The vast majority of people marching will not be members of BLM and I agree their aims are a bit odd when you read down.
People are marching because they are angry and have had enough.
Yes there are always people who come for a ruck. Did you see the size of the crowds? Thousands. A tiny proportion caused trouble. No, that was not a riot by a long chalk.
So many posts I want to take issue with but tried. So here's just a couple.
'It’s a known fact that gang culture is a problem in London, including young black men. Stop and search is controversial, and I understand that black men don’t want to be searched. Who would? But if someone went on to stab someone, and wasn’t searched, the police would still be criticised for not searching.'
What about all the other gangs? There is loads of dodgy stuff going on in other groups. Black people are targeted by the colour of their skin. Nice car? Drug dealer. Stopped. White person in a nice car? Not stopped. This causes resentment. Of course it does.
'An earlier poster said that stop and search had been proven not to work in reducing knife crime, it worked in Glasgow, former murder capital of Europe, BUT only as part of a well funded Violence Reduction Programme(which i believe was copied from Chicago)'
Did this initiative in Glasgow mainly focus on the black people there? Guessing not. If it's even handed it's a different argument.
Black men are twice as likely to die at the hands of the police than white men. Reports have said that excessive force features in these incidents due to sterotypes about black men being unstable and violent.
The met, my police, have shit form, at least when it comes to certain groups. They have lied about circs, more than once. They have covered up. They have acted in ways that are totally immoral. They have shared info with the media when they shouldn't.
Do you want a list?
We can start with Ian Tomlinson, go through jean Charles menezes, past John warboys, consider the failings of the sapphire unit, consider the disproportinate deaths of black men who come into contact with them Vs white, we can swing by the women in green activism who were misled for years by undercover officers, maybe have a little look at Stephen Lawrence and how for years the police put the family under surveillance rather than investigating the murder.... It really troubles me this attitude of the authorities must be right. Because this force has been shown repeatedly to be very much less than perfect. Very much indeed.
When you see the police at a protest cover their faces and take their ID numbers off. You know things are not good. That was the situation with the protest where Ian Tomlinson died. And they lied and lied and lied until a video came out.
I am a white, middle class, privately educated woman. I have had a VERY mixed experience with the police. I don't trust them at all. And I am of a group that they should treat relatively well. Fuck knows how bad it is for others.