Time: 2:00 - 4:00pm Venue: Room 2.40, Second Floor, Bancroft Building, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
The International State Crime Initiative and the School of Law is hosting an event on 'Combating Police Impunity' at Queen Mary University of London.
After misconduct charges were dismissed against Metropolitan police officers involved in the arrest of her brother over 10 years ago, Marcia Rigg said the police ‘had a licence to kill.’ More than 30 years after the murder of Daniel Morgan, and despite an apology from the Met eight years ago that police corruption thwarted the criminal investigation, his family are still awaiting the report of an independent panel established in 2013. Hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry, set up in 2015 to investigate Met surveillance on lawful social justice campaigns, are not expected to commence until 2020. Evidently, police impunity is a pressing issue for Londoners.
This event brings together leading scholars and activists from the US and UK to examine both the structures and conditions of and solutions to police impunity.
In the 1980s and 1990s Graham Smith was the secretary of the Hackney Community Defence Association, a self-help group comprising victims of police crimes, and developed a police misconduct database. More recently he has served the Council of Europe and UN as an international expert on police complaints, the prohibition of torture and combatting impunity.
Craig B. Futterman is a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and a Resident Dean in the College. He founded and has served as the Director of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic since 2000. Before his appointment to the Law Faculty, Professor Futterman was a Lecturer in Law and Director of Public Interest Programs at Stanford Law School. He previously joined Futterman & Howard, Chtd., a boutique law firm concentrating in complex federal litigation. There, Prof. Futterman specialized in civil rights and constitutional matters, with a special focus on racial discrimination, education, and police brutality. Before that, he served as a trial attorney in the Juvenile Division of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. Mr. Futterman received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and graduated with the highest distinction from Northwestern University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Economics.
Nadine El-Enany is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law (@CentreRaceLaw). Nadine teaches and researches in the fields of migration and refugee law, European Union law, protest and criminal justice. Her current research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, focuses on questions of race and criminal and social justice in death in custody cases. Her book, (B)ordering Britain: law, race and empire is out with MUP later this year.
Val has recently completed her PhD at the Law School of the University of East Anglia, where her research has centred on the impact of state surveillance on political autonomy and the growth of social movements. She also sits on the steering group of Netpol, a UK-based human rights NGO which focuses on the protection of assembly rights and the monitoring of public order and protest policing. Val’s current research interests include pre-emptive policing and the designation of ‘risk’, and in particular, the extent to which a growing emphasis on preventive policing is constraining the growth of civil society.
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