[Gun-Crime, a licence to kill]

All gun-crime is linked to the crack trader. Crack is the drug of choice for black people. Therefore all gun-crime is linked to black people. Such is the argument that defines black-on-black gun-crime, a label which opens the gate of hell for blacks, especially Jamaicans.

Hell is British prisons populated disproportionately by Jamaicans, victims of a criminal justice system staffed by individuals drunk on the dregs of an ideology that defines Jamaicans as lesser beings. Hell is British media, which under the pretext of criminal reportage provides fuel for a police-led propaganda campaign, the daily-hate, against Jamaicans. Above all, hell is the licence any white racists have to kill blacks courtesy of the camouflage with which the label gun-crime proves them. Sounds dramatic, where’s the beef?

The beef is police automatic assumption that any homicide involving firearms and black victims is a black-on-black rather than a white-on-black gun-crime. The Byfield double homicide is a good example.

An as yet unknown assailant shot Bertram Byfield, 41, and his daughter, seven-year-old Toni-Ann at his flat in Kensal Green, northwest London on September 14, 2003.

To date police have not released any information to indicate they have evidence that might help identify the Byfield assailant. Neither have they reported finding anything suggesting a motive for the homicides. Therefore it is safe to assume they remain clueless about two key elements of any successful criminal investigation: the assailant profile and motive.

Without knowing the assailant profile and motive, police informed the press that the homicides were the result of a black-on-black gun-crime. Consequently, they are looking for a black assailant, which they claim might be a woman (News of the World, 12/10/03).

By focusing solely on hunting down a black assailant, police block the road to any other line of investigation. Thus ruling out the possibility of catching two other likely suspects: white cocaine traffickers or white racists.

The police have been swift to claim Mr Byfield has done time for crack dealing. The raw material used to manufacture crack is cocaine. White traffickers smuggle most cocaine entering Britain. They sell the cocaine to blacks involved in the manufacture and sale of crack. The Byfield homicides might possibly be the result of a cocaine deal gone wrong.

White gunmen might have slaughtered Bertram and Toni-Ann Byfield safe in the knowledge the police would be looking for black suspects.

Such gunmen would not have been the first white individuals to rely on racist policing when committing murders. Two American examples are enlightening. In October 1989, Charles Stuart killed his wife for her life insurance. Stuart, a 29-year-old white businessman, told police that “a black carjacker killed his pregnant wife, Carol” and shot him. Once evidence emerged that implicated Stuart as the real killer, he committed suicide (The New York times, 5/12/02).

In October 1994, Susan Smith, a 23-year-old mother of two rolled her car into a pond in Union County, South Carolina. Smith’s two sons were in the car. Smith told police she had been carjacked by a black man. She later confessed to killing her children, Michael, 3, and 14-month-old Alex (CNN.com July 6, 2001). Union City administrator, Charlie Potts, called Smith a “very clever young lady” for choosing such a popular stereotype (Herald-Journal 7/18/95).

Other possible suspects for the Byfield homicides ruled out by police assumptions about gun-crime are white racists. Police are not alone among British racists with a penchant for inflicting violence on blacks.

In 1999, David Copeland, a 24-year-old engineer assistant, exploded two bombers in Asian and black communities. Copeland wanted “ to stir up a racial war’ (The Guardian 8/06/00). He targeted a third bomb at gay revellers.

A second racist, David Tovey, 37, amassed guns and explosives with the intention to kill Asians and blacks (The Guardian 23/11/02). Police did not refer to Tovey’s possession of illegal firearms as gun-crime.

Is police lack of success in solving so-called black-on-black homicides due to such crimes being in fact white-on-black murders? In other words, police failure to solve such murders might be less to do with black people refusal to come forward as witnesses and informants and more to do with police assumptions about the killers’ racial profile.

Did a Copeland or Tovey type racist kill the black teenagers Charlene Ellis, 18, and her cousin, Letisha Shakespeare, 17, outside a new year’s party in Aston, Birmingham in January 2003?

Post-war British history is littered with examples of police reluctance to acknowledge instances of white-on-black violence. Their refusal to accept the 1958 Notting Hill riots was racially motivated was just the precursor to them claiming the 1981 New Cross massacre of thirteen black teenagers was perpetrated by black arsonists. That is a black-on-black crime. To date no one has ever been charged for the New Cross massacre, just as few people are ever charged for so-called black-on-black gun-crime.

The Byfield and similar homicides cry out for a change of investigative emphasis: less focus on black-on-black and instead more white-on-black, where possible suspects could be racist and white cocaine traffickers or dealers. Such a change in emphasis might free Jamaicans from the hell of racist policing; racist murderers not to mention the media’s daily hate campaign.