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The grim attempt to turn Chris Kaba into Britain’s George Floyd

Today’s phoney anti-racists only want to sow fear and division.

Tom Slater

Tom Slater
Editor

Topics Identity Politics UK

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The killing of Chris Kaba has pulled back the veil on British society, but not in the way ‘anti-racist’ activists are making out. The shooting dead of 24-year-old Kaba by armed police officer Martyn Blake in 2022 followed by Blake’s acquittal on murder charges this week have not revealed the profound sickness at the heart of our supposedly ‘systemically racist’ society. But they have revealed the profound sickness at the heart of contemporary ‘anti-racism’, whose primary role today is sowing division among the population and promoting a sense of permanent racial peril among ethnic-minority Brits.

The speed with which Kaba’s grisly end was reflexively presented as a racist killing was stunning. His body was barely cold before all the usual suspects took to social media, the comment pages and the streets to say, or at least heavily imply, that Kaba – a black young man from south London – had been murdered by a racist white cop. London mayor Sadiq Khan responded to the lethal shot taken by one of this own officers not by seeking to calm tensions, encouraging people to wait for the facts to emerge, but by waxing lyrical about the ‘grave concerns and impact of Chris’s death on black Londoners’ and the ‘pain and fear it has caused’. ‘As the terrible fate of Chris Kaba shows, people can lose their lives even when going about their daily lives’, said Labour MP Diane Abbott, blasting the media for ignoring ‘inconvenient truths’ about black people’s experiences.

Coming a little more than two years after the Black Lives Matter movement went global, Kaba’s death was leapt upon by the Great and Good. It was as if they were all secretly, grimly excited to have their own George Floyd on their hands. Mind, the mental-health charity, felt moved to tweet the words ‘racial trauma is real’, and offer support to those ‘triggered’ by Kaba’s killing. A few months later, the University of Greenwich, its silence hitherto deafening, weighed in, describing Kaba as a ‘musician and aspiring architect’. It even mentioned Floyd by name: ‘Two years ago, following the murder of George Floyd, our university committed to do more to eliminate institutional racism… It is essential that we all continue to be honest and humble about the challenges we face about the work that needs to be done and unapologetic in fighting for equity and social justice.’

As is often the case, it fell to author and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu – name No1 in the ‘race debate’ section of every TV-news producer’s Rolodex – to say the quiet part out loud. ‘Chris Kaba was murdered by the police’, she tweeted a full two days after his death, when we knew next to nothing of the details. ‘It was an unjustified, unprovoked and unlawful killing. He was 24. A black man killed by the Met Police. If he were white he would be alive’, she said. This was also the view of protesters across the country, who turned out in city centres to chant ‘No justice, no peace’ and other BLM standards.

To call all this ‘irresponsible’ is to let these activists off the hook. This was grotesque opportunism. Immediately after Kaba’s death, all we knew was that he had been shot following a police pursuit of a ‘suspect vehicle’ but was later found to have been unarmed. His killing was undoubtedly cause for deep public concern. Any time a life is taken by law enforcement there must be the utmost scrutiny. But demands for accountability were not what were being made here. The anti-racist set simply folded Kaba’s death into their favoured narrative – that another innocent black man had been slain by a racist cop – before any investigation could get its boots on.

That narrative imploded this week. Firearms officer Martyn Blake was acquitted of murder by a jury of his peers following less than three hours of deliberation. They saw footage and heard testimonies that painted a very different picture. Police had begun following Kaba’s Audi Q8 because it had been linked to a firearms incident the previous day. They surrounded the vehicle, blocking Kaba’s path in what’s known as a ‘hard stop’, shouting ‘armed police’ and demanding to see his hands. Kaba resisted, ramming the Audi repeatedly into the police cars in an attempt to break free. Blake pulled the trigger, saying he feared for his fellow officers’ lives.

Everyone involved, and anyone with any humanity, wishes that that encounter in Streatham Hill that night had ended with an arrest rather than an autopsy. Kaba’s death has devastated his family and friends. For his part, Blake told the jury he thinks about the shooting every single day. But this was not the story of a black man losing his life as he went about his daily life, as Diane Abbott memorably put it. This was a violent, dangerous situation in which a split-second decision was made, and which a jury has now deemed to be lawful, if awful. Those pundits now pontificating on the airwaves, asking why Blake didn’t simply shoot out Kaba’s tires or somehow deliver him a devastating but non-lethal wound, should probably stick to watching movies.

If Blake’s acquittal isn’t enough to make the identitarians reassess their initial rush to judgement, you’d hope the revelations about Kaba’s life of crime are. Following the trial, and the lifting of reporting restrictions, we suddenly learned that Kaba was a core member of the notorious 67 – a gang / drill-music collective that has terrorised south London for years now. Six days before his death, Kaba was caught on CCTV shooting a rival multiple times in a crowded east London nightclub, causing panic on the dancefloor. Had Kaba survived, he would almost certainly be in prison for attempted murder. Reportedly, the aspiring architect and family man we’ve heard so much about was also a career criminal alleged to be running a protection racket and subject to a domestic-violence protection order.

None of this has any bearing on whether Kaba’s killing was lawful or legitimate. The jurors were barred from learning about his criminal exploits, not least because Blake was unaware of them as well at the moment he pulled the trigger. But it does cast an unforgiving light on those who have tried to take the dreadful killing of an admittedly hardened criminal and turn it into a morality tale about the treatment of all black people in British society. Some of the coverage since the verdict – with BBC and Guardian journalists dispatched to Brixton and Croydon to talk to self-appointed ‘community leaders’ about the ‘trauma’ being felt among black south Londoners – has been downright unseemly, and borderline racist. A tragic but explicable police shooting is being used to spread baseless fear about racist killer cops, and conflate the experience of black Brits with that of violent criminals.

For their part, the activists have only doubled down. ‘Our lives will never matter to this system’, said a member of a group calling itself Justice for Chris Kaba, outside the Old Bailey on Monday. ‘This is injustice’, thundered TV’s Dr Shola. ‘Martyn Blake killed Chris Kaba in cold blood but because he’s white and cloaked in authority by the institutionally racist Met Police, he’s been acquitted of killing an unarmed black civilian… The system isn’t broken – it’s working exactly as it should.’ This lurid, dystopian vision would make no sense if it were being projected on to America, let alone Britain, where police shootings are in some years as low as zero.

The attempt to turn Chris Kaba into Britain’s George Floyd has, for now, run aground the facts. But I fear we are still heading recklessly towards our own Poundshop version of America’s racial mania. In which The Narrative conquers all before it. In which addressing genuine racial injustice and inequality takes a backseat to doom-laden sermons about the eternal stain of racism. In which a profound racial pessimism turns progress into a dirty word. In which black people are lumped together in the name of equality, and division is sown in the name of unity. It’s high time we pulled back from this.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater

Picture by: Getty.

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Topics Identity Politics UK

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