Mek' it Blow: police raid New Cross Jah Shaka Blues Dance (1975)

From the groundbreaking black radical magazine, Race Today (May 1975), a report on 'the atmosphere of tension that has gripped the community of black youth in South London following a police invasion of a blues dance at Malpas Road, New Cross, on Saturday 26th April'. 

'More than 200 young blacks danced to the sound of the popular Jah Shaka at Malpas Road on Saturday/Sunday 26th-27th'. After visiting to demand the sound be turned down, the police 'reinforced in numbers and violent in attitude... ordered everyone to leave the building. One of the organisers who stood at the door was dragged out and thrown into the van. The police proceeded to kick, punch and truncheon people indiscriminately. Not content, they went on to wreck £400 of equipment with their truncheons. Sixteen people were charged with crimes ranging from assault to drunk and disorderly behaviour... one police officer exuding arrogance warned Jah Shaka that the sound was banned from playing in South London'.

'A mass meeting was organised on Monday 28th at the Moonshot Youth Club, New Cross. Some 300 youths attended. They dealt at once with the ban placed on Jah Shaka. They immediately announced details of another party in the area at which Shaka would play'

Undercover with the Bushwackers

Yesterday's Telegraph had an interview with James Bannon, who infiltrated Millwall firm the Bushwackers as an undercover cop in the late 1980s:

'At 7pm on Friday April 3 1987, two novice undercover police officers left Brockley police station for a drive down the Old Kent Road in south London. These were grim miles of looming tower blocks, shuttered shops and graffitied trains clattering above looming arches. It was also the territory of Millwall Football Club and their hooligan firm the Bushwhackers. It was just gone 8pm when the two men entered one of the Bushwhackers’ favourite pubs, The Old Castle...

...total infiltration wasn’t as simple as a handshake. Over the coming months, the two men had to prove their worth. Bannon won the trust of several key individuals by joining them in planned violence in pubs and backstreets. Chris accused his partner of enjoying his role too much.

“Was I a football hooligan?” Bannon asks of himself. “Yes. But I never lost sight of the fact that it was a job. There were parts of it where I laughed more than I’ve ever laughed before. I met people I’d quite happily have had as lifetime friends. But it was a job. You create a role and you live that role – to a point.” But where, exactly, is that point? If he’s drinking with thugs, singing their songs and fighting in the streets with them, how is he not one of them? “If I pick a bat up and run at a load of West Ham fans, there’s no justification in that,” he says. “But if I’m with a group of Millwall fans and a West Ham fan is running at me with a bat, I’m totally within my rights to hit him. That’s the difference.”' (The Undercover Football Hooligan, Telegraph,18 November 2013).

Bannon has written a book about the operation, 'Running with the Firm'. On his account there were four full time undercover cops infiltrating Millwall fans in this period. Alongside recent revelations about infiltration of political activist circles, this is further evidence of the widespread use of this tactic. Similar questions arise - were they just keeping watch, or were they joining in, maybe even initiating trouble as 'agent provocateurs'? And what about the emotional abuse of people they developed relationships with? Bannon says he didn't have a sexual relationship despite falling in love on duty, but it appears from his book that he strung along a woman he identifies as 'Steph'.

This made me laugh in the Telegraph interview: 'Bannon, 48, asks to meet at a café around the corner from the now-empty Brockley police station, above which his small team was based in its earliest weeks. With its artisan flapjacks, this middle-class establishment is not the sort of place that existed when he patrolled the streets in the mid-Eighties. Bannon, it’s easy to tell, is of the old pre-gentrification order...'. Assume they went for a coffee at The Broca, or maybe Browns.

See previously:

May Day 2001: A police spy at the Elephant and Castle
Undercover in East Dulwich

1926 and all that...

Naturally Bannon's book includes accounts of conflict between Millwall and West Ham. And how does he explain this rivalry? Yes this old chestnut: 'hostility developed between two shipyards on either side of the Thames. To the north you had the workforce of the Royal Docks (the claret and blue of West Ham) and to the south, the Millwall, London and Surrey docks (the blue and white of Millwall). When the Millwall shipyard broke the 1926 dockers strike, the anger across the river raised the tensions to boiling point' (p.126).

No, no, no! As shown at Transpontine before, there is no evidence of Millwall or South London dockers breaking the 1926 General Strike. And what's more Millwall dock was on the north bank of the Thames - the club moved from the Isle of Dogs  to South London in 1910 but the docks didn't!

