Veteran community activist/historian Bro Cecil Gutzmore dissects Crime & Policing historically and in light of the Sewell Commission Report
This is a BTWSC/African Histories Revisited Open Voice Open Space presentation, where we facilitate spaces for pundits and commentators to have their say.
Now that the noise surrounding the Tony Sewell Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report for Boris Johnson’s government has quietened down, veteran community activist, historian and former university lecturer Bro Cecil Gutzmore, will provide a critical, analysis not only of the Sewell Commission report, but also the role of PM Boris Johnson, former PM aide Dominic Cummings and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick within Britain’s Crime & Policing narrative, and how that inter-plays with the British African communities.
This presentation will focus on the contrast and connection between the following:-
1. Claims/assertion by the Sewell Commission relating to “Crime & Policing”
1.1. This chapter aims to demonstrate what drives these disparities and propose ways of addressing them with a focus on 4 areas: [including] re-establishing mutual trust between communities and police service areas:
1.2. The data consistently highlights the over-representation of ethnic minority groups – both as perpetrators and victims – when it come s to hate crime, violent crime and drug-related offences. Police workforce diversity figures… remain low. Past injustices still loom large in perception of the police in for some ethnic minority Britons, especially Black Caribbean people.
2. Now historical remarks from within the Afrikan-Caribbean Community relating to “Crime & Policing”
2.1. “… Stuart Hall reminded us that in the 1950s and ’60s the police were saying of the West Indian community that we were particularly law-abiding. As late as 1967 when I went to work in Lambeth, the Brixton police said that there were only two problems they had withWest Indians. First, the police wanted them to solve their domestic affairs, which as the police they could not do, and second black people had noisy parties at weekends! As far as crime was concerned the police reported no problem. I wonder if anybody would say such a thing about Brixton today. If that is so, it’s a powerful comment on what society has done to Black People between 1967 and 1986 [Not to mention 2020/21] if we believe what we are told, we have changed from a law-abiding set of people into people who commit crimes and are bursting to riot.”
By George Greaves in The Roots of Urban Unrest, J. Benton and J. Solomos, Editors, Pergamon Press, 1987, 99
The monstrously false nature of the narrative that racist Perfidious Albion has mobilised the
Askaris of the Dr Tony Sewell chaired Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparity is what is at state.
Cecil Gutzmore (August 2021)
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