When my friend was murdered some people tried to say it was motivated by racism.
The National Front even had my (white British) friend’s photo on the their website, alongside 3 of the 6 murderers’ police mugshots (black British & mixed race British).
Unsurprisingly, the racism-as-motivation stuff was bollocks, 2 of the 6 were white British, the minor who instigated the attack and continued to commit violent crime after incarceration and the only one who actually showed remorse and cooperated with the police, who was an adult. The girl was mixed race but
the NF didn’t mention her, presumably because she disrupted their overall political narrative, which was creating division by pretending that hoardes of scary black youths were targeting nice middle class white boys.
The National Front posted a half story because the whole story, one of children growing up with inadequate parental supervision, inadequate education, inadequate social services supervision and inadequate policing on a deprived South London estate wasn’t a convenient one.
Those children grew into teens who wandered the central London streets, taking drugs and committing petty crimes in an unhealthy, ever escalating group dynamic that desensitised them to other people’s humanity. Once the violence began it continued until my friend was dead.
They weren’t even a gang, just two groups of three friends who vaguely knew each other from the estate and one group encountered the other mid-crime and joined in.
My friend was in the wrong place at the wrong time, could’ve been anyone really, he and his mate looked like easy targets for a robbery but didn’t have anything worth stealing, so they beat both of them unconscious and threw them in the river.
There are many parallels with Brianna’s story, including that one of my friend’s murderers, like Girl X, had told some of the others that he had murdered a couple of times before. As with Girl X the police were unable to find evidence of those crimes and the claims were just stories, violent fantasies to impress and intimidate others into committing real crimes.
The big difference is that my friend’s murder was not premeditated, although some of the 6 were out that night with the intent of committing violent robbery.
No text message evidence back in 1999, of course.
That some people seek to politicise Brianna’s murder by turning it into a convenient, shallow stereotype of hate-crime rather than seek an understanding of all the factors that made Brianna vulnerable and desensitised Brianna’s murderers to human suffering to the point they cheerfully and fatally brutalised a vulnerable person for no real reason beyond violence for violence sake is depressingly similar to how the NF sought to politicise my friend’s murder more than 20 years ago.