Chris Kaba was a gangster, not a victim

A Metropolitan Police firearms officer who shot dead an unarmed black suspect was cleared of murder yesterday. It was the right verdict in a case that has been warped by identity politics and shrouded in unfounded allegations of police racism.

Police sergeant Martyn Blake shot Chris Kaba dead on 5 September 2022. Blake and his colleagues had been following Kaba’s car, a blue Audi Q8, after it had been linked to a firearms incident the previous day. They forced it to stop on a residential street in Streatham, south London and asked Kaba to step out of the car. But he refused and then proceeded to drive the car towards the armed officers. It was in this moment that Blake fired a single shot at Kaba, hitting him in the head.

In the immediate aftermath, commentators and campaigners tried to paint Kaba’s killing as evidence of systemic police racism. His father was quick to declare that the shooting was ‘racist and criminal’.

On 10 September 2022, Kaba’s parents led hundreds of protesters, including Labour MP Diane Abbott and rapper Stormzy, on a march serenaded by chants of ‘Who are the murderers? The police are the murderers.’ Speaking to reporters at the rally, Rashid Nix, a Green Party equalities and diversity officer, said Kaba’s killing proved the police ‘neither protects us [the black community] nor serves us’.

Too many seemed utterly convinced, without a shred of evidence, that Kaba had been unjustifiably killed by a racist police force.

The outrage from activists, politicians and others appeared to drive decision-making throughout the case. A week after Kaba’s killing, Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley seemed to cave into calls to take action against Blake by suspending him from duty. This prompted Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham, to complain that ‘it shouldn’t have taken public pressure to make this happen’. London mayor Sadiq Khan said the decision to suspend Blake was ‘really important’ and that he ‘fully supported’ it.

These interventions gave the impression that decisions relating to Blake were being taken in response to political pressure and the outcry of a vocal minority, rather than because of clear evidence of wrongdoing.

At the same time, commentators and activists tirelessly presented Kaba as a blameless, even admirable young man. He was described as an ‘expectant father’ and an ‘aspiring architect’.

Since the verdict – and the relaxation of reporting restrictions – a very different picture of Kaba has emerged. The 24-year-old had several convictions to his name and was a senior member of the ‘67’ gang. He was involved in violent crime, drug dealing and racketeering. Just six days before he was shot, he smuggled a handgun into a nightclub and shot a gang rival twice in the legs. The police have since confirmed that had Kaba been alive, he would have been charged with attempted murder. Much was also made of Kaba’s imminent fatherhood. But it has since been revealed that in April 2022 he was served with a 28-day domestic-violence protection order relating to the mother of his then unborn child.

All this goes some way to explaining why Kaba decided to resist arrest and drive his car at the police instead. He must have feared the police were on to him.

The idea that this was a racist killing has now been completely undermined by the evidence at the trial. The police were not sure who was driving the vehicle until it had been stopped. The only reason the police stopped the vehicle was because it had been linked to a firearm incident. The decision to force the car to stop – a so-called hard stop – was described in court as ‘reasonable’. Likewise, it’s clear that the jury thought that Blake’s decision to shoot at Kaba was justified – that it was motivated by a desire to protect his colleagues.

In response to Blake’s acquittal, some politicians and pundits have said that the case should never have been brought to court in the first place. But the Crown Prosecution Service was well within its rights to prosecute, given the seriousness of the allegations. A jury may have to be ‘sure’ of a defendant’s guilt before they can convict. But the CPS only has to establish that there is a reasonable prospect of conviction in order to authorise a charge. This means that it is right to bring a case like this to court, even if it ends in acquittal.

The not-guilty verdict does not mean that Blake did everything right. But from what we know of the evidence, it would have been a grave injustice to convict him of murder. He made a split-second decision while Kaba was threatening the lives of his fellow officers. The prosecution claimed that Blake murdered Kaba through ‘anger and annoyance’. While we do not have access to the entirety of the prosecution’s case, from what we do know, there is scant evidence that Blake acted in anger.

Ever since that fateful day two years ago, protesters, politicians and commentators have peddled a simplistic and completely misleading narrative. They have presented Kaba as an innocent victim of a racist police force. At every stage, they have insisted that this was yet another example of the systemic racism that is said to blight the lives of black people. In truth, the case against Blake was driven less by evidence than by the poisonous creed of identity politics.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.