Memorials
Back in 1994 I was volunteering at a grassroots police monitoring group. We worked with people who needed help with advice on legal issues, benefits, all sorts of everyday problems and we also campaigned on local issues. On a regular basis we were dealing with people who’d been assaulted or fitted up by the police and in some cases the relatives of people who’d been killed by the police.
On 16 December 1994 a man called Shiji Lapite was killed by the police in Upper Clapton, east London. He was stopped for “acting suspiciously” and was killed in a subsequent struggle with two police officers. An inquest found that the cause of death was asphyxia from compression of the neck consistent with the application of a neckhold. PC Wright, one of the arresting officers, admitted applying the fatal neckhold to Shiji and biting him in the chest. The other officer present, PC McCullum, admitted kicking Shiji twice in the head “as hard as he could”. Pathologists’ evidence and post mortem reports found that Shiji Lapite had suffered at least 36 separate injuries, that his larynx and neck were bruised and a cartilage in his voicebox was fractured. The inquest jury returned a unanimous verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ but no criminal or disciplinary charges were brought against the officers involved.
Shiji Lapite was killed just round the corner from where I was living at the time and like many people I was very angry about it, but it seemed to me that the killing was forgotten about very quickly in the local area. The place where it happened was not marked in any way and soon it was as if nothing had even happened. It was like Shiji Lapite just disappeared.
A little while later, on 2 May 1995, a man called Brian Douglas was stopped by PC Mark Tuffey and PC Paul Harrison in St Luke’s Avenue, Clapham. During the incident Brian was struck with an American-style long-handled baton by PC Tuffey. He died from haemorrhages and a fractured skull five days later. Evidence at his inquest said the force of the blow was equivalent to being dropped from 11 times his own height onto his head. The CPS claimed there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the officers involved. No disciplinary action was taken against either officer (PC Tuffey resigned from the police in 2006 after he was found guilty and fined £400 for racially aggravated abusive or threatening words whilst on duty).
Once again, after a short while Brian Douglas was forgotten about and the site of his death was not marked in any way. I had been cutting and painting stencils since around 1982 and I decided to create memorials for Shiji Lapite and Brian Douglas and use them to mark the locations of their deaths. I also dropped the stencils at other sites to help highlight the injustice of these cases, just two amongst many examples of young Black men dying at the hands of the police. The stencils weren’t very sophisticated, they were quickly produced out of anger rather than calculated decision.
I continued to make stencils with a variety of themes in the time since then, but in 2008 there was a sudden media frenzy about knife crime and the numbers of young people being murdered in London. In most of these cases the scene of the murder would be marked with tributes, messages and flowers that would be left for a short while and then swept away. Even tributes left for high-profile victims like Ben Kinsella were the subject of deliberate decisions by the local council to clear the street and prevent the area being associated with their death. We were back to the familiar story of young people’s lives being taken away and then forgotten about. I wanted to stop the victims from being invisible and to help keep them in our collective memories.
The murder of Nass Osawe was a dramatic example. Nass Osawe was murdered on 27 December 2007 in a busy shopping street at Angel in north London. He and two friends were attacked by another boy who stabbed him to death just for looking at him. He was only 16. Although flowers and cards were left at the spot, before long “normal life” resumed for everyone else and the spot was not marked in any way.
This memorial for Nass Osawe went up in December 2008 and remained there for 18 months before the council finally had it buffed. There was apparently a considerable protest when it was removed.
The response of the local authority to the memorials has been utterly random. A memorial for David Nowak in Hackney was buffed almost immediately.
A memorial for Ben Kinsella in Islington was actually protected by the council and when it was painted over by BT, the leader of the council said he was “gobsmacked and outraged”.
A memorial for Jahmal Mason-Blair in Hackney became of the focus of tributes on the first anniversary of his death on 23 May 2009.
This was exactly the motivation behind the whole idea - which is the exact opposite of the dominant narrative which demonises and fears youth - to mark the place where they died so that we can properly remember and pay respects to these young people who have died in our streets but will not be forgotten.
