It Happens Here Too

Dear IRR News subscriber,

As the world wakes up to police racism following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, activists and campaigners are working tirelessly to draw attention to the long histories and present day realities of the violence of police racism in the UK – it happens here, too.

This week, we publish up-to-date statistics on deaths in custody in the UK of people from a BAME, refugee or migrant background, compiled from IRR News coverage and media releases by Inquest. We have found that since September 2014 there have been sixteen deaths involving the police, nine in prisons and fifteen in immigration detention. Alongside the lists of custody deaths, we publish a comment piece that highlights restraint concern, the frequency with which mental illness is part of the scenario and continued police impunity – not one officer has been convicted since the IRR started collecting figures on black deaths in 1969.

The Black Lives Matter movement has provoked many revelations and discussions of institutional racism in various fields, which we document in a special BLM roundup, alongside our regular calendar of racism and resistance. Watch IRR director Liz Fekete discuss the current situation in the US at a recent Global Justice Now seminar with Abdul Alkhalimat and Walden Bello.

In order to further contribute to this important political moment as resistance against police racism is coming to the fore, we highlight here key IRR anti-racist educational resources. We have also freed up a collection of Race & Class articles on policing and the carceral state in the US and the UK, featuring seminal writers including A. Sivanandan, Angela Davis, Micol Seigel and Lee Bridges. See our twitter threads, one on the UK and one on the US for further information, as well as anti-racist archival footage on @IRR_News.

IRR News team

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