QUIDS PRO QUO

A man received a £22,000 payout from the British Transport Police (BTP) this week after he was nicked for witnessing a stop and search in Seven Sisters, North London. Ken Hinds stopped to observe eight cops aggressively grab a black teenager near the tube station. “There were seven or eight officers tugging at this teenager. It caught my attention because the youth looked scared and alarmed. I wanted to watch to make sure he had a witness in case he was hurt.

“But an officer spotted me and told me to f*** off. When I told him I knew my rights, he said to his colleague, ‘I’m going to nick him’. They then put me in tight handcuffs which was very painful.” As any SchNEWS reader knows, police are quite happy to nick anybody who looks at them sideways or acts as if they know their rights, especially if they happen to be, like Mr Hinds, a big shaven-headed black guy.

Unfortunately for the ignoramuses of the BTP, our Ken is quite the respected member of the community. Not only is he an experienced community youth worker (who helped broker a truce between rival gangs in the area) but he sits on the Metropolitan Police’s Black Independent Advisory Group and (the ironies just keep coming) is chairman of a monitoring group for police stop and search in Haringey. Oops.

Originally charged with threatening and abusive behaviour, police were forced to eat humble pie, apologise and cough up. Two cops received formal warnings and one was deemed to be “not a credible witness.”