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How the police killing of Chris Kaba is linked to the climate crisis [1]
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Date: 2023-02
Chris Kaba, described by his cousin as “a loving son, caring brother, excited father-to-be and a young man with so much potential”, was shot and killed by a Metropolitan Police firearms officer in south London in September.
The police initially claimed they had been “in pursuit” of the 24-year-old Black Londoner, who was unarmed, though it was established at his inquest that he had not been a suspect. Rather, the car he was driving was believed to be linked to an earlier firearms incident.
Months after Kaba’s death, the Climate Reparations Network – a coalition of UK grassroots groups demanding reparations for communities on the frontline of the climate crisis – launched its day of action for climate justice with a vigil.
The event, which was held in solidarity with the Kaba family’s fight for justice, highlighted the links between racist police violence, imperialism and climate change. Together, they argued that the continued impunity of police violence and murder, used disproportionately against Black men like Kaba, must not go unchallenged, and resistance to it must be central to the fight for climate justice.
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A unified movement against state violence is the only solution to the climate crisis that could change a world built upon racialised violence and exclusion. It’s also a step towards ensuring an end to people being murdered by the police, both in the UK and across the world.
Capitalism, imperialism and the police
Activist and writer Harsha Walia has described the climate crisis as “a symptom, and not the cause, of our existential crisis”. It is a symptom of capitalism, imperialism and a racialised system of extraction, in which the Global South’s labour and resources are exploited and extracted for the benefit and profit of a ruling class often located in the Global North.
This system is built on the blood of so many Black, Brown and Indigenous people, many of whom live (and die) under the worst effects of the climate crisis or are forced to protect their lands, which make up 20% of the planet but 80% of the remaining biodiversity, from land clearances.
Upholding this system is the organised violence of police, military and border forces. This is nothing new; the British police – and police forces across the world – have always worked to protect the interests of the ruling class, their property and their need for a so-called ‘civil society’ in the metropolis.
As Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee explain in ‘Race to the Bottom’, the UK’s first police force, the Marine Police Office, was conceived at a “meeting of slavers” in 1798. It was intended to protect wealth stolen from colonised lands and to maintain class divides essential to capitalist exploitation.
Since then, policing has developed hand-in-hand with the methods and technologies of colonial repression, as was meticulously detailed in a recent report from the Campaign Against Arms Trade.
Continued reforms to how the police work and their position in society – such as the illusion of ‘policing by consent’, the idea that officers can operate only with public support for their actions – have been essential to normalising and legitimising the presence of a repressive institution.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/chris-kaba-killing-metropolitan-police-climate-justice/
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