It has taken 19 years for Ken Fero to complete the follow-up to Injustice, his unforgettable film about deaths in police custody. But perhaps the surprising thing is that he finished it at all. Injustice is the great documentary about brutality in the police – a shocking exposé of deaths resulting from beatings, shootings, teargassing, asphyxiation and neglect. The film, co-directed by Tariq Mehmood, won numerous awards, yet was never shown on television and as good as destroyed Fero’s career. As he says today, no broadcaster would touch him after Injustice.
Yet Fero is now back with Ultraviolence, another collaboration with Mehmood and their film-making collective Migrant Media. Like Injustice, it does far more than document deaths in custody. It follows the families who have lost loved ones on their heroic, if thwarted, fights for justice. We witness the horror of their loss, see them build up hopes of justice, and gradually see that hope pricked. Nearly all the victims are people of colour – a reminder that Britain has been every bit as contaminated by police brutality over the decades as the US.
Injustice started with the death of a Nigerian asylum-seeker, Shiji Lapite, in 1994. Lapite, 34, died in a police van shortly after being detained by two plainclothes Metropolitan police officers who claimed he had been acting suspiciously. At his inquest, PC Paul Wright described holding him in a headlock while PC Andrew McCallum admitted he had stood up and twice kicked Lapite in the head, “as hard as I could”, claiming he was using reasonable force to subdue a violent prisoner. One of the officers described Lapite as “the biggest, strongest, most violent black man” he had ever seen. Lapite was 5ft 10in. The cause of death was given as asphyxia from compression of the neck, consistent with the application of a neck hold, and the jury concluded that Lapite had been unlawfully killed. No criminal charges were brought against the officers.
In May 1995, Brian Douglas, 33, died after being hit with a police baton by PC Mark Tuffey. He had been stopped in his car for alleged bad driving in Clapham, London. At the inquest, PC Tuffey claimed he had hit Douglas on the shoulder and the baton slid up. Several witnesses claim they saw the officer raise his arm and bring the baton down on Douglas’s head. Medical experts testified that the impact was the equivalent of falling 11 times his own height on his head. The inquest jury delivered a verdict of death by misadventure.
And on the film goes – the inglorious roll call of lives taken by the police. Joy Gardner, a 40-year-old Jamaican mature student who died after having her face wrapped in 13 feet of adhesive tape to gag her; a Gambian asylum seeker, Ibrahima Sey, sprayed repeatedly with teargas and held face down for 15 minutes; Roger Sylvester, 30, who was mentally ill, dying after being restrained on the floor of a padded room by six officers; Harry Stanley, 46, a Scottish painter and decorator shot after being mistaken for a terrorist carrying “a gun wrapped in a bag” which was, in fact, a table leg; Christopher Alder, 37, choked to death while handcuffed and lying face down on the floor of a police station in Hull, as officers laughed, made monkey noises and accused him of acting up. All but Gardner’s death resulted in inquest verdicts of unlawful killing, though Sylvester’s and Stanley’s were later overturned. None led to criminal convictions of police officers. (In the cases of Gardner and Alder, officers were tried and acquitted.)
The litany of deaths is horrifying. But what gives the film its power is its humanity. We learn so much about the victims and their families. Ibrahima Sey had hoped to study law, and his wife, Amie, had given birth to their baby six weeks before he died. Brian Douglas’s sister, Brenda Weinberg, laughs as she describes how her handsome, popular brother would commandeer the family bathroom before a night out. Joy Gardner, portrayed by the police as feral, was a vibrant mother of two.
We see families united in grief, discovering reserves they never knew they had. Gardner’s mother, Myrna Simpson, says: “I’m still fighting. I’ve been to universities and given talks. I couldn’t talk before. I was a very shy person.” We see people radicalised by an establishment determined to deny them justice. The siblings of Brian Douglas describe how they formed a protective line between demonstrators and the police to prevent a riot, and later on regretted it. At the end of Injustice, Weinberg says she will not be able to grieve until she has achieved justice for him: “As the time gets longer it’s any justice. It can be legal justice or street justice. I don’t really care any more.”
