Alina Joseph, a bus driver, moved to South Wales with her seven children close to a decade ago. In the town of Hirwuan, they met microaggressions and more: Joseph said that racist graffiti was twice painted outside their home, “dogs were set on the kids,” they received hateful letters calling the family "monkeys," and some of her children were even urinated on. After six years, they moved north to a housing project in another small city called Mountain Ash.
In Mountain Ash, their situation became immeasurably worse. One hot day in 2019, Joseph's 13-year-old boy, Christopher, said he was going to play football with some friends. The boys went to the edge of a nearby river.
There, one of the group of 15 white boys plus Christopher apparently gave Christopher a push that sent him tumbling into the water. Christopher couldn't swim.
Several hours later, his older sister heard a rumor that Christopher had jumped or fallen or been pushed into the water. Police showed up at Joseph's apartment to look for him -- perhaps he had just gone home. Later in the afternoon, the police returned and asked Joseph to come down to the hospital with them.
They'd found Christopher, and Joseph knew the moment she saw him that he was dead.
Joseph saw that the spot where Christopher had fallen into the water was not marked off as a crime scene. His belongings weren't there. And the police told her the very next day that Christopher's death was a tragic accident.
A local activist group, The Monitoring Group, thought otherwise. “It was a homicide,” said one of its directors.
The South Wales police sent the case to a police investigation board. At that point, noting that the report was not yet complete, the local police said the board had found "No indication that any police officer may have acted in a manner that breached professional standards."
In 2020, the Crown Prosecution Service, decided that there was "a realistic prospect of conviction for manslaughter." But the boy who had pushed Christopher had committed "a foolish prank, with nothing to suggest that the suspect intended to harm him." It was "not in the public interest" to prosecute the boy, who was 14 years old at the time.
Moreover, this stellar product of Wales society hadn't had any racial animus toward Christopher. "There was nothing in any of the statements of the young people which suggested any racial issues or that this was a hate crime.”
“There would have been a totally different outcome if there had been 14 Black teenagers (playing that day) and a White teen had died,” said another director of The Monitoring Group.
"All I want is [for] the justice system to do their job," Joseph says. "So far they have not done so.”
___________
Do you think that the Wales police and its supervising bodies have done their job?
What do you think ought to be done here? Should the boy who pushed Christopher be named? Should that boy be sentenced to public service? If this case had occurred in the United States, there could be civil liabilities.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/08/world/wales-racial-justice-cmd-idnty-intl-cnnphotos/
CNN's article is "interactive." Does that mean we can have an alternative ending?
No comments:
Post a Comment