The shameful exploitation of Chris Kaba’s death

Why exactly is it that the journalists and politicians who claim to be most proud of multicultural, multiethnic Britain seem to be the ones most determined to tear it apart?

To read the newspapers, you might sometimes think a deep cover cell of white separatists is secretly running the show. Why else would left wing politicians and newspapers who supposedly want us to pull together as one spend their time pumping out racial agitprop in their never-ending search for attention? Why else would they emphasise division and mistrust, undermine institutions, and blatantly mislead people about the country they live in if not to advance a cause which benefits from these things?

I ask this because the coverage of the police shooting of Chris Kaba looks almost like a concerted effort on the part of certain journalists and politicians to actively stir conflict. Kaba was shot by a Metropolitan police officer after a car chase ended with his car being hemmed in by two police vehicles. Protests were held across the country as outraged commentators stressed the most important fact of the case: Kaba was an ‘unarmed black man’. Racism was surely to blame for his death.

It was left to others to introduce certain awkward details into this narrative, such as the observation, made by a bystander, that Kaba was unarmed only in the sense that a ton of metal directed towards officers does not technically qualify as a weapon. An eyewitness stated that armed police repeatedly issued instructions until Kaba ‘smashed into’ a vehicle, then reversed for a second go. From where the witness stood, his behaviour was dangerous: ‘from what I could see he could have killed one of the officers with his car. I don’t understand why he didn’t stop’. At this point, a single shot was fired.

It is possible that the officer who fired the shot will end up being charged. We can’t say with absolute certainty that they didn’t in some way act wrongly. But we certainly can’t say with any confidence that they did. The evidence we have, as thin as it is, tells a sad but simple story. It’s just not a narrative certain quarters have chosen to promote. Instead, we’ve been treated to a constant drip of innuendo. Would Kaba be alive if he was white? Is the Met still institutionally racist? Will justice be denied?

This is likely to end now. Chris Kaba’s family has seen the body-worn footage held by the Met. They still want ‘justice’, for the IOPC to conduct investigations, and to know if the officer will be charged, but will ‘take a break and take a step back’. It will be difficult for agitators to twist their words from here. Whatever the footage showed, it doesn’t seem to have confirmed a version of events dramatically out of line with existing police statements; we would surely know by now if it did.

Without fuel for their pyre, the commentators attempting to use the shooting for their own purposes will move on. If they’re looking for the elusive ‘spark’ of revolution, the story that finally delivers a popular swell of support for the politics they demand, they won’t find it here. That doesn’t mean they won’t keep searching. What these vultures want more than anything else – what they go to bed at night praying for – is for the UK to finally have a George Floyd moment of its own. Something that they can point at as proof of Britain’s racist soul, and something they are denied by the simple fact that Britain is a pretty good place for people of all colours and creeds to live in.

And because we know they will behave in this way, the Kaba incident does highlight one genuine need for police reform: the release of body-worn footage should become a standard measure after police shootings. If our guardians act wrongly, we should know about it. And when others claim that they do, we need to be able to evaluate the evidence for ourselves.