I wish the critics so furious over the perceived two-tier sentencing guidelines were as angry over the statistics that have weighed so heavily against people of colour for a lifetime.
Unless you’ve been living on Mars you will know that people of colour, across the western world, have been profiled, harassed, fitted up, beaten up and even killed by law enforcement forever and a day.
It isn’t even difficult. Visit a library, jump onto Google. Streaming services are full of the dramatisations of the true stories of miscarriages of justice. There is no excuse for being in high office, a broadcaster or even an adult who can read – and not being able to contextualise this debate.
Official UK figures prove offenders from ethnic minorities consistently get longer sentences than white offenders for indictable offences.
I wish the people making so much political capital from a clear misstep by the Sentencing Council would acknowledge as much.
I hope, as this conversation moves into the weekend, the rabble rousers will be as vocal about the fact that Black men have been disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system for decades. That there has been so little balance in that regard is remarkable.
Nor have I seen too much context around the numbers – there for all to see before this Labour government came into power last summer – proving Black men in the UK are 2.4 times more likely than their white counterparts to be arrested.
We all agree that the Sentencing guidelines changes, due to come into force in England and Wales next month, tips things too far the other way in trying to redress the balance.
Of course the ethnicity or faith of an offender shouldn’t be a bigger factor when deciding whether to jail anybody. Every single person should be treated equally under the law.
I just wish the pitchfork-clutching commentators refusing to call off the dogs – even though the Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has challenged the latest guidance – would take a step back.
They won’t of course. Hate has become a business model with the extremists intent on creating fear and loathing, clutching at whatever they can to try and drive a wedge between us.
But there are so many recent examples of the treatment of Black men, by police and the justice system, to back up the statistics.
Like the 2016 case of ex-Aston Villa footballer Dalian Atkinson, unlawfully killed by PC Benjamin Monk who was jailed for eight years.
Monk discharged his Taser three times and kicked Atkinson twice in the head, leaving bootlace prints on the former striker’s forehead, the trial heard.
In 2012, 36-year-old Anthony Grainger was shot by police through the chest as he sat in his car in Cheshire. Detectives believed he and two others were planning to hold up a supermarket and had access to firearms on the evening of 3 March 2012.
No weapons, however, were found in the car and a public inquiry found Greater Manchester Police to blame for his death due to serious flaws in its operation.
I wish the people correctly concerned about two-tier justice would Google those cases and the details of the ones involving Azelle Rodney, Jermaine Baker and so many others over the last 40 years, shot dead by police when not in possession of a weapon. Then make their own minds up.
Rafael Rowe, from south-east London, was one of a trio of men wrongly described as the M25 Three. They were falsely convicted of a series of robberies that left a man dead. Rowe, then aged just 20, was arrested in 1988 and jailed for life in 1990.
Trouble was, four out of five of the surviving victims of the attacks told police at least one of the attackers was White, while all three defendants were Black.
There was also no direct forensic or identification evidence linking them to the crimes.
Even then, a first appeal was rejected in 1993. It would take another four years later before the European Court of Human Rights ruled the three men had been denied a fair trial.
Rowe then was forced to wait a further three years before his conviction was eventually quashed in 2000 – when it emerged crucial evidence had been withheld from the original trial.
Even then, the UK Court of Appeal claimed the ruling was “not a finding of innocence, far from it”, and that the evidence “against all three appellants was formidable”.
“Of course we were innocent,” said Rowe, two years ago. “But they didn’t want to accept that the system could allow three Black men to go to prison when the perpetrators consisted of two White and one Black.”
I wish the escalating row over two-tier justice now would at least acknowledge and discuss in detail, the long and dark history of the litany of cases like this.
I wish the critics would shout about the fact that Black people are seven times more likely to die than white people following restraint by police.
Or the fact that there simply isn’t a comparable case to the horrific incident in which three officers were involved in the strip search of a menstruating 15-year-old Black girl – without her parents present. The Met since admitted to over-using its powers to strip search children, most of them Black.
Not only are trainee detective constable Kristina Linge and police constables Victoria Wray and Rafal Szmydynski facing misconduct hearings in June, they are also accused of making: “a misleading record of the search after its conclusion”.
If you need more examples of two-tier justice in the UK that existed long before the phrase was dreamed up on social media, this column could do this all day.
You could too. Easily.
The usual suspects, like the poisonous Tory shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, are once again taking advantage of peoples’ unwillingness to go away and read the detail to find proper context.
He has the taken to social media to stir the pot when, in fact, his Conservative government was consulted on the proposed changes when the Sentencing Council was considering reforms between November 2023 and February 2024.
Asked why his government had not objected back then, Jenrick’s word salad suggested “there was no direction or requirement by government” for the council to investigate the issue.
Really?
In any case, current Justice Secretary Mahmoud has already written to Lord Justice William Davis, chairman of the Sentencing Council, to “make clear my displeasure” at the changes.
“As someone who is from an ethnic minority background myself, I do not stand for any differential treatment before the law,” she wrote.
None of us do. But nor should we leave ourselves open to double standards by screaming blue murder, only when it affects us.