Bubble Matches: the policing of football fans at Millwall and elsewhere

Hot off the press - OK the report has been out nearly a year but I've just noticed it  - Criminalising Football Fans: The Case Against ‘Bubble’ Matches by Peter Lloyd for the Manifesto Club:


'‘Bubble’ match travel amounts to ‘kettling’ on wheels. Travelling fans must be transported on licensed coaches  under police escort, from a designated pick-up point to a designated drop-off point. No independent travel is allowed to the match by car, train, or any other means of transport. Fans often must pick up their tickets on route, for example at a motorway service station at a halfway point. Their freedom of movement is suspended...

...is it fair that the vast majority of supporters, who behave well, should have their freedom to travel to a popular leisure activity curtailed, because of the (increasingly slight) risk that there will be disorder caused by a small number of troublemakers? Bubble match restrictions do not target the minority of troublemakers. Instead, they punish all away fans, and hope to deter the violent minority by doing so. This is surely wrong in principle. Under Britain’s common law, people are treated as innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. People are held to account for their own actions, not punished for the actions of others'.

Examples in the report show that fans travelling to Millwall have been targeted, as well as Millwall fans travelling to away matches:

'For the Millwall match at Leeds on 3 December 2011, coaches had to leave the football ground in London at 5.30am, meeting the police at Woolley Edge Services on the M1 motorway, where pre-paid vouchers were exchanged for match tickets. This was the only place where it was possible to acquire a match ticket, the early kick-off time of 12.30pm added inconvenience for the supporters...'

These tactics make it impossible to do the normal things that people would do when travelling round the country. For instance, what if you were a Millwall fan who wanted to combine going to a Leeds away match with popping in afterwards to see an old friend in Yorkshire? Or if you were a Millwall fan at college in Leeds the only way you could go in the Millwall end at a match would be to travel down to London the night before and then get a 5:30 coach back up.

When police kettle demonstrators my twitter feed is (quite rightly) overwhelmed with outrage. When similar police tactics are applied regularly to thousands of football fans, nobody bats an eyelid. To add insult to injury, football fans are paying for the policing of football grounds through ticket prices - and if the Association of Chief Police Officers had their way they would also be paying for policing of football fans beyond the ground. At Millwall's match at Luton on Saturday I noticed that even Luton fans, no great friends of Millwall's away contingent, chanted 'What a waste of money' when large numbers of police came on to the pitch at the end. They're right and it's their money that's being wasted.

(incidentally this is blowing up to be a big issue right now with Hull City fans facing a 'bubble' for their match next month against Huddersfield - this article quotes one Hull fan: "I live in Huddersfield, so have to come to Hull to go back to a game 10 minutes from my house. Ridiculous!")

Subterranean Greenwich: Spooked Out?

[make sure you read to the end of this post for the updates which explain what really happened]

Subterranean Greenwich is (or maybe was) a fascinating site documenting the history and geography of tunnels, caverns and other hidden underground places in the Greenwich and Kent area. It has been posting regularly up until last week. Now it has vanished.

It you go to its address today (http://subterraneangreeenwich.blogspot.co.uk/) you get a 'blog not found' message (no I didn't mis-spell it - for some reason the url has three e's in Greenwich):

Shortly before the blog went down they posted the following 'On 24 July 2012 the Subterranean Greenwich blog was targeted during a five and a half hour assault by the UK Government's FTAC (Fixated Threat Assessment Centre). The attack started at about 9.50am and ended at 3.20pm - with continuous viewing of dozens of blog posts in this time window...

The FTAC is a special unit staffed by both police officers and forensic psychiatrists/psychologists; its main aim is to pre-empt and prevent attacks on high-profile public figures (including the royal family) by obsessed individuals.

It's sad that the government prefers to sneak in via the back door rather than contacting us directly to ask us about our research - which we're happy to discuss. Why we should be regarded as such a threat remains a complete mystery - although it's likely to be associated with the 2012 Olympics, specifically the events in Greenwich Park'.

Previously Subterranean Greenwich had issued the following: 'Statement on 2012 Olympics: Here at SubG we don't really have any opinion one way or the other on the Olympics; it will soon be over. For some time our hit counter has shown intense research on Greenwich Park coming from the secure government Internet backbone; we have unwittingly become involved in Olympic security. Maybe that's inevitable given the fact that we know more about what's beneath the Park than anyone else alive. What would be nice is a donation (official or unofficial) from the Olympics people to help us with our future research - the blog entries on the Park and environs are the fruit of thousands of hours of unpaid work'.

Does anybody know why the blog has now gone? Did the authors just take it down because they were feeling the pressure? Or did the authorities lean on Google/blogger? What was the nature of the cyber 'attack'? A site being viewed many times wouldn't constitute an attack as such, unless it was designed to somehow limit viewing by other people, but maybe there's more to it. 

