Jun 2, 2020
Justice is still not being delivered for black families in the UK by the media #BlackoutTuesday
The murder of George Floyd was an inhuman crime which should shock any person of conscience into reflecting on the suffering which black communities around the World still face to this day. Seeing police forces in America use inexcusable levels of force against protesting civilians in the aftermath of the killing only compounds the deep-rooted nature of the culture which led to his death.
Here in the UK, I have seen the names Nuno Cardoso and Aston McLean being mentioned as examples of black men who died while in contact with the police.
Having written about the deaths of both men when the inquests into their deaths were taking place, this horrific tragedy in America caused me to re-evaluate how I perceived those events at home.
In both cases, no prosecution was ever brought, nor was any police officer arrested as part of an investigation. Police authorities and the watchdog conducted investigations behind closed doors and later announced they had cleared of all the officers involved of any blame.
It is right that we look again at cases where two families had to have their grief compounded by the knowledge that the loss of their loved one would not be marked with any kind of judicial process.
There are a plethora of shocking statistics about justice inequality in the UK which have been mentioned by various people today:
White offenders have had a consistently lower average custodial sentence length (ACSL) for indictable offences than ALL other ethnic groups since 2014.
A higher proportion of prosecutions in the Black and Mixed ethnic groups were against children, 13% and 14% respectively, compared to 5% for White defendants.
Black and brown people account for half of all young people in jail right now, in a period in which the population of young offenders has fallen by two thirds over the past 13 years, with the proportion of young offenders, black young offenders doubling in that same period whereas their whereas their white counterparts have seen a roughly 70% fall in their numbers in youth offender institutes.
Clearly more families in the black community than just Nuno Cardoso and Aston McLean’s families have had to experience a poorer quality of justice than privileged white people in the UK are accustomed to expect.
The justice system is not the only institution which is failing to deliver equality for black communities, and working in the media we can see how much needs to be done to tell their stories and diversify the workforce.
Working in an agency, I can routinely see stories put on to the wires which are about black families being less likely to be picked up and included in reports carried by national newspapers.
A perfect example of a story which, for a long time, did not receive the coverage it merited was the tragic death of Joy Morgan, a 20-year-old student midwife who was murdered and found in woodland.
Whereas the equally tragic death of Louise Smith, a 16-year-old from Havant who was also murdered and found in woodland, received widespread and daily coverage during a two-week search, Joy Morgan’s killing failed to receive anywhere near as much coverage.
In my view Joy’s story was only given justice when Cherry Wilson for the BBC created this incredible documentary on the investigation and the trial.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p07ltjts/newsbeat-documentaries-the-murder-of-joy-morgan
In the BBC documentary, Joy Morgan’s mother, commenting on the lack of coverage, said: “she couldn’t sell news, because if she could have sold the news with all that stuff behind her, gang warfare, guns, drugs and all the rest of it, they would have stuck her little black beauty on the telly”
Joy Morgan, Nuno Cardoso and Aston McLean all received relatively little press coverage and Joy’s mother’s words are a reminder that while we all must demand justice for George Floyd’s family, there are so many others who continue to be failed due to institutions which discriminate based on race. #BlackoutTuesday
