THE SAME day that Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Paul Condon was telling the Lawrence inquiry that the institutional racism does not exist in the Police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decided not to press charges against any of the officers responsible for Ibrahima Sey's killing. In March 1996 Ibrahima Sey, a Gambian asylum seeker, was arrested by police at his home in Forest Gate, East London. He was taken to Ilford Police station where he was sprayed with CS gas whilst lying face down on the floor, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Within minutes he was dead. The jury at the inquest ruled last year that he had been unlawfully killed at the hands of the police. The CPS decided that there was insufficient evidence as to the cause of death, particularly whether or not "excited delirium" on its own could cause death.
Excited delirium is a condition that many black people who die in police custody apparently suffer from. It is claimed that people go into a mad frenzy and take on super-human strength, leaving the police no option but to use excessive force to defend themselves.
Effectively what has happened in the Ibrahima Sey case is that the courts have. ruled that Ibrahima was killed illegally by the police.
To deal with this the police have spent thousands of pounds of tax payers money flying in "experts" from around the world to argue that Ibrahima wasn't really killed but died of natural causes.
Since the inquest ruled out the police version of events, the CPS have dropped all charges on the grounds that the "expert" testimony paid for by the police conflicts with the ruling of the inquest. How many other jobs can there be when you can illegally kill someone, get your boss to pay for experts to say that you didn't, get the state to say that it can't really do anything because the events are too confusing, and not even face a disciplinary? How more institutional can racism get?