded and sentenced prisoners, it only needs one spark for the whole prison system to break down, whilst the conditions inside the prisons will cause many prisoners to break down. The suicide of a remand prisoner at Bristol prison last weekend will not be the last (remember that whatever charges the person may face, they aint even been to trial yet). Meanwhile back on the streets its business as usual for the ruling class with rising unemployment and inflation, more cuts to services, devalued wages and pensions and savings, and of course more bank bailouts from public money.