- Sayce Holmes-Lewis talks to insider about the racism within the UK Police Force.
- Sayce was assaulted by the Met Police at age 14, and has been stop and searched over 30 times by the UK Police.
- Between 2018 and 2020, the Met Police strip-searched 650 children. Almost three out of five of those children were Black.
The following is a transcript of the video:
My name is Sayce Holmes-Lewis. I was first assaulted by the Met Police aged 14. Since then, I've been stopped over 30 times. This is how police racism works. People don't really understand what it feels like to be stopped and pulled over in your car, and being followed by officers, and your heart's beating, the adrenaline's going. People don't really understand that this is something where you think, potentially, if something goes wrong here, I could lose my life.
I've been dealing with the police professionally for a long time, but also personally too. But all my views and expressions are based on my personal experience.
I was assaulted at age of 14, just coming home from school in my school uniform. I was at the train station, on the train, and a police officer came onto the train and told me to get off before he took me off. I questioned him and said, "Look, what am I supposed to have done? Let me know." And when I walked up to him, he dragged me off the train, assaulted me, punched me, hit me twice in the abdomen with his truncheon, handcuffed me, dragged me with the handcuffs along my front all the way down the platform, two flights of stairs, and then dearrested me because of public outcry of adults and my friends.
Never told me what I was supposed to have done. Went home to press charges against the officer, was thrown out by the Crown Prosecution Service, the criminal justice system here, for lack of evidence. And we had eyewitness accounts of about 12 people and CCTV evidence too. But that changed my whole outlook and feeling towards policing. I saw that adults weren't able to give me justice. That manifested itself through anger. Because that was the only thing that I had to hold on to. So, after the assault, age 14, I experienced over 30 stop and searches since then. But it was always the same language. "You look like a criminal." "Look at the clothes you're wearing." "Why are you in the area?" "This area is known for drugs and criminals, such as yourself." It's just the way in the manners, the language. And it made me feel like a criminal, even though I wasn't involved in any of that stuff. I was literally at the mercy or whatever officer who came to contact me, whatever they wanted to do.
And that just made me feel worthless at times, like less than human. And for some people, there's no coming back from that. So, the London Gangs Matrix was born out of the 2011 uprisings after the the shooting of Mark Duggan. And the Gangs Matrix was basically a database of predominantly Black males that were seen to be part of gangs or organized crime in London. But many people on this list were guilty by association.
They might have been family members, friends, uncles, acquaintances, but they were on this list. And this information was used to criminalize and target a large number of young Black males in particular for things that they weren't even a part of. There were people on there that were criminals and part of that, but however, it was very disproportionate. And a lot of people on that Gangs Matrix, on that database, had information shared about them with other agencies, such as schools, businesses. It was sharing information about people who weren't actually criminals and using that to decrease their life chances and opportunities within education, employment, training.
But this is also linking that to the criminalization of Black youth and dehumanizing Black youth and actually creating a stereotypical narrative around criminality. And that is attributed to the Black community only. But there are gangs from all walks of life, all backgrounds in London. But again, it seems to be a real succinct focus on Black deviants, on Black criminality. Stop and search is a police power which is used to stop anyone that they feel might be potentially committing a crime or may have committed a crime.
And it's used under one of three sections routinely in communities. PACE, Section 1 of PACE 1984, which is the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which allows police to stop people based on reasonable doubt. Another one that's commonly used is Section 23 of the Misuse of Drugs Act. This is something which is routinely used in our communities, especially with young Black boys, to stop them and to detain them under Section 23, with the purpose of carrying out a search for drugs. And that is used, been used on myself many, many times.
There are people that are consuming drugs in affluent areas, but they're not being policed in the way that some of our young Black boys are being policed in some of our areas. Another one, which is very controversial, is Section 60, which is a police power which is used when violence is anticipated in certain areas or certain boroughs. This can be used to stop anybody without reasonable grounds. When we talk about suspicion and we're talking about reasonable grounds and evidence, those seem to go out the window when it's a Black person.
Many people are not against stop and search. They're against the way that it's carried out and the way that it makes them feel and the legacy of that stop and search. When my grandparents came here from the Windrush generation, in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, sus law was literally just that, suspicious law. If they thought you looked suspicious, they could stop you. And that came derived from the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which was used to actually imprison vagabonds and travelers and people with no fixed abode. And that was revamped in 1984, Section 1 of PACE.
But it's still being used in disproportionate ways to really criminalize and oppress large volumes of working-class people based on their demographic and where they're from. There's a real lack of empathy in policing, and that causes a lot of the trauma and reinforces a lot of the trauma in our areas as well, and the trauma that we face as Black Britons and the