People power

What do you do when no one in power is on your side?

On belatedly watching Mangrove, the first in the BBC's Small Axe film series, I was captivated by the performance of the actor playing Darcus Howe. The poetry of his speech and the conviction of his actions was astonishing. Many years ago -- but decades after the events portrayed in Mangrove -- I used to sub-edit the real Howe's writing. It was not typically the devastatingly precision-guided discourse seen in the film but it had much of the idiosyncratic tenor and accidence, perhaps a legacy of his Trinidadian upbringing. The black-rights campaigner was in his later years by then but still radiated wisdom and conspicuous virtue. He was a gentle and patient man towards the novice journalist, but it was quite clear that he believed everything he wrote and did was right -- or that he didn't trouble himself to write or do anything that wasn't.

In Mangrove, Howe's eloquence is redemptive. The film, directed by Steve McQueen, depicts the Metropolitan police's sustained and malevolent campaign of intimidation and harassment against a Notting Hill restaurant, Mangrove, that had become a meeting place and community centre for the Caribbean immigrant families in that area of west London and was central to the birth of the carnival. It was run by Frank Crichlow, who is portrayed as a somewhat accidental community leader. The plod continually raided the place, always without success, and finally, when Howe and others marched to protest against their appalling behaviour, charged the "Mangrove Nine" with riot and affray.

The film brilliantly depicts the indignation, fury and terror that must overwhelm you when the establishment closes ranks, unjustly and immorally, against you. What can you do when the judge is pretending that a police constable's word must, by definition, be beyond question. However, Howe meticulously exposes the fault lines and inconsistencies in the police accounts, ultimately ridiculing the witless officer in the eyes of the jury. And that point struck me like a sledgehammer -- it is only when the man or woman on the street, the outsider, has a say that justice is done.

I imagine Neville and Doreen Lawrence must have felt a little like Crichlow, who continued to be victimised by the Met after his acquittal, finally receiving £50,000 but never the apology that was what he most wanted. The circumstances are different: the police were not the original aggressors but rather colluders in the failure to secure justice for the bereaved parents. I imagine the family and friends of Jean-Charles de Menezes must have too, after he was shot dead in cold blood in front of Tube passengers for the crime of looking slightly like a terrorist who may have lived near him.

The Met office who was gold commander that day is now head of the Met. I cannot imagine how Cressida Dick believed herself worthy to spend one more day as a policewoman after being responsible for an innocent young man's killing; how she thinks she is the right person to lead the force is baffling. But that's the unfortunate paradox of the police, MPs and others in power over us: the people who want to do it are generally the last people we'd want to do it, and the people who would do the job most diligently, honestly and humbly do not feel comfortably about setting themselves up in a position of authority over their peers.

Dick's predecessor was Bernard Hulk Hogan Howe, a ferrety little creature with a policeman's sharp eye: a former colleague of mine who encountered him at a police bravery do said he was was meticulous in checking thoroughly and repeatedly that she had no concealed weapons or drugs down the front of her dress.

I did not want him to be the country's most senior police officer. I do not want Dick to be it now. Is it conceivable that anyone who knows what happened with Jean-Charles would consent to her baffling promotion? No. This is wrong.

We need some sort of citizen involvement. Citizen panels are becoming popular in many countries for making civic devisions. Bringing ordinary people in from outside the institutions is the only way to break the closed-ranks wall of blank injustice.