The Black Cop: ‘Police badge was a get-out-of-jail-free card’

Gamal Turawa shares his poignant journey as a police officer and a black gay man in the BAFTA nominated film

A BLACK and gay former police officer tells spills the beans about life in the Metropolitan Police in a new documentary.

The Black Cop, produced by Guardian Documentaries, follows Gamal Turawa – otherwise known as “G” – who admits to racially profiling and harassing black people in the early days of his career and comes during heighted debate of institutional levels of discrimination within the police force.

In a small village in Kent, he spent his early years in the foster care of a white family before being joining his biological parents.

After enduring years of child abuse and being tricked into living in Nigeria by his father where he endured his fear year on the streets of Lagos, Gamal returned eight years later in his early twenties and says he then began questioning his identity as a black man.

I think part of my joining the police is because I didn’t know who I was,” he tells The Voice. “I had been brought up in an environment and circumstances that kind of taught me to hate myself through cultural coding and messaging.

“So by the time I got to my early 20s, I was in a place where, to be honest, I didn’t want to be black and I saw in some way joining in the police was a way of saying, ‘I’m not one of them. I can be one of you.’ I saw that [police] badge as a get-out-of-jail free card.

Gamal joined the police in 1992 and was witness to some of Britain’s most divisive years with the black community, including the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence and the publication of the Macpherson Report. It was then, he says, he did what he could to belong among his white colleagues by targeting young black men through stop and searches.

“I wasn’t thinking about them, my thinking was I just wanted to fit in,” he admits. “I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing and I was thinking about what I was achieving. I was blind to the side of myself. I took the role of being a police officer as an important one, but I did some stupid things.

For Gamal, the turning point came later in his life while he dealt with his reality as being not only black, but also a gay man where the police force wouldn’t accept him, nor his own community.

I was brought up in the African-Caribbean household and being gay was just a no-no. So up until I was almost 40, I had to suppress that, I had to hide it, I had to tell lies around it,” he says.

“When I was in my late 30s, I had a nervous breakdown and almost committed suicide. I think that was a turning point for me to look how I have allowed other people’s negativity to stop me from being myself.

“And that was when I started to have this challenge of ‘I need to be true to me. I need to look in the mirror and tell me who I am and not allow other people to tell me who I am.'”

Cherish Oteka, Director of the short documentary, hopes that through telling Gamal’s story, viewers will get an inside into an exploration of “identity,  discrimination and institutional bias” from someone who can speak on all sides of an all important conversation.

The Black Cop (Credit: Guardian Documentaries)

She said: “The Black Cop is an exploration of self-hatred and the devastating effects it can have. ‘G’ isn’t someone that we can easily discard as a horrible person, he is someone who acted out of pain as we all have.

“In one person and one story we present a villain, victim and hero and begin to  understand the potential that we all have in being any one of these  if not all three.”

After 26 years as a serving police officer, Gamal left the force but still believes they have work to do to continue to build trust with the black community.

An issue, he believes, began long before the Macpherson report during the police’s first campaign in to recruit ethnic minority people into the police in 1971. Over 50 years later, the same conversations are still happening.

The police are very transactional, they’re not very good at the emotional intelligence part. They are not very good at responding to people’s feelings, they’re more reactive,” he says.

“I left the police early in my career…I felt that the police were ticking boxes and not actually getting to the core of the matter.

“The thinking was what do we need to do to make people happy as opposed to what do we need to do to be better.

“There are some very good people in the police who are trying to do their best to change things and there are people at the top who are doing it blindly.

He adds: “It’s not the first time I share my story, I’ve been sharing my story for about 20 years. I think it’s about getting people to take a step back and take what we bring into the party.

“The journey I’ve been on is I had to step back and think where I saw with this [institutional racism and homophobia] and where am I coming from.

“But we have to be honest with ourselves, there was a question, somebody asked me, they said: ‘Do you see your colour and your sexual orientation as a joy or a burden? Because whichever way you look at it would determine the life you live.'”

“Now when I work, I wear my African clothing and I walk into that room and say, ‘Look, I have me. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-you. It just means I am pro-me, I am pro-my history, I have learnt and earned the right to be proud of myself.

That’s why I think that’s what I would like people to see [in the documentary] that we can be proud of us, so that we don’t need permission to be proud of ourselves.”

The Black Cop is available now on The Guardian.

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