People trying to get to Heathrow Airport have faced delays after demonstrators claiming to belong to the Black Lives Matter movement laid across a road. In particular, the protesters blocked motorway to the major United Kingdom airport Heathrow in a bid to attract public attention to the racism issue.
Advertisement
It was one of several coordinated demonstrations across England created to cause maximum disruption, with others held in Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham.
London’s Metropolitan Police Service said 10 people were arrested at the demonstration near Heathrow, six of whom were “locked on” to one another.
The protesters said they were marking the fifth anniversary of the death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black man shot by London police under disputed circumstances on August 4, 2011.
Nkonde blended the complaints of America’s Black Lives Matter movement (lack of convictions in cases where black people died in police custody) with the new refugee crisis angle.
The organisation, which began in 2013, regularly organises protests around the deaths of black people by police officers.
Then at a protest rally in Dallas five police officers were killed by a sniper.
The protests Friday were aimed at drawing attention to police-linked violence in the U.K.as well as to turn the spotlight on the nationwide “crisis” of racism, the British chapter said.
The campaign group had called for a “nationwide #shutdown” to mark the anniversary of the London riots in a post on social media yesterday.
The protests came the day after the fifth anniversary of Mark Duggan’s death.
A 2014 inquest into his death found Duggan was lawfully killed, even though he did not have a gun in his hand at the moment he was shot. “At the moment, we’re in conversation about how we might work together in the future”, BLMUK spokesperson Shanice Octavia said.
Another man says black people are “up to 37 times more likely” to be stopped and searched, while another says black people face “far more severe” sentencing than white people for the same offence.
BLMUK describes itself as a network of anti-racist activists from across the UK.
Advertisement
Later crowds gathered in east London where the families of people who have died in police custody addressed the crowd, each sharing stories on their long fight for justice. The killing sparked Britain’s worst civil disorder in decades, several nights of rioting that spread from London to cities around the country.
