DANIEL HANNAN: Officer who shot Kaba should never have been on trial

Walking through Trafalgar Square on Monday, I happened upon a group of ‘Justice for Chris Kaba’ protesters.

All, as far as I could tell, were white, and most were carrying Black Lives Matter placards from four years ago.

They drummed and chanted and waved their banners. But they did not seem remotely interested in the details of the case. Rather, they started from the presumption that a black man killed by the police must be a victim of racism, and reasoned backwards from there.

They were not alone. BBC reporters could not repress a sceptical tone as they reported the verdict. The Guardian informed its readers that the four most recent non-terrorist police shootings all involved black men.

That had, indeed, been their narrative from the start, when former Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott told us that the ‘terrible fate of Chris Kaba’ was the responsibility of a ‘dangerous, repressive government’.

Did they know something that the rest of us did not? How could they be so sure that Kaba was an innocent victim?

Now that the case has ended, several damning facts are in the public domain - facts that were not made available to the jury. 

We now know, for example, that Kaba had a string of convictions, including for violence and for the possession of illegal weapons, dating back to the age of 13.

We know that, just six days before his death, he had shot a rival in a nightclub and that, had he still been alive, he would have been tried for attempted murder.

And, of course, we know about the incident itself. We know that Kaba’s vehicle had been linked to the firing of a gun outside a school the day before - the reason he was stopped - that he refused a police instruction to halt and that he sought to use his car as a battering ram against the officers who had flagged him down.

We know that he was shot by a highly trained officer who had never before fired a bullet during a police action. We know all this because we have numerous recordings, both from bodycams and from a nearby police helicopter. Watching that footage, it is hard not to conclude that charges should never have been brought against Sergeant Martyn Blake. 

Would he have been put through this hellish experience without the racial hypersensitivity that has governed police actions since British protesters got it into their heads that the Met was somehow responsible for killing George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020?

You might argue that prejudice is found on all sides. If the numbskulls in Trafalgar Square started from the presumption that a white copper must be at fault, am I guilty of the opposite prejudice?

No. I am usually a severe critic of the Metropolitan Police. Its officers, being human, can make mistakes. Their motives are not always pure.

But on this occasion there can be little doubt that the policeman was in the right. 

I say this with confidence because the jurors did something that neither Diane Abbott nor the Guardian nor the BLM blockheads did. They watched the footage.

They spent hours poring over every detail of those 13 seconds, sometimes freeze-framing it, sometimes running it in slow motion. And they concluded, quickly and confidently, that Sgt Blake had behaved properly.

They reached this verdict without knowing about Kaba’s gangster past. Our judicial system is very clear on this point. Because it was Sgt Blake, rather than Kaba, who was on trial, the jurors were given no hint as to why Kaba had been so desperate to avoid being stopped (he still had the discharge of a gun on his clothes), let alone about his decade-long criminal past.

Yet even without that knowledge they could see that Sgt Blake had acted in good faith, seeking to protect his fellow officers from a clear and present threat.

How did this case ever come to court? Day after day, month after month, Sgt Blake would wake up to the knowledge that he was on trial for murder, that he might end up (every policeman’s nightmare) in prison. As if that were not enough, he also had a price put on his head by members of Kaba’s gang.

The murder charge against him was so outrageous that other firearms officers laid down their weapons en masse, fearing that they might also be stitched up on politically motivated charges. The shortage became so severe that the last government had to draft in soldiers to plug the gap.

Those firearms officers believed that Sgt Blake’s was not an isolated case. Again and again they had seen cases skewed by imagined racial sensitivities, especially since the unhinged BLM summer of 2020.

Think, for example, of the incident at Manchester Airport in July, where partial footage was shown of a police officer kicking a man, without the earlier film showing that that the man had first violently attacked that officer’s female colleague. That incomplete clip led to protests outside police stations around the North West.

The response of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, when the complete footage emerged, was not to exonerate the officer but to launch an investigation into who had leaked it. As I write, the officer remains under investigation, and no charges have been brought against the men who began the affray.

We have seen the same pattern again and again. The police and local authorities were too frightened to act against grooming gangs for fear of being accused of racism. The Manchester Arena bomber, as the official inquiry heard, tragically went unchallenged by security staff for the same reason.

The police obsession with race began for understandable reasons. In the 1970s and 1980s, police racism was a huge problem. Public order depends on trust – specifically, on the willingness of all communities to talk freely to the cops.

But the answer to racism should have been to make policing equal and predictable, to treat everyone the same regardless of colour. Instead, we toppled into treating people differently. It is hard to imagine a protest in Trafalgar Square, or angry statements by Diane Abbott, had a white criminal been shot while ramming a police car.

The problem can be traced to the 1999 Macpherson Report, which upended centuries of common law by defining a racial crime as any crime so perceived by the victim.

The Macpherson Report was a response to a horrific crime: the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which was followed by a major campaign, led by this newspaper, to bring the killers to justice. Yet in his confused recommendations, Lord Macpherson both accused the police of racism and berated them for refusing to show more cultural sensitivity – ie, he simultaneously told them to treat everyone the same and to treat everyone differently.

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Two-tier policing has been been the problem ever since. We saw it in 2020, when the police cracked down on anti-lockdown protesters while dropping to their knees before BLM protesters. We see it in the refusal to crack down on anti-Israel violence with the same vigour that was deployed after the Southport riots by the far-Right. We see it in outrageous cases such as the shooting of Chris Kaba.

This country has traditionally been distinguished by the happy relationship between the police and civilians. Ever since Sir Robert Peel created the Met in 1829, coppers have been citizens in uniform, with no more power than you or me except insofar as they are temporarily and contingently bestowed by magistrates.

That principle is now in retreat, as police officers feel they must follow the lead of our knee-taking Prime Minister. By heaven, we’ll miss it when it has gone altogether.