There’s been an update on the Avon & Somerset site and in The Cancer on the carnival night killing of 35-year-old Somalian, Mohamoud Muse Hassan who was stabbed to death at The Criterion pub in Ashley Road, St Pauls (Blogger passim).
First let us remind ourselves where we were:
“There are no indications it was racially motivated”
Chief Inspector Cath Tarrant, Avon & Somerset Constabulary
16 September 2007
“Avon & Somerset’s story of the murder on carnival night in St Pauls isn’t adding up”
The Bristol Blogger, ‘Dead Strange’
19 September 2007
Then today Avon & Somerset indicate:
“It is understood possible tensions between the Afro-Carribbean and Somali communities may be hindering the police operation”
Bristol Evening Cancer
11 October 2007
Fancy that! One month later and possible racial motivations appear. Who’d have ever guessed that?
Avon & Somerset meanwhile are also now wheeling out their “community leaders” and calling for unity and better co-operation with the police.
Why is it that white people’s “community leaders” are invariably democratically elected representatives but black people’s “community leaders” are invariably selected representatives in the pay of the government?
The Blogger will be returning to this issue soon.
You beat me to it… Your penultimate paragraph makes me wince though, I’ll whack up a proper response tomorrow.
But yes, clearly the A&S has been less than candid if not at times engaged in downright dissembling since this investigation began. Pretending the world is a better place than it is does not help make it a better place – acknowledging real problems and then fixing them does.
Sadly the initial police position has meant a late-in-the-day back-pedal, and beyond the killing of Mr Hassan, I suspect this position has only made it harder to address the very real tensions here in St. Paul’s.
Not sure what’s making you wince? Because you think it’s racist or because of the truth of it?
The fact is for someone like Marvin Rees to be described as a “community leader” is highly misleading. (Not that he’d mind as he clearly has long-term political ambitions)
He actually works for an organisation called the BDA who are wholly funded by the government.
Their biggest funder of all is GOSW. So he’d be more accurately and usefully described as “a Government Office of the South West spokesman on race”.
Doesn’t have quite the same ring of authenticity and authority to it does it?
PS. Keep on writing about this. It’s important and the MSM ain’t gonna do it justice.
For the record, no where does it describe Marvin Rees as a ‘community leader’. The A&S site clearly says ‘from the Black Development Agency’. What is so wrong with that? He’s paid to do a job and he’s trying to do it.
Also, for the record, us black people get totally fed up when more vocal members of whatever “black communities” are being talked about are labelled as ‘community leaders’ by the lazy, culturally biased media, (whether it be in Bristol or London or wherever).
YOU SAY:
Why is it that white people’s “community leaders” are invariably democratically elected representatives but black people’s “community leaders” are invariably selected representatives in the pay of the government?
That is a totally ignorant thing to say B-Blogger. You always complain about the lazy journalism in the “cancer”, and yet here you are showing those same credentials that the Daily Mail would be proud of! It is the lazy culturally biased media who perpetuate this myth of the ‘community leader’, especially in “minority communities”. You never hear about ‘white community leaders’ as the media wouldn’t dare be so patronising. Black people get patronised so much it is now the norm, and as you have sadly proven here, it is also accepted as fact.
Coming back to the central issue. A man was killed and the murderer must be brought to justice. It is a crying shame if any race divisions are getting in the way of police progress, but depressingly it actually goes much deeper than that. Stemming from the 70’s “black communities” had much reason to mistrust the police, and even though it is now time to break out of that mind state and for law abiding black people to work with the police, there is still an ingrained fear that is hard to break.
And even more relevant than that, far above any race divisions and historical mistrust, people are just basically shit scared of what might happen if they speak up.
Also, to put this in perspective, in the pub that night was an equal mixture of people with brown skin and those with white skin. The failure of witnesses coming forward has more to do with fear of reprisals than it has to with the sexy media angle of a race war. B-Blogger, this is basic media analysis 101. Don’t believe the hype!
This is from the Avon & Somerset site:
This is from the BBC:
It’s the government that is using and popularising the term “community leader” not the media. I’ll return to your other points this evening.