The afterlife of Injustice was every bit as dramatic as the film. As family members accused officers of murder, the Police Federation threatened to sue anybody who showed the film. The TV networks were terrified of the consequences. Channel 4, which had shown earlier work by Migrant Media (including Justice Denied, a film about Gardner) were scared off by libel lawyers. Fero, who grew up in Malta and is 59, says he and his colleagues received anonymous phone calls. “They said we should take care, check our cars in the morning, make sure our kids don’t go to school. We had all these veiled threats.”
After Fero was threatened with legal action by the Police Federation, he threatened to sue the officers for loss of earnings. He says he never heard from them again. The film went on a successful three-year tour, and they were never sued for libel.
The more it was screened, the greater became its impact. Even the mainstream media started to talk about deaths in police custody. Yet Fero also realised that while more people might be aware of the number of deaths in police custody – 1,000 between 1969 and 1999 (with only one successful prosecution for manslaughter) – none of his families had achieved criminal convictions. In fact, things seemed to be sliding. In 2004, narrative verdicts were introduced at inquests, recording the factual circumstances and replacing the standard short verdicts. This meant that juries were less likely to be asked to consider a verdict of unlawful killing, which in turn meant deaths in police custody were even less likely to result in criminal prosecutions (juries were told that they could only rule unlawful killing if they believed the bar for at least manslaughter had been reached).
As for the film-makers at Migrant Media, Fero claims they were effectively blacklisted. “We found it impossible to get work after making that film,” he says. “Financially it wiped us out.” But the company wasn’t destroyed. “And after 19 years I think they’re going to be surprised that we’ve come back in this way.” He smiles. Fero – cerebral, serious-minded, intense – doesn’t smile lightly.
Ultraviolence continues where Injustice left off. The film focuses on two later deaths. Jean Charles de Menezes, 27, a Brazilian, was shot in the head seven times by the Metropolitan police at Stockwell tube station, south London, in 2005 after being mistaken for one of four men who had tried to carry out suicide bombings on the city’s transport system the day before. Paul Coker, 32, died a month later at Plumstead police station in south-east London after being restrained by the police.
The footage of the Menezes family is heartbreaking – they tell public meetings that Jean Charles was executed, that the police did not give the electrician a chance to say a word before shooting him. His cousin, Vivian Figueiredo, asks for unity because “unity will give us the strength to win.” But, of course, they don’t win. An Independent Police Complaints Commission report concluded that the then commissioner, Ian Blair, was not well served by his staff, that his private office had failed to keep him informed, but does not uphold allegations of a cover-up against him. No police officer is charged. Figueiredo is left bewildered: “A man is shot in his head and yet their conclusion is no one is accountable?”
Perhaps the most disturbing footage in Ultraviolence is CCTV footage from the police station where Coker died in 2005. After serving a year in prison for burglary, Coker had a new job, a new flat and was looking to make a new start when he was arrested for a breach of the peace at his girlfriend Lucy Chadwick’s flat. She called the police when he became “a bit paranoid” after taking cannabis and cocaine. She told the inquest she heard him tell the police: “You are hurting me, I can’t breathe, you are killing me.”
When the police brought him down the stairs, she said, he was making no noise, his face was lolling to one side and he was being carried by his hands and feet. In the police custody suite, we hear officers talk excitedly about the restraint: “He is high as a kite, high on crack.” “He was an evil fucker.” “He has already assaulted four officers … it’s amazing the strength of the fucker to try and do that.” It’s hard to reconcile this Coker with the one his mother talks about – no angel, she says, but a funny, compassionate, thoughtful son who loved to write poetry.
We see him lying on the floor in a police cell in his boxers, one leg twitching. Then he stops moving and is left for 15 minutes before being pronounced dead. In 2010, the inquest heard that shortly after Coker was pronounced dead, an officer in the custody suite was heard on CCTV saying: “You have to get one death in custody under your belt.” The inquest jury concludes he died of cocaine intoxication, and that poor police communication and training had contributed to his death. No officers were charged.