Targeting a site like SubG in any way would seem a massive over-reaction, if that is what happened. In the unlikely event that somebody was planning an attack on the Olympics events in Greenwich Park they would presumably have done their homework by now. And no doubt the police will have considered such possibilities. Recent posts have covered subjects such as the death of miners in Plumstead in 1817 and dances in the Blackheath cavern in the mid-19th century - hardly a threat to anybody. Let's hope the blog returns soon.

Update 30 July: Google to blame? I wrote this story because somebody sent me an email telling me that the site was down following above posts. My first reaction was to check on google. Searching under 'subterranean greenwich' the result that came up was http://subterraneangreeenwich.blogspot.com/  (3 e's in Greenwich) - this is still the case (see below accessed just now). Following the link still takes you through to the 'blog removed' message. But if you go to http://subterraneangreenwich.blogspot.com/ the blog is there, albeit with no mention now of unwanted attention from security services. Not sure how google can make a spelling error, but was the site there all along? It's still curious, but not suggestive of a conspiracy. Anyway glad to see the site's there.

Update: 31 July 2012, pm - OK have heard back from Dominic at Subterranean Greenwich and here's the real story - some funny business, but more cock-up than conspiracy:

'Originally I made a very silly mistake in spelling "Greenwich" in the blog title - I used 3 "e"s. I only noticed a few months ago, and built a complete mirror blog with the correct spelling title, and updated both addresses continuously. Google grabbed the wrongly-spelled one and indexed it. A few days ago I pulled the plug on the wrongly-spelled one, which is why the blog appears to be down. It's actually fine - just go here:

http://subterraneangreenwich.blogspot.com/

I'm currently building a brand new home for the blog with a proper domain - it's already up and running, but I'm still in the process of transferring all the old blog posts onto it. You're welcome to go and have a peek. All the posts should be on there within a few days - I'm working several hours a day on it right now.

www.subg.org.uk

It's true that FTAC were sniffing around my ankles - very unpleasant. But they didn't pull the (mis-spelled) blog, I did. Why were they interested? Two possibilities - either because they thought Per and I know too much about tunnels in Greenwich Park and are a danger to this week's multiple royal visitors to the equestrian events there, or because they thought my "campaigning spirit" was spilling over into insanity. They're wrong on both counts'.

History Corner: 1912 Nunhead Tragedies

A hundred years ago, the Old Nun's Head pub was the scene of a bitter inter-family dispute. The story in the South London Press was headlined 'Nunhead schoolgirl's escapade - Publican's daughter's trip to Southend on stolen coppers' (SLP 26 April 1912).

In the children's court at Tower Bridge, twelve year old Nellie Hazell was 'charged by her mother with stealing 20 shillings in coppers from the bar... Mrs Hazell stated that on April 15 she missed four 5s bags of coppers from the bar, and on the same day Nellie did not return from school. On Saturday she heard that Nellie had given herself up at Southend-on-sea'. A few weeks previously she had apparently taken a trip to Hastings in the same way.

The consequences for Nellie were serious. The Magistrate recommended that she be remanded 'with a view to the girl's committal to a school'

Death in police custody

Shortly afterwards another resident of Nunhead Green died in police custody.  Alfred Lockyer (33) 'a carman of 13 Nunhead Green' was arrested for being drunk in charge of a furniture van outside the Duke of Cambridge pub in Hooks Road, Peckham.

Taken to Peckham police station, he was found in the evening to be 'insensible'. His father had come to bail him out, but was refused permission to see him. The Divisional Surgeon ruled that he was 'fit to remain in the cells'. The next morning, a doctor was called for again and Lockyer was moved to Camberwell Infirmary where he died from a fractured skull.

The cause of the injury was not established, and the Coroner refused permission for an acquaintance of the dead man to speak; 'The jury returned a verdict of Accidental death, and added that no blame attached to the police. Lockyer's father complained that the affair was 'shocking' ('Nunhead Man's Death in a Cell', South London Press, 24 May 1912).

Immigration Fishing Expeditions

Last week in New Cross Road, there was a combined police and Borders Agency operation. A witness from South London Solfed describes: 

'On my way to work this morning I found the bus stops around New Cross bus garage swarming with police and UKBA immigration officers. I saw a man being questioned by immigration officials and surrounded by several police under the bus shelter... a bus stopped and people started piling out. I spotted a plain clothes officer (see hoody in pic) eyeing someone up and start moving so I shouted at him. I asked if he’d seen someone he didn’t like the look of and made everyone aware that he was an immigration officer (probably police in hindsight)... The most interesting part of our discussion was when I asked him on what basis he was stopping people. He told me that they were stopping men from African countries such as Ghana as there is a “big problem with them around here”. 