Pingback: “Community united in supporting police investigation” « Bristle’s Blog from the BunKRS
BB: to answer your question to me, both – I’ve briefly blogged my take on the use of language by A&S, so I’m broadly in agreement with you on that.
But I also felt that the way you phrased your point was a little uncharacteristically clumsy, and open to misinterpretation. Certainly from my experience, there are plenty of palefaced selectees and cooptees speaking for me; it’s just that the monicker ‘community leader’ seems to have been set aside as a convenient shorthand for those who are not white skinned (except, such is the peculiarity of language, when prefaced by the word ‘business’; in which case it’s all about the green).
Shawn: with regard to the fourth paragraph of your first comment, “You never hear about ‘white community leaders’ as the media wouldn’t dare be so patronising. Black people get patronised so much it is now the norm”; I think I also broadly agree with you here. When the phrase ‘community leaders’ is used by the police, in the news, to me it has the ring of what is not being said as much as what is being said; it’s framing something and loading it with meaning that might or might not be true, it says one thing to one person, and something completely different to another, and as such is a weaselly way of avoiding saying anything, whilst simultaneously saying it with a wink and a nod, if you see what I mean.
In some contexts it seems barely one step up from saying something as transparently offensive in meaning and intent as ‘uppity blacks’ – a means of both writing someone off as a troublemaker and through implicit racial prejudice; in other contexts it is affecting a concern, but a concern based in little substance, one which can be reduced down to a meaningless phrase, as if centuries of cultural, economic and political subjugation under white European primacy might be forgiven and forgotten with the assignment of a snappy title; as if ‘being black’ is a single, homogenous experience, one not informed by geography, gender, class, occupation, wealth, nationality or anything else, only by skin colour, and skin colour alone.
BB: Regarding your last point, “It’s the government that is using and popularising the term “community leader” not the media” – well, as your own quotations demonstrate, the hacks are as likely to use it as the flacks, not least because news reportage is so much aboutregurgitating press releases and ‘official statements’ these days. Each feeds the other in an ongoing process of mediation, recuperation and self-fulfillment. Again I’m reminded of the example of the ‘Aggi versus Hype’ narrative: who’s to blame for the oversimplified, beginning-middle-end version of reality this represents, Mike Roe, Neil Smart and the A&S, or Tony Thompson, Nick Davies and the newspapers? Both bought into it and sold off the back of it.
Bristol Blogger – fair point with how the police & press use that language, but do you beleive everything you read? I come to your blog because I know (or at least thought) you don’t.
I read your blog to try and get underneath the usual line that is drossed out in mainstream press, but here you are just mindlessly regurgitating it all. I’m confused by the narrowness of your thinking here. Doesn’t seem to fit with other times you have talked about similar topics. Proves you are not perfect and are only human. (You are human, I presume!?).
BristleKRS – Thanks for taking the step towards trying to understand eachother. That’s the basis of a real community.
Shawn – I’ve corrected your original comment and deleted your correction.
To address some of your points:
The A&S call him a community leader on the record I’ afraid. As for the “he’s paid to do a job and he’s trying to do it” routine, that’s fine. But what is this job? It’s quite legit to start asking questions about anyone whose job appears to be to front police PR operations, particularly if that person is paid by the government. One of the jobs a journalist does is call attention to these kind of relationships and connections when they’re not being openly declared or made apparent. This, unfortunately, can be uncomfortable.
Like I said this is primarily coming from the Avon & Somerset with the apparent support of the BDA. That’s government not media. It seems just as lazy and culturally biased to blame the media for the labels that the authorities are openly using.
Ironically the Daily Mail owned Cancer – in what is actually a pretty decent and fair report (but don’t tell them I said that) – hasn’t mentioned “community leaders” at all. You can blame the media all you like but its the BDA, a black organisation, that’s helping perpetuate the “community leader” myth here alongside the authorities.
I don’t believe the hype – nor do I see very much from the local press, which is actually really reticent about this – but I do have an idea about what’s going on. Writing off serious divisions in this city as a “sexy media angle” invented by the press is just pure denial.
