[White-on-white gun crime, it's real]

Two teenagers enter a jeweller store in Arnold, Nottingham on September 30, 2003. Minutes later Marian Bates, 64, lies dead from the single gunshot wound in her chest. She dies protecting her daughter, Xanthe, the intended target of the bullet. Her husband, Victor and Xanthe have facial injuries. In this particular homicidal encounter, all five participants are white; a handgun, the deadly weapon. Is Mrs Bates’ courageous and selfless death a white-on-white gun crime?

As a label, the exact meaning of white-on-white gun crime is problematic. First, a common-sense understanding of gun crime links it exclusively to a particular “race”: black people. “Yardie-style” black-on-black gun crime is public enemy number two, “after international terrorism,” according to detective chief superintendent John Coles (The Guardian 14/06/03). The affect of such police propaganda, when looking at gun crime, makes the label “white-on-white” appears strange. Consequently, in determining whether the Bates homicide is a gun crime, the first problem to overcome is the strangeness of the label: white-on-white.

The second problem is to find the meaning of gun crime. No laws exist, neither common law nor statutory, which refer specifically to gun crime. However, Operation Trident, established in 1998, is a special police anti-black-on-black gun crime squad. Trident is headed by John Coles and chaired by Lee Jasper, a police-paid black adviser appearing as civil rights campaigner. In spite of Coles and Jasper’s frequent references to gun crime, neither of them has defined it. Therefore in order to see what the phrase gun crime could possibly mean it is necessary to look in brief at the laws governing possession and use of firearms.

The Firearms Act 1968 and its subsequent amendments set out the laws which govern possession, sale and use of guns in England and Wales. With the exception of certain airguns, it is illegal to own any gun without a firearm certificate. Even when legally owned, the law is strict about how, when and where owners use their guns. For example, using a legally owned gun to endanger life is unlawful. So is causing someone to have fear of violence, even with an imitation gun.

Breaches of the Firearms Act 1968 normally occur within the context of the commission of other offences such as armed robbery. Take the Bates homicide. The teenagers enter the Bates’ jewellery store and demand that the owners hand them their property. The owners refused. The teenagers attacked them with a crowbar and a gun. As a result they commit a number of unlawful acts not least of which are manslaughter or murder, actual or grievous bodily harm, attempted robbery and offences relating to the possession and used of firearms.

Like all criminal laws, the Firearms Act 1968 is race neutral, it applies to everyone regardless of his race. So too is the mechanics of investigating crimes involving firearms. However, the single distinguishing feature of crimes involving black victims and offenders and firearms is that police “raced” them.

The racialisation of crime is the practice of police propaganda to establish in the public mind a stereotype which links black people to particular crimes: black-only crimes. The only difference between these crimes and ordinary crimes is the labels police attached to them in order to identify them as black-only crime. Gun crime is one such label.

As a label black-on-black gun crime serves to identify the uniqueness of the offence, usually homicide or attempted homicide. The unique characteristics of such offences are that both offenders and victims are black, and a gun is the weapon of choice. This begs the questions that if the decisive factors for black-on-black gun crime are same-race victim and offender and gun violence then why police and press do not describe the Bates homicides as white-on-white gun crime?

The same factors which constitute a black-on-black gun crime are present in the Bates homicide: same-race victim and offender gun related fatality. Like her teenage killers, Mrs Bates is white. A gun is the weapon used by the teenagers to kill her. Therefore the answer is in the affirmative to the question “is the Bates homicide a white-on-white gun crime”.

However since Mrs Bates unfortunate death there has been an ear-rupturing silence from Lee Jasper about the dangers white-on-white gun crime pose to the fabric of society. Paradoxically, John Coles’ prophecy about the plague "Jamaican criminals" will visit upon “the white middle classes....in the home counties” has come to pass but in a form unpredicted by the prescient detective: white criminals gunning down white respectable citizens in suburbia.

With three separate, unrelated incidents of white-on-white gun crimes in different parts of the country in a week, the black community looks forward to the police ending their discriminatory treatment of white suburbia. Surely it is time white communities are policed in the same way as black communities. Now is the time for a Trident Operation to deal with “white-on-white gun crime”. Middle England deserves nothing less than what is available to the black folks of Brixton, Lambeth or Harlesden.