This week the IRR’s Liz Fekete reports on a symposium on ‘Policing Communities: Race, Class and the State’ which was organised by the Institute of Race Relations and the Power, Conflict and Justice Research Group at Edge Hill University, in conjunction with the Tottenham Defence Campaign. Aisha Maniar reports on a press conference on how the use plastic bullets could fuel racial tensions and we also publish Clara Reilly’s (United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets) speech in full.

Please also read a blog by Liz Fekete written for the Open Society Foundation on ‘The Truth About Far-Right Violence in Europe‘.

And in news from across the UK, the family of Mark Duggan today witnessed the coroner presiding over an inquest hearing into Mark’s death threaten the Independent Police Complaints Commission with legal action for their failure to release the evidence they have collected so far. The family of Sean Rigg have heard two police officers accused of ‘deliberately misleading’ the jury at the inquest into Sean’s death at Southwark Coroner’s Court. And another inquest jury hearing about the circumstances surrounding the death of Kassa Osebu, who was found hanged in his cell at Leeds prison in September 2007, has been told that a number of injuries on his body did not appear to be self-inflicted.

Harmit Athwal,

Editor, IRR News