'According to UKBA enforcement guidance and instructions Chapter 31.19 pg 21. “an Immigration Officer (IO)may not stop an individual based upon their racial appearance and race or colour can never be the basis of the IOs “reasonable suspicion” that someone has committed an immigration offence”... So the hooded man was probably police, picking up people based on race to hand over to the Immigration Officers with clipboards. This is known as a Crime Reduction Operation (aka a CROP) and seems, unfortunately, to be legal'. 

I have seen similar operations in New Cross before, as well as in Peckham and at the Elephant and Castle. They are essentially fishing expeditions which rather than responding to crime are focusing on people going about their daily business. People who left their kids at school and set off to work can find themselves suddenly detained because they don't have the correct documents. Of course they are self-justifying in that if you trawl through a group of people you are bound to be able to find some minor ticket offences, drug possession and immigration paper irregularities so that a press release can trumpet that 'X arrests were made', but these do nothing to address the real problems of burglary, rape, robbery and other violent crime that most people would view as priorities.


Another fishing expedition was carried out at the Coronet at Elephant on February 25th, when Latin American people waiting to see Puerto Rican singer Don Omar were targeted. According to a report in community newspaper The Prisma 'a short while before the concert room’s doors opened people were already queuing to go in. Suddenly, they saw how the police began to arrive and walk along the queue line, and all of a sudden they started to ask for ID... they started to separate those who did not have ID and put them into vans'. Around 90 people were detained, and an unknown number were deported (further discussion of this at People's Republic of Southwark). Since when have people in the UK had to carry proof of ID?

There is clearly at the very least an element of racial profiling which determines where these operations take place and who gets viewed as 'suspicious'. No doubt rounding up Australians going to a rugby match would find a fair few overstaying on their visas, but I can't really imagine it happening.

Forest Hill shooting: police story challenged

When a young man was shot and critically injured by police in Stanstead Road, SE23 in February some people believed that it was a simple story of a dangerous knife-wielding criminal being shot by police in self-defence after tasers failed to subdue him. But as I wrote at the time 'the facts of what happened have not yet been independently established. In many previous cases the first version of events reported in the press has turned out to be incomplete and misleading'. According to a report published last night by the Daily Mail, (3 April 2012), the facts may be very different from how they were first presented:

'Police marksmen were accused last night of Tasering a man as he lay grievously wounded in the street after they had shot him four times with live bullets. Witnesses claim they heard one of the 50,000 volt stun guns being discharged after George Asare, 25, collapsed in a pool of blood. One claimed officers repeatedly kicked the suspected knifeman on the ground as they surrounded him in a chaotic confrontation. Medical evidence has emerged that one of at least four Taser shots hit him in the groin, something his family believe was deliberate.


George Asare, shot by police in Forest Hill
(incidentally his father is a well-know TV sports presenter in Ghana)



Last night they demanded answers. His mother, Elizabeth Benin, said: ‘Why wasn’t there a stand-off? I want to know why the police did not try to talk to George. George is not a bad person, he is a good person but he was not well, I don’t understand why they had to shoot him. I just thank God that he was not killed.’

Asare is due to appear before magistrates in Bromley, Kent, today accused of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm to police and affray. He is being held in a secure psychiatric ward at the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley, where he is recovering from his injuries.

The new claims dramatically contradict the original chain of events that emerged in the days after the shooting in Forest Hill, South-East London. It was originally believed that police shot Asare with live rounds only after several Tasers were discharged but failed to restrain him as he threatened them... Asare, a British-born Ghanaian university graduate, was left fighting for his life with wounds to the abdomen, leg, groin and hand in the early hours of February 19. Local officers attended the suburban street where he lives with his mother after a member of the public dialled 999 to report someone suspected of trying to break into a car...

 A family friend said: ‘George has suffered horrific injuries. The family believe it is the other way around, he was shot and then he was Tasered. Witnesses claim that when police came shots were fired almost immediately. As soon as George hit the ground they surrounded him and started to kick him and then they heard the distinctive pop-pop-pop noise of a Taser.’

A spokesman for the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is investigating the shooting, confirmed that it is looking at the exact sequence of events and appealed for anyone with information to get in touch' [foresthill@ipcc.gsi.gov.uk or on freephone 0800 096 9077].

In my earlier post on the subject I also pointed out that the actions of the person shot as described 'would suggest not a career criminal but a vulnerable adult, for instance with mental health and/or drug and alcohol problems. If that were the case, questions might include whether the person was known to other agencies and whether they had received the support they needed'. The fact that Mr Asare is now in a psychiatric ward indicates that this was indeed the case.

In a week in which evidence has emerged of a Metropolitan Police officer calling a young man a foul racist word which anybody else would get arrested for using, and of one his colleagues kicking another man as he lay on the floor, we now have a suggestion that in the borough of Lewisham a badly injured man lying on the floor may have deliberately been given an electric shock in the groin.