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Child X: Black boy held at gunpoint by Met police over water pistol [1]

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Date: 2023-10

A 13-year-old Black boy playing with a water pistol was rammed off his bike and held at gunpoint by police.

The boy and his younger sister were playing with the toy water guns in Hackney, east London, when a Metropolitan Police officer spotted them and reported it as a potential firearms incident. The plastic water guns were white, blue and pink.

After ramming him off an e-bike, firearms officers pointed submachine guns at the boy, who is being referred to as ‘Child X’, and also arrested him. He was soon dearrested.

Detective chief superintendent James Conway, police chief for Hackney and Tower Hamlets, apologised for the incident, which took place in July, and said it was “understandably extremely distressing for the boy involved as well as the rest of his family”.

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The Alliance for Police Accountability, which is supporting the family, said Child X and other children who witnessed the incident, including his younger brother and sister, “have all been left suffering deep trauma” because of what happened and the “contempt” shown to his mother by officers.

His mother said: “It has been a deeply traumatic experience for him, for me, and for our family as a whole.

“The attitude of the police to him – and to me – is shown up in the words of the senior officer at the scene when I protested to him about the conduct of his officers: he told me I was lucky that they had not arrested my son!

“For what? For playing with a brightly coloured plastic water gun with his younger sibling on the streets behind our home? For being a Black boy on the streets of Hackney?

“I know – and the police know – that they would not have treated my son in the way they did if he had been a white 13-year-old boy.

“I know that they would not have treated me with the contempt shown towards me or described me as ‘aggressive’ if I was not Black.

“After what has happened, how can I ever tell [my children] that they can turn to the police for help? I feel broken by it all; distraught because I was not able to protect my child from what happened.”

Conway said he had met the family to explain why the situation unfolded as it did. He said: “Our officers are dealing with fast moving situations, based on the limited information provided to them at the time. Such is the nature of the threat from firearms that the College of Policing is clear that officers should treat all firearms as real and loaded until proven otherwise.”

He also added that ramming the child off his bike was a tactic used by specialist officers who are trained on how to use vehicles to bring cyclists to a stop.

The case is being investigated by the Met’s own Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS).

Police watchdog the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) received two referrals about the incident, but decided to leave the investigation with the Met’s DPS.

One of the referrals to the IOPC related to allegations of racial bias by the officers and adultification – a type of bias which skews the perception of some children, particularly Black children, as being more ‘grown up’ or ‘adult’, and can lead to a lack of appropriate safeguarding from professionals.

Diane Benjamin, director of children’s social care at Hackney Council, said the council awaits this outcome “with interest”.

Benjamin added that she met Child X’s mother in the summer, and that the council will be “looking to attend community meetings to hear from our concerned Black and Global Majority residents too”.

“Hackney Council strongly welcomes the decision by the City and Hackney Child Safeguarding Partnership to undertake a rapid safeguarding review following police actions against Child X,” she said.

Earlier this week police in Birmingham admitted tasering a 14-year-old Black boy in Birmingham after footage emerged of the child being dragged out of a house before being held in a headlock and tasered to the ground by a police officer.

Raju Bhatt, one of the solicitors acting on behalf of Child X, highlighted the family’s lack of faith in the police, particularly after Conway said “no misconduct has been identified”.

“He is saying that at this early stage, before any investigation has even commenced – even the possibility of any disciplinary wrong let alone criminal wrong has been eliminated,” he said. “What it suggests is that the outcome of the investigation seems to have been prejudged.

Wanda Wyporska, CEO of the Black Equity Organisation, told openDemocracy the Met can’t be trusted to mark its own homework. She said: “I think we need independent oversight, we need evidence, we need to make sure the officers are off the streets and we need to make sure the community is heard and that we have the full story.

“This has to go higher. [We can’t] have police officers who aren’t accountable who are doing this sort of thing to a child.”

Wyporska warned adultification is “a vital component of some of the mismanagement in education, policing, and healthcare”.

“Is it really a crime for a Black child to play outside with their siblings? The policing of our community and children needs significant change to get us back to the principle of policing by consent.

“Our Black children are suffering because people are seeing them as adults and they’re treating them as adults. We have to make sure that people aren’t stereotyping our children as violent and aggressive adults because that is a consistent part of institutional and structural racism that we face.”

Earlier this week police in Birmingham admitted tasering a 14-year-old Black boy after footage emerged of the child being dragged out of a house before being held in a headlock.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/child-x-hackney-met-police-armed-gun-water-pistol/

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