Police Follow

"We want the truth-we want justice," pleaded Rhoda. She is the sister of Ricky Bishop, who died in police custody last Thursday. Rhoda was surrounded by a shocked group of family, friends and supporters who gathered to demand answers outside Brixton police station last Sunday. Ricky Bishop was a healthy 25 year old black man.

Where could ordinary people be arrested and locked up indefinitely without a trial and without being told the charges against them? Britain, under home secretary David Blunkett's new anti-terrorism laws. It exposes the "democracy" Britain and the US claim they stand for around the world.

The Scottish legal system was slammed as incompetent and racist by two official reports last week. The reports gave damning evidence of the way the police and courts failed to bring justice to the family of a young Sikh murder victim in Lanarkshire, Surjit Singh Chhokar.

New Labour's ten-year crime programme, released on Monday, was full of "get tough" policies. It centred on 2,500 new prison places, 9,000 more police, allowing juries to see details of a defendant's convictions during a trial, and an army of private security guards backing up the police.

A trial judge at Newport Crown Court recently claimed there was no racial motive in the horrific murder of Jan Marthin Passalbessy on 20 June 2000. This was despite hearing evidence that the four killers convicted of the murder had called their victim "nigger" and "black bastard" during the attack.

High ranking officers have branded as "naive" a senior black officer's report into the police's treatment of Delroy Lindo. He is a friend of Winston Silcott, who is still wrongly imprisoned for murder. Tariq Ghaffur, the Met's deputy assistant commissioner, said in his report that Delroy suffered "systematic harassment" by the police and "negative stereotyping". Delroy has been stopped and searched 37 times by police since 1992. "Nothing has changed with the police," said Delroy. "The Met want to blame Ghaffur because some of the truth has come out in the report."