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Ken Hinds has been commended by the Met for his courage in tackling knife gangs yet he has had to take the police to court for harassment and has won £22,000 compensation. Why?
It is hard to find a more widely respected member of the north London black community than Ken Hinds.
For years, this charismatic youth outreach worker has been helping young gang members turn away from violence and resolve their conflicts through talking. The Home Office recently approved him to work with the police as a gang mediator and last October he received a commendation from the Metropolitan Police for his "courage, tenacity and dedication" in tackling knife crime.
Yet when six-foot-two Ken, whose toned physique belies his 50 years, heads out onto the streets of London, he is often treated, he says, not as a pillar of the establishment but as a potential criminal.
"In the past 20 years, I have been stopped and searched more than 100 times - on average once every two months," he says. "I am stopped all over: at Tube and train stations, on the street, in my car. Once I was arrested and held for four hours at a police station on suspicion that the car I was driving, an old Audi, was stolen, when in fact it was my own car.
"Most recently, in August, I was arrested and humiliatingly frog-marched across the King's Cross concourse because my £35 train ticket only entitled me to travel on a train 24 minutes later and they refused to accept I'd made an honest mistake.
"I don't want to appear as if I've got a chip on my shoulder but I'm afraid there is only one explanation for this enduring and horrendous harassment: I am a black man. If I was white, there is no way I would have been stopped and searched so many times."
Speaking to the Standard at his flat in Edmonton, Ken says that his victory this week over the British Transport Police, who agreed to apologise and pay him £22,000 compensation for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution in May 2004, is just "the tip of the iceberg" of what he's had to endure.
Moreover, he is about to pursue a second court case against British Transport Police for what he says was "wrongful arrest and abuse of police powers" at King's Cross in August. "We'll be going to the High Court to get the caution they gave me quashed and I'll be seeking an apology from them yet again. What upset me is that the next day, I had to catch the train again and I saw a white person catch the wrong train and instead of arresting her, they bent over backwards to help."
Ken, who is extremely articulate and assertive but softly-spoken, says that fighting the police has taken years off his life. "Friends told me: 'Walk away, get on with your life, you'll never beat the police.' But I couldn't because not only did the police wrongfully arrest me but they also lied and tried to cover it up. They said the officers were simply inexperienced but that's not the case: they were malicious."
The 2004 incident is engraved on Ken's mind. "I was walking through Seven Sisters train station to meet my son, Courtney, then 12, when I saw the police searching this young black guy who was clearly distressed. I stood to one side and decided to observe in case he might need a witness and next thing an officer came up to me and said: 'You know him? No? Then f*** off! It's nothing to do with you.' I calmly told him I knew my rights and that I was going to stand there and not interfere and observe but he called his pal over and they arrested me."
Ken was charged with threatening and abusive behaviour but at the trial in 2005 the charges were dropped after the magistrates spotted that the officers' statements appeared to mimic each other word-for-word and that one of the officers was not a credible witness. Ken pursued the British Transport Police for a simple apology but this was refused until, faced with a High Court trial next month, they capitulated this week.
The case brings to mind that of another respectable, middle-aged black man earlier this year: Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, was arrested in America for entering his own house in broad daylight. The case caused a furore with President Obama intervening and Gates claiming he'd been targeted because he was "a black man".
Ken, who chairs a police stop-and-search monitoring group in Haringey, says: "It is illegal for the Met to carry out crude racial profiling and the police insist they don't do it but my experience indicates otherwise."
Indeed, Metropolitan Police Authority figures show that on average, blacks are at least four times as likely to be stopped and searched as whites in London. Moreover, as Ken points out: black youths have a worse time of it than he does: men aged 18-24 are 10 times more likely to be stopped and searched. But just eight per cent of stop-and-search cases lead to arrests.
Ken describes his regular ordeal: "It usually starts with me driving along minding my own business and suddenly there's a police van behind me, flashing its lights for me to pull over. They tell me I've been driving erratically or that my tail-light is not working but it's usually a pretext to grill me: 'Is this your car, sir? How long have you owned it? Got anything in here you shouldn't have?' Then they search me and my car and my passenger. At the very least, it's an embarrassing inconvenience. I can't tell you how often I'm late for meetings because I've had to wait 30 minutes before they let me go on my way."
Mostly, says Ken, the stop and search goes no further than that, but on occasion, you get "power-hungry" officers who "are looking to put me in my place as a black man" and take it one step further. "The worst are the ones who try to intimidate you. I've had officers tell me: 'You think you flash, you think you hard but we can fit you up, we can put cocaine in your pocket and it'll be your word against ours and who do you think they gonna believe, so behave yourself!'"
"One night a few years ago, I was giving my girlfriend a driving lesson near the Hackney Marshes when a police van pulled up. There were about eight officers, all white, and they crawled all over the car but found nothing. Next thing I was told they were arresting me on suspicion of being in possession of a stolen car and they took us down to Hackney nick and locked us in separate cells. My girlfriend was terrified.
"It soon became clear that what they really wanted was to search my flat. They took me home to produce my log-book but as soon as we got there, they started rummaging through my bedroom. They found nothing. I don't do drugs. But for four hours we were subjected to an ordeal for no reason other than that I am black."
Admittedly, Ken wasn't always law-abiding. He grew up in Haringey and when he was 16 his father died from pneumonia. Ken got caught up in a bad crowd and twice did time for shoplifting, robbery and handling stolen goods. He was 25 before he developed the maturity to turn his life round, he says. He became a personal fitness trainer and founded a project called Ruff Diamonds, which took youths to the Notting Hill Carnival. Later he began to use his experience in gangs to work with black boys and their parents to help them avoid the kind of mistakes he'd made.
Today he sits on the Met's Black Independent Advisory Committee for Haringey, which aims to build relations between the police and the black community. The biggest obstacle is the stop-and-search policy, he says. "Young black boys hate the police because every time they are stopped, it makes them feel like outsiders in their own community. Enough is enough! There has to be a more intelligent, fairer way.
"I'm fighting to make the police more transparent and hold them to account. The only way we can change this is by engaging the police at the top level, getting them to admit the truth about racial profiling, and changing their psyche. And that's what I'm trying to do. But whenever they get it wrong on the street, I will pursue them. I will fight them, carrot and stick, all the way."
Reader views (8)
It's a pretty sad indictment of life today when, in spite of all the reports and other comment, institutionalised racism is still rampant in the Met.
What also concerns me is that today's policeman is not open minded. A couple of times I have been with friends who have been stopped and questioned, yet when I have tried to intervene to explain the situation, or prevent a misunderstanding, I have been told to go away and when persisted, threatened with arrest under Section 5 of the Public Order Act.
I would have thought a key characteristic for a police officer is first to listen to all available evidence, THEN make your mind up, rather than pre-judging situations that then get out of hand. Or maybe that IS the hidden agenda they peddle.
It is this type of arrogance from police officers that is created a gulf between the public and law enforcement agencies that may never be healed.
- Tom Watson, SE1
Q. "Ken Hinds has been commended by the Met...yet he has had to take the police to court for harassment and has won £22,000 compensation. Why?"
A. Easy money.
Stand by for another pay-out when "a second court case against British Transport Police" come up, too.
"It is hard to find a more widely respected member of the north London black community than Ken Hinds." Also: "he sits on the Met's Black Independent Advisory Committee for Haringey".
Racism pure and simple: why is there apparently no "north London white community"? ...Or a White Independent Advisory Committee for Haringey?
- Croyboy, Croydon
This is a very disturbing story. I would describe Ken Hinds as a respectable pillar of the establishment who should never have had to endure such blatant racism in the first place. He´s obviously on a crusade, but a justifiable one. I just hope he stays with the Met's Black Independent Advisory Committee and doesn´t become disillusioned and leave. Success Ken.
- Graham Rodhouse, Helmond, Netherlands
I'm white, a law-abiding citizen and in my late '40s - but it's accounts like these that continuously remind me why I hate the British Police.
- Nowan King, London
The two police at the Seven Sisters incident were (according to this newspaper) black. Kind of undermines the old racist argument eh?
- H Morgan, London
Today he sits on the Met's Black Independent Advisory Committee for Haringey
Will the above organisation need to change with the recent ruling on the BNP's membership?
- Paul, Ealing
This is very WRONG. If it's any consolation, I suffer from 'reverse racism' or some sort of 'ism' - as a fairly noticable, tall, blonde, blue eyed female, I get picked on an abnormal amount by authoritarian control freaks who also want to 'bring me down' / 'put me in my place'. Particularly ticket inspectors and police. I tend to get a bit gobby or swear and can't count the number of times I've been threatened with Breach of the Peace or taken to police stations for an empty threat of being charged with something. I've been rugby tackled to the ground by plain clothes police / ticket inspectors. I have even been lifted in the air so I couldn't walk when plain clothes stopped me in the street once and I refused to stop (assumed they were trying to sell something) - how was I supposed to know they weren't a gang of muggers or rapists and then I get charged with breaching the peace when I scream and f and blind? Keep on fighting, Ken!! What they are doing to the black community is WRONG but they do also pick on other vulnerable people such as the homeless, mentally ill - anyone who isn't mainstream conformist. The whole thing about protecting women from domestic abuse and helping vulnerable communities is utter rubbish. I notice they're leaving one minority alone though, despite them being the ones who have blown up and murdered hudreds of people.
- Real, London
Pretty discraceful assuming it's all true which I am inclined to believe it is...I am 6'4" white 38 and have been stopped ONCE and that was in the park near MI6 in Vauxhall !
I have little experience with the police but it's been my experience from so much I have heard and seen that rather too many of them go into "the job" because they want to throw their weight around, tell people what to do and some just like a bit of aggro.
- Jason Stone, Stratford, Newham
