On September 26th, whilst most Americans were nervously eyeing suspicious envelopes, the police officer who shot 19 year old Timothy Thomas was acquitted of reduced manslaughter charges by a municipal judge. Timothy was shot in the US, but for observers of the Noble Defenders of Democracy in this country, the scene is depressingly familiar. A young unarmed black man is shot dead with little or no justification and the agencies of the state, including the justice system, close ranks to protect the murderers.
In the past 30 years there have been 1000 deaths in British police custody. Not one officer has been convicted.
These include Gambian asylum seeker Ibrahima Sey, who was forced to the ground, sprayed repeatedly with CS gas and held face down for 15 minutes, by which time he was dead. And Joy Gardner who died of suffocation after police officers wrapped 13 feet of medical tape round her head.
After a lot of hard work by families and friends, an inquest ruled that the death of Shiji Lapite in custody was an "unlawful killing". The Crown Prosecution Service, however, declined to prosecute the officers responsible. The list goes on. And on.
The claim that police are here for the protection of us, the people, is revealed by this list as the absurd and offensive lie that it is. The remit of the police force is to keep things exactly the way they are, to keep power firmly in the hands of the rich and powerful and away from the poor and oppressed.
Let's challenge this. Next time you see someone being harassed, or unjustly arrested, ask the cops for their numbers, and for their reasons. Just imagine you were stopped on the streets for no other reason than your looks. Wouldn't you like passers-by to do something more than to see how the police car takes you away?
To find out more, see the film "Injustice". Police have been extremely successful in preventing people from seeing it, by threatening libel cases that nobody except them can afford to take on- regardless of whether they'd win in the end.

Or visit their website: www.injusticefilm.co.uk