BRITAIN’S ONLY black national newspaper has launched a ‘Get Police out of our Schools’ campaign today.
The Voice will be campaigning to remove police officers from British schools, following the disturbing case of Child Q, who was subjected to a humiliating and traumatising strip search.
We will be working with activists to campaign for an end to the practice of teachers regularly calling police on their pupils, and a ban on police having offices in school premises.
The 15-year-old black schoolgirl known as Child Q was on her period when two Metropolitan Police officers carried out the intimate search at her school in Hackney, east London.
2,000 people held a vigil in Hackney on Sunday in protest at the girls’ treatment.
Lester Holloway, editor at The Voice said: “Getting police out of our schools is a crucial step to tackling the criminalisation of black young people in our schools.
“Black youngsters have enough problems with police on the street without having bad interactions with police within the school premises.
“Strip searches are not only traumatic for the child but mostly find no wrongdoing. They are failing on their own terms and are deeply damaging and having a long-term psychological impact on children. Its completely unacceptable.”
Mr Holloway said The Voice will be holding the police, schools and local authorities to account and will be working closely with campaigners and community representatives “to make sure police stay out of our schools and are not coming in to strip search young people.”
He said British schools are following in the footsteps of American educational institutions and are becoming more and more “militarised.”
“This sends out all the wrong messages to young people about having a good learning environment, what we need to start doing is decolonising the curriculum, and getting far greater numbers of black teachers to create an environment which is stimulating to young black pupils so that they can achieve the potential that we all know that they have,” he said.
The new campaign has been welcomed by prominent campaigner and social commentator Patrick Vernon OBE, who said: “I think The Voice’s new campaign is a laudable campaign and I am happy to support it.
“There needs to be a review of the role of police officers, as well as the gathering of intelligence from children and their families in schools, with the view to banning police officers in schools.
“We need to review to see the extent of other cases as well, we have to make a case for that ban.
“We can’t just base it on Child Q, there has to be other evidence, we need to do a review of other schools, other examples, other experiences from parents.”
Mr Vernon was one of the speakers at a rally in solidarity with Child Q, which was held outside Hackney Town Hall on Sunday afternoon.
He said: “It was a vigil, there were speeches to support Child Q and her family, and our key demands are the police commander of Hackney needs to go and the police officers who were involved in that strip search need to be sacked.
“They have already got rid of one of the teachers in the school, but I think the headteacher needs to go too.
“There will definitely be no justice no peace, if there is no clear accountability.”
MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington Diane Abbott spoke at the event.
She said: “What we are seeing now is a pattern of police abuse of power in relation to women, particularly Black women.”
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It’s not just get the police out of our schools though it’s get mercenary policing out of the police service. It’s the whole fake/real who is entitled/who is represented/representable that the mercenary supply chain is undermining across the world as well as locally in the massive supply chains that have pushed in on local neighbourhoods especially during and since the pandemic. The cruelty inflicted on child Q is the same
cruelty inflicted on prisoners, the same injury inflicted on protestors, refugees, asylum seekers. It’s the same mercenary third party contracted action allowed P and O to sack long-standing workers and impose colonial conditions on staff from ex colonial countries that allows a massive backlash against Saudi Arabia confirming prejudices in a way that forgets everyone who’s been
working so hard across the world and in our schools and local services including the police service to change the way we use resources and each other for everyone’s benefit. What can we do? I think yes we should use the democracy in the school, councils, encourage school children and teachers to demand a safe working, learning and community connection. We should rethink our relationship with schools as parents, relatives, neighbours, employers and write, document, make lessons that work within the curriculum to pull everyone together to change this. We need a different environment that connects, makes sense in parliament so that it sees itself in the local neighborhoods, schools colleges, universities that is human/humane and that is concerned with developing representation as its main project. Away with the post modern version of feudal gig and gang labour supply chains delivered through companies that are so big that they don’t realise how little they know about the people they employ and why and how their isolated workplaces lead to poor mental health and stranger and weirder fantasies about themselves and others. Many of the people who work in environments where compliance is important such as schools never engage properly with anyone in the school community and so the chances of them going wonky are very high. We need to get to know each other to have any chance of overcoming these horrendous acts of violence and the way we protect learning and everyone in our schools, organisations is through having control over security security being based on knowing, understanding and developing decent relationships of citizenship, not breaking up trust, relationship and community. What they did was a crime against the community as well as a crime against the young student.
For issues of concern to Her Majesty’s African-heritage Subjects, the political and Parliamentary Establishment usually marginalise; or calls the Police or use the criminal law as the preferred remedy for issues that impact on African-skin Subjects of Her Majesty.
We are not treated as sentient and valued human being of equal worth to our Caucasian family members; friend and colleagues by the English political Establishment and public institutions.
The Political Left now teaches pupils to ignore biological sex difference between men and women; boys and girls to placate the powerful and influential LGBTQOAP+ Stonewall Lobby that receives £600,000 annually from the Treasury. However, African-skin colour injustice; prejudice, discrimination and racism remain ignored; marginalised and receives no Lobby funding from the Treasury.