I first encountered the Somalian community in Bristol in 1996 when I was at the Big Issue. I was interviewing Somalians as long ago as 1999 in The Abyssinian on Stapleton Road about serious and often violent problems between them and other black communities.
Local people and the authorities were in denial then about this and they’re in denial now.
Elsewhere KRS has written about the yardie problem in the inner-city during the late nineties and into the turn of the century:
Well that turned out to be bollocks didn’t it? I well recall the 180 degree u-turn on this one. It started over the motorway in Easton after a 18-year old Jamaican kid was literally disembowelled by a gang on All Hallows Road in the summer of 2001.
By early 2002 the A&S had set up Atrium to tackle, er… the very Jamaican-led criminal gangs they previously said didn’t exist!
The police and their supporters in the government and local authority got it wrong then and they’ve got it wrong now. Some of us know exactly how this little lot conduct their business in the inner-city – they’ve done it all before.
Thanks Blogger,
You wrote:
Like I said this is primarily coming from the Avon & Somerset with the apparent support of the BDA. That’s government not media. It seems just as lazy and culturally biased to blame the media for the labels that the authorities are openly using.
> Well I work in the media also, just like you, and know how lazy it can be. I blame the authorities AND the media. You call that lazy?! haha
Anyway, I’ll call shalom here as I feel debating over the internet can only go so far before it goes in circles.
Thanks for your additions, though we were still talking slightly on cross purposes.
Cheers.
p.s. You didn’t answer whether you were human or not. Hmmmmmm….. LOL
Pingback: One hundred and eightieeeeee!!!! « The Bristol Blogger
Thanks Shawn
Dear Blogger. Point one is Steve Brodie lazily labelled me community leader. I did actually raise concerns with a number of my friends in the area about the term being applied to me. I do my stuff and thats that. Don’t like the term and never used it when I was at the BBC.
There’s lots more I’d like to say but haven’t the time. One thing is though that I get fed up with self righteous “activists” shooting at people who are trying to do something. Crabs in the barrell. You do better targetting the IMF or World Bank. Its tanatmount to the white working class having a crack at impoversihed overseas workers for stealing their call centre jobs. Misplaced rage!! I did have to tackle someone once who criticised me for working for the BBC. Went something like this: I grew up the mixed race child of a single white woman on social security. We put up with all the crap that went with that. Lived in a hostel in Devon. Then to Lawrence Weston in the 1970’s. Then to Easton. Crap schooloing. Easton Primary and St George. Managed to get off to Uni. Got couple post grads. Didn’t go and work in the City. Worked in Development. And now back in the area in which I grew up. Now, we work for a decent education for our kids, the same access to positions of influence as the posh kids get. Do we then treat them as lepers if they manage to become a GOSW Policy Officer or a BBC Editor? I don’t think thats wise. I want the kid I work with to have the biggest aspirations for the biggest positions. We (I) just need to equip them with the strength to be able to remember where they come from and that there is a bigger and more important agenda that getting rich or dying while trying.
Blogger, I am no Ghandi. I don’t live in Montpelier or St Werburghs. I’m not even vegetarian and I don’t wear a rainbow coloured scarf or army surplus combat clothes or eat olive bread . No doubt your contribution to social justice is greater than mine in every way. But I do what I can where I can. I’d suggest a little research before suggesting I am some kind of Government Agent working against the interests of the community I grew up in and have come back to. Ask around. No sob story, just facts that made me the way I am and shaped the way I see and engage with the world. Also makes me short tempered with cheap shots.
And yes, I do have political ambitions. Its dangerous to get involved in political structures – power and respectability are very seductive. But I think we need more black, mixed race and Asian politicians. Don’t you? Its not the whole answer but its part of the answer to the effort to reduce the race and class inequalities we currently suffer. And I have received a lot of encouragement from some of the older Jamaicans who think ambition in a young(ish) African Descent man is a good thing.
I like the idea of a blogger, I really do. Just do your research and be careful of appearing self rightous.
Incidentally, I am still on the government payroll. Working on the “Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health” agenda. You might be surprised to know tht when I checked this morning, I still had my soul.
Call me whenever you want a proper chat. Ask the BDA for my number.
Write more than I thought I had time for.