Chris Kaba verdict shows the police have a licence to kill

Martyn Blake’s acquittal is a symptom of Britain’s institutionally murderous police system. JS Titus discusses the causes and argues that we need a revolutionary response.

On Monday, 20 October 2024, Met police officer Martyn Blake was acquitted of the murder of Chris Kaba, an unarmed Black man. Blake shot Kaba in September 2022 after a police stop in Streatham, South London. Officers had followed Kaba, unaware of his identity, solely informed that the vehicle he was driving was linked to a shooting the previous night. Once the car was surrounded by armed officers, Blake, who had positioned his vehicle in front of Kaba’s, fired at him, ending his life. The whole series of events took place in 13 seconds.

Blake claimed Kaba was using his car as a ‘weapon’ and argued he acted in self-defence, fearing for the lives of his fellow officers. Yet, despite the overwhelming presence of armed officers at the scene, Blake insisted, ‘I thought I was the only person with effective firearms cover at the time.’ The defence painted Blake as a respectable, middle-class individual who enjoys reading and had previously worked in finance, emphasising that he wouldn’t commit such an act without just cause. However, video evidence played in court contradicted his narrative, raising significant doubts about the integrity of his account. For example, Blake claimed the car was driving towards him when it had actually moved away before he fired. Blake justified discrepancies between his account of events and the video footage by claiming he experienced a contested psychological phenomenon called ‘perceptual distortion’ which supposedly affects memory.

When Blake was charged in 2023, the backlash within the police force was immediate. Many police officers threatened to put down their guns and walk out of their roles.  There were rumours that the Special Air Service would have to replace the cops had they rebelled. This was not merely a police reaction; it was supported by then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who stated, ‘We depend on our brave firearms officers to protect us from the most dangerous & violent in society. In the interest of public safety they have to make split-second decisions under extraordinary pressures. They mustn’t fear ending up in the dock for carrying out their duties.’ Met Commissioner Mark Rowley and other police chiefs have called on the government to provide greater protections for armed officers.

This case exposes the law’s role in shielding police from accountability. As anti-racist activist Lee Jasper argued after the verdict, ‘If the rationale is a police officer only needs a reasonable belief to fire his weapon, then it’s tantamount to a licence to kill… this verdict will make it absolutely clear to Black communities that when it comes to the Met police, Black lives don’t matter.’ This verdict reinforces the dangerous notion that the police have the right to kill people with almost no need to justify their actions. 

The broader crisis in British policing is undeniable. Since 2020 activists have highlighted the case against the police and how they are integral to the racist and sexist power structures of the British state. Trust in the police has plummeted, with the Economic and Social Research Council study revealing that only 40% of the public still trust in the Police. As Steve Pickering notes, ‘It looks like policing has lost legitimacy and that it has been undermined by a succession of high-profile scandals.’ What this case and its proceedings highlight is that the police are trying to protect themselves from scrutiny and accountability as part of a counter-movement to the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising and the Sarah Everard protests of 2021.

After the racist riots that took place in the summer, there has been a concerted effort to rehabilitate the image of the police as a force for good and order, and the Kaba case is clearly being mobilised in that interest. This narrative is all too familiar: a young Black man is demonised by the state, media, and the bourgeois establishment, while the police are valorised as both victims of criminal violence and heroes for confronting it. In the public eye, Chris Kaba was transformed from an unarmed victim into a villain, a gangster or a hitman. But regardless of any narrative spun about his past, Kaba did not deserve to be shot in the head.

In 2023/24, Black people in England and Wales were subject to 22 stops and searches per 1000 population, compared to 6 per 1000 for white people – nearly four times as likely. At the same time, policing technologies, including the Gangs Violence Matrix and Live Facial Recognition, continue to target Black people disproportionately, especially working-class people at the sharp end of a racist social system. 

Since 2005, the Met police have fatally shot four unarmed Black men: Chris Kaba (2022), Jermaine Baker (2015), Mark Duggan (2011), and Azelle Rodney (2005). Across Britain, there have been 1,906 deaths in police custody since the 1990s and no murder convictions. The system continues to let police off the hook, who act with near-complete impunity, aided by a legal framework that shields them from the consequences of their actions.

We should understand the police as an oppressive institution. Not only is it a tool for maintaining the current social order, but it is integral to the functioning and reproduction of capital. In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx argued that from the very genesis of capitalism, the state had ’employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour,’ or, as Mark Neocleous puts it, ‘a massive police operation’ to guarantee the wage form. The myth of a ‘criminal class’ served the state by ‘demarcating boundaries within the working class, to both fragment and police it accordingly.’

This remains the case today. The police act to protect private property and as a regulating mechanism within society that ensures people behave ‘normally’. That means having formal employment and doing your job. People who are outside formal employment or, due to ingrained institutional racism, are assumed to be outside of it, are targets for harassment. This is where race and class collide to the detriment of so many people of colour in Britain.

Threats to the social order of capitalism often become targets of the police, breaking working class resistance such as the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, or the recent state repression of climate and Palestine protesters. Anyone who wants to see radical change needs to see the police as our enemy in form and function.

The police defend the very system that reproduces racism and repression. While we must continue to argue that killer cops need to be held to account, we need to be clear that ultimately, toothless reforms to remove ‘bad apples’ will not be a solution: we need a society without the police. Yet, given their centrality to the functioning of capitalism, we should not imagine abolition is possible without a revolutionary confrontation with the state in which all those who have suffered at the hands of its police can win justice.