On Boxing Day 2003, David Bieber shot dead Ian Blakehurst, a traffic
cop, in east Leeds, northern England. Bieber is, Blakehurst was, white.
On December 2 2004, Bieber began a life sentence for Blakehurst’s
murder. Was his murder a gun crime?
Andy Beckett’s “Death in Woolwich” centres on Daniel
Williams killing Norman Francis in Woolwich, south-east London, on October 15,
2001. Beckett’s alleged theme is each death has outcomes, “aftershocks”.
They affect not only the victim’s family but also everyone involved
(1).
The Metropolitan police force will no longer use the label black-on-black.
The force has used the label to describe shootings involving black victims
and suspects.
How does a service such as the Metropolitan police, famous for its
racism, goes about getting the public to believe its claims about links
between ethnic minorities and certain crimes? It gets the Observer,
a newspaper known for its liberal anti-racist posture, to make them on
its behalf.
If lord Reith is right and “news is the shocktroops of propaganda”
(Taylor 1999:336), then newspapers are the propagandist’s armoured
divisions. Last autumn three well-publicised shootings in Nottingham,
Hoddesdon and Leicester, undermined police stereotype of Jamaicans as
being responsible for firearms related homicides.
In partnership with the Home Office, the Metropolitan police stereotype
Jamaicans as criminals responsible for all gun-crimes. Is the stereotype
a Big-lie?.
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.
Is a homicide involving the use of an AK47
assault rifle or a handgun a gun-crime? Not when it is a “targeted
killing” or “an armed robbery that went wrong”.
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. Is Mrs Bates’
courageous and selfless death a white-on-white gun crime?
