Chris Kaba Video text

Have you lost a loved one? Have you lost a loved one to injustice? Have you had to watch footage of your loved one dying? These aren’t my questions, these are the questions that Chris Kaba’s family asked the crowd outside the Old Bailey after the police officer who killed him, Martyn Blake, was found not guilty.

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The family was advised not to show their emotions as they watched the footage, in the hopes that it would help with the case. They had to stay visibly calm and collected as they watched the video of their own family member being executed by the state over and over, and for what?

On the 5th of September 2022 Chris Kaba was stopped by 3 marked metropolitan police cars and one unmarked car that had been following him in Streatham Hill, South London. Police officers pointing guns at Kaba and shouting orders to get out of the car surrounded him, at which point he tried to drive forward out of the road block but was stuck between one of the squad cars and a car parked on the road. At this point, Martyn Blake moved around to in front of Kaba’s vehicle and shot him with a single round in the forehead. 

The discourse and media reporting following this has repeatedly asked people to consider what they would have done in Blake’s situation - pointing a gun at an unarmed man who was stuck in his car and surrounded by armed police - but I think it’s worth asking what anyone would do in Kaba’s situation. He was being followed by an unmarked police car - these have been an increasingly common sight on the streets of London year on year, cars that appear to be unremarkable until they turn on sirens and flashing lights. Crucially, the car following Kaba hadn’t used its sirens or lights, so all he would have known was that someone was following him. The point of police using marked cars, officers in uniform and overwhelming numbers is to make a person they are arresting surrender without incident, and tailing someone in an unmarked car runs directly counter to that. I think if most people were being followed and suddenly found themself surrounded by shouting men with guns pointed at them they would probably panic and try to escape. As for Blake’s statement that he thought his colleagues were in danger, I find this frankly asinine - Kaba’s car was completely trapped and even at the point he tried to drive forward there was no one in front of the car.

In the two years since Kaba’s death, his family have had to talk to press, attend rallies, organise and campaign tirelessly to demand justice. No family should have to do that while mourning, especially while mourning a 24 year old who was murdered. In September 2023, Blake was charged with murder. The trial itself was 3 weeks long starting on October 2nd 2024 and on the 21st a jury deliberated for only 3 hours before finding Blake not guilty.

I think that a lot of people in Britain think of police violence as an American problem, something that doesn’t really affect us here, and this logic is seemingly enough to write off cases like this as flukes even when everything about it follows the same patterns as police killings in the US. The IOPC, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, responsible for investigating cases like the murder of Chris Kaba, reported 19 deaths in police custody in their 2020/21 period, 23 deaths in 2022/23, one of which would have been Kaba, and 24 in 2023/24. In 2023 by comparison in the US there were 1002 people killed by police and 1117 in 2024. That means that the UK police, despite whatever difference we like to tell ourselves exists, are involved in the deaths of as many people as an average American state. 

I want to be clear about my position - I don’t think that the solution to find justice and peace in society involves special agents of the state who can exercise carceral power over others. I am an abolitionist, so I don’t expect to see eye-to-eye with people who don’t see the police as fundamentally existing to terrorise the working class for the ruling class, who see the racism of the police as an accident rather than as an integral component of their history and existence, but I think that the outcome we have right now is one that everyone can agree is wrong - the British state has sanctioned the murder of a 24 year old man who never got to meet his baby daughter by finding Martyn Blake not guilty. I believe everything about this case makes it obvious that justice here would involve a deep change to how policing works.

The very fact that Martyn Blake can kill someone and be found not guilty is an injustice that goes beyond his individual decision making, it is an injustice in the power that the state has over our lives. If you’re watching this before Saturday 26th of October 2024 and you can attend, please join the annual march of the UFFC - United Friends and Families Campaign, a coalition of people affected by deaths in police, prison, mental health & immigration custody. This will be the 25th annual march, because these people have been campaigning for change for a quarter of a century now. Otherwise, if you can’t attend you can follow the UFFC for updates, donate to it or sign up to get involved through their website, but I’d like to also draw your attention to Inquest, whose primary work is in holding police and public bodies accountable. They have done great work in the campaign for a Hillsborough Law, a bill which will require a standard of honesty from public bodies in the UK and ensure that victims and families have equal publicly funded legal representation in cases of government injustice, which should come into force next year. Inquest are currently working on the No More Deaths campaign, aimed at creating a national oversight mechanism to ensure that inquiries into preventable state related deaths lead to actual changes being implemented.

As an aside, my uncle was killed in the Hillsborough stadium collapse caused by police mismanagement 7 years before I was born. Seeing what the Hillsborough Law campaign has achieved during the same years after the Grenfell fire killed 72 people in London showed me that our country isn’t as indifferent and cruel as the ruling class wants us to think we are. They don’t want us to believe that we care about each other, or that that care is capable of manifesting real change, but we do, and it is.

Supporting the work that Inquest does means campaigning for more honesty, transparency and accountability from those responsible in cases like Chris Kaba, Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, the victims of the Grenfell Fire, the Hillsborough disaster and many more besides. In cases where it feels almost impossible to say what justice would mean, that seems like a step in the right direction.

I am making this video because after the jury acquitted Martyn Blake, Chris Kaba’s family asked the crowd outside the court to talk about it, to make videos, to use social media to get more people down to the UFFC protest, more people involved in the campaign to prevent more people from losing their family to state violence. They told the crowd, “we are the ones we are waiting for”.