Friends and comrades Past Tense on another tragic police related death in Hackney. We have a Colin Roach Centre leaflet about the case on our archive.org site, courtesty of Mark Metcalf – https://archive.org/details/kwanele-siziba
Just two weeks ago a man fell to his death from a balcony in Peckham, after police fired a Taser at him as he threatened to jump.
The dead man, not yet named, fell several floors to the ground. He was taken to hospital with life-threatening injuries, and died later the same day.
The man had clearly been in some mental distress all day; neighbours had heard him shouting about jumping from the balcony for several hours before cops arrived.
The police claim the officers spent more than an hour trying to convince the man to come down.
Tasering him in while he was in such a vulnerable condition and in such a dangerous place, was pretty typical of police responses to people with mental health problems. Restraint, arrest, violence are the trademarks of cops arriving as first responders to people in mental health crisis.
It comes less than a…
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The Radical History of Hackney 