Hundreds of people protested outside Scotland Yard in London on Saturday after a young black man was shot dead by police, with his family calling for the officer responsible to be fired.
Chris Kaba, 24, was killed by police on Monday night in south-west London when he was being chased by a patrol car driving his car. A shot was fired and the young man, who was unarmed, was injured, according to British police (IOPC). He died overnight at the hospital.
Open investigation for “homicide”
His family called for a murder investigation and wondered in a statement if Chris Kaba would have died “if he hadn’t been black.” According to the “homicide” investigation opened by the IOPC on Friday, his license plate had been detected by a camera, which had reported that the vehicle was linked to a firearms incident in the previous days.
“The family welcomes the IOPC’s decision, albeit a belated one, to open a homicide investigation and disciplinary investigation against this police officer on Friday,” Chris Kaba’s family’s lawyer said in a statement on Saturday, adding that he asks that it be “immediately suspended, pending the results of the investigation”.
Two years ago, the arrest of the black athlete Ricardo Dos Santos, his partner and their baby, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, caused a scandal. It had resulted in the opening of a wide-ranging investigation into racial discrimination within the police, which had led to disciplinary proceedings for five officers.
Since then, former Scotland Yard director Cressida Dick resigned in February in the wake of a damning IOPC report pointing to racist, misogynistic and discriminatory behavior within her teams.
Source: BFM TV