Since the deaths of Menezes and Coker, there have been a number of high-profile deaths in police custody of men of colour – Mark Duggan (2011) and Jermaine Baker (2015) were shot by the Metropolitan police, and Trevor Smith was shot by West Midlands police last year. Leon Briggs died after being restrained by Luton police in 2013, Sheku Bayoh died after being restrained by police in Scotland in 2015, Rashan Charles (2017) and Kevin Clarke (2018) died after being restrained by the Met.
No police officers involved in these deaths were prosecuted. (In the case of Baker, though, last week the Court of Appeal ruled that the firearms officer – known only as W80 – could face misconduct proceedings after an earlier decision to bring disciplinary proceedings had been quashed by the High Court last year.) The inquest into Clarke’s death, which concluded last Friday, heard that he told officers “I can’t breathe ... I’m going to die.” In its narrative verdict, the jury found that the way the police had restrained Clarke, a paranoid schizophrenic, “probably more than minimally” contributed to his death.
There is one small but significant fist-pump moment in Ultraviolence. In 2006, 11 years to the day after his involvement in Brian Douglas’s death, Mark Tuffey was in court facing a criminal charge. He had been reported by fellow officers after chasing a black man, kicking him and calling him a “dirty black cunt”. Tuffey was convicted of racially aggravated behaviour and ordered to pay a £400 fine and £400 costs.
“We saw him stand in the dock and found guilty. It did feel good to know he would no longer be a serving officer as he had continued to be since Brian’s death,” says Douglas’s sister Brenda Weinberg. “I walked away from court that day not necessarily feeling victorious but that a little piece of justice had been done.”
While we see the same brutality in Ultraviolence as we did in Injustice, it is a very different film – more personal essay than pure documentary. After Injustice, Fero found himself teaching students how to make activist films at Coventry university and telling them about the great revolutionary film-makers. Ultraviolence feels like a homage to his heroes. There are nods to Jean-Luc Godard (Fero refuses to conform to a linear narrative – the film is as much about the brutality of the Iraq war as the brutality of the police) and Chris Marker (it opens with his statement “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”).
Fero pays tribute to James Baldwin ( as the narrator he addresses the film to his son, just as Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is addressed to his nephew). He references Susan Sontag, telling us to think about what has been left out of the image as much about as what we can see. We are shown the infamous still from Vietnam of the naked, melting child running after being hit with napalm, and Fero segues to the second battle of Fallujah in 2004, and the allegation that Iraqi children were burned with white phosphorus. At times he throws the kitchen sink into Ultraviolence. The film is didactic (a call to action, a plea to his son’s generation to resist authority), discordant (migraine-inducing sound effects) and determined to disrupt its own narrative. It is proudly, cussedly uncontainable. Ultraviolence feels both old-fashioned – it could have been made in the 1960s – and surprisingly contemporary.
For years, Fero says, he didn’t have a clue what to do with his material. He didn’t know who would want to watch a film like this. The world was vapid, depoliticised, uniform. Now he says he sees it changing by the day. “It would be impossible, six or seven years ago, to think that issues of class, race and gender would be central to the political debate in this country. In the UK, race was only used as an issue to divide people. But as a powerful force of unity, as something that white kids could get into as well, it just didn’t exist and now it does. So when you see thousands and thousands of young people marching because of the environment or marching because of racism or marching because of gender, that fills me with hope.” He offers another rare smile. “You’d have to be a cold-hearted bastard not to be filled with hope.”
His smile widens. “I can see in the eyes of these young people that they really have had enough. They’re hungry for something. Some answer, that makes sense of this mess that this government and other governments have got us in. And anything that makes them think about their position, makes them think about fighting back, makes them knowledgeable about the history of resistance and how people can say fuck off to governments can only help.”
Fero may not seem a natural optimist, but he insists he is. Why would he make these films otherwise, he asks. I give him a look. Really? Surely, Injustice and Ultraviolence are two of the bleakest films ever made. Yes, he says, the subject may be bleak, but its protagonists are beacons of hope. And he has a point. I think of the families walking united, arm in arm past the police barricade into parliament to make their point once again – to insist that they will be heard, that things will change. “Injustice and Ultraviolence are full of trauma,” Fero says. “But they are also full of resistance. Every time the families speak, every time the families show their pain, every word, every image is a fight back. That’s what people need to think about.”
