'My niece died after being bound and gagged by police - racism is STILL rife'

01 August 2023 , 18:53

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Joy Gardner was bound and gagged

Thirty years on it is still happening. Disproportionate force if you’re Black in situations where it is utterly unnecessary.

On July 28, 1993, at around 7.40am, five police officers – three of whom were from the now-disbanded Alien Deportation Squad – raided 40-year-old Joy Gardner’s home. In front of her son Graeme, then aged five, they sat on her body, bound her hands with a leather belt and manacles, strapped her legs together and wrapped 13ft of adhesive tape around her face to gag her.

She suffered respiratory failure during the raid in Crouch End, North London, and died in hospital four days later. Joy’s uncle Carl Smith is speaking in a week when a Black woman in London was handcuffed by police in front of her son for not showing the bus ticket she’d paid for.

Also in a week with six London officers under investigation after a 90-year-old Black woman with dementia was handcuffed, put into a spit hood and had a Taser pointed at her. All six still have their jobs. Carl, 75, says: “We hear of what’s happening in the police force now around institutional racism and I don’t know that it’s going to change in a hurry. It’s very sad.”

'My niece died after being bound and gagged by police - racism is STILL rife' eiqrkiqueiqxrinv

Carl chats with Mirror’s Darren Lewis (© Jim Bennett)

Joy came to this country from Jamaica legally in 1987. When she realised her six-month visa had expired, she followed all the correct procedures in a bid to stay – only to be told to leave or risk deportation. A series of appeals failed and a flight to Jamaica was arranged for her in 1992. But she missed the flight, insisting she had not been notified.

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Recalling Joy’s death, Carl says: “It was horrendous. You wouldn’t do that to an animal and expect the animal to survive. We heard about it in the news.” Carl remains convinced Joy would never have been trussed up as she was had she been white.

Dismissing police claims she’d been violent, he says: “Ours is not a violent family. You try to block it out. But you cannot escape the fact that it happened to her. And that it is not far from happening to somebody else.” Three officers were acquitted of manslaughter and there has never been an inquest or public inquiry into the case.

'My niece died after being bound and gagged by police - racism is STILL rife'

Carl Smith says niece Joy was denied justice (© Jim Bennett)

Myrna and Graeme on march (PA)

“Here, again, is justice not being done,” Carl says. “The establishment failed not only Joy but many others. Mainly on the basis of their colour.” Joy’s mum Myrna had come to England in 1961 before working to bring the rest of her family to the UK from Jamaica. Carl says: “It was terrible what she had to go through, fighting for her daughter.”

Following Joy’s death it emerged that her deportation letters had been deliberately delayed so she was given no notice of her removal. Carl says it makes a mockery of the Windrush 75th anniversary celebrations when many of those asked to come over from the Caribbean in the 60s have spent six decades being told to “go back home” –despite having the right paperwork.

Just months before Joy’s death, Stephen Lawrence, 18, had been stabbed to death in Eltham, South East London. “The Stephen Lawrence case was very trying as well,” says Carl, who now lives in Gravesend, Kent. It was only because of the determination of his parents that they managed to get some sort of justice for him.

Met’s Paul Condon (Alex Lentati/ANL/REX/Shutterstock)

“But it was a halfway measure. Because what happened to him shouldn’t have happened. And the people who are responsible for the way it was handled in the police force, were never really brought to justice.” Then-Met chief Paul Condon claimed after Joy’s death that race had not been a factor in her treatment. A view that Carl, who arrived from Jamaica in 1978, has little time for.

“He would probably say that there was no racism in the police force either,” he adds. “It’s always been about race. What else could it have been about?” Myrna was adamant at the time that no one should forget about how her eldest daughter had died. But there are many other instances of Black people dying at the hands of police officers.

Last month the Independent Office for Police Conduct launched an inquiry into the death of a 30-year-old man in police custody in Croydon, South London, on July 15. Little wonder the 30-year anniversary of Joy’s death reopens painful wounds for the Smiths. “This is what makes it so hard,” says Carl.

“When you think of what she suffered, it makes it very hard to mark it. And not just Joy, others have suffered and are still suffering. What I would like to see happen is justice for everyone where everybody can feel at home and at peace with each other.”

Five others who died after arrest

Shiji Lapite, 1994

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Just a year after Joy’s death 34-year-old Nigerian asylum seeker Shiji Lapite died in the back of a police van in Stoke Newington, South shortly after being detained by two officers.

Shiji Lapite (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/106733.stm)

Roger Sylvester, 1999, and Sean Rigg, 2008

In 1999, Roger Sylvester died after six police officers held him on the floor at a hospital in Islington, North London. Sean Rigg died at the hands of the police in 2008 in Brixton, London. An inquest ruled in 2012 that “unsuitabe” force had been used and failings of police had “more than minimally” contributed to his death.