Black coordinator of UK “Million People March” threatened with arrest
A British black community activist has accused the MET police of discrimination after he was threatened with arrest and prosecution for organising an upcoming anti-racism protest march in London.
Hinds is one of many campaigners who had called for people to walk together in Notting Hill last Sunday, the first day of the west London district’s eponymous carnival, which is cancelled this year due to the current pandemic.
He explained that “the Million People March” was imagined to revive the original spirit of the carnival, which began as an attempt to resolve racial tensions in the capital, specifically after the pressures the country has experienced for the incessant racial inequalities that, miserably, are still commonplace in 2020.
“It is to tackle systemic racism – institutional racism – and it’s simply to address that because all too often we are having inquiries and commissions that are saying the same thing but are seldom followed through … there is no change,” Hinds said.
“But what we are trying to say here is that this time it’s different. For the first time, we’ve got a significant amount of white people supporting a black cause and joining up and calling for change. That’s a beautiful spirit.”
Ken Hinds has then inspired a legal challenge against the London Metropolitan police after some police agents told him he was not qualified to call a demonstration because of the COVID-19 preventive measures, as he was not “a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution, a public body, or a political body. What this means is that you are encouraging anyone attending to commit an offence contrary to [Health Protection] regulations 5 and 8,” declared a trainee commander in an email to Hinds a few days ago.
The email explained to Hinds that he could also be inspected for offences under the Serious Crime Act “relating to encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence”, simply because he tried to organise the demonstration planned for the 30th of August. “You may have already committed an offence under the 2007 act by promoting the event,” it read.
Hinds was also threatened with arrest after he asked the Met police in London to help facilitate the peaceful planned march.
Lochlinn Parker, of ITN solicitors, who is representing Hinds, declared: “My client is baffled by the Met police’s approach. It seems to be more than a coincidence that it’s happening on the weekend when the Notting Hill carnival was due to take place.”
Yesterday, Hinds’ lawyer sent a letter to Scotland Yard before action, the first stage of a judicial review. It pointed out that Communities Against Violence, a registered community interest company set up by Hinds and other people who joined his cause, was focused on changing the law around racism – an explicitly political goal.
The letter also pointed out that, while the black-led organisation had been threatened with arrest, no white-led protests had faced the same procedures/menaces in the past month, a disparity it asserted to be highly discriminatory.
Recently, the Met police have begun to clamp down on events that break the governmental anti-COVID-19 regulations after the closure of nightclubs led to a series of illegal raves around the UK. From Friday on, those facilitating or organising any unlawful gatherings of 30 people or more – including protests – may face a fine of up to £10,000.
The coordinator of Netpol, Kevin Blowe, who also monitors policing, claimed that he was looking out for instances of the police using the new measure to crack down on protests. “In this particular instance, it’s because it is associated with carnival, and they have convinced themselves that it’s an alternative to the carnival. That’s the alarming thing, the alarming factor of the police deciding what is or isn’t an article 11 [right to] protest.”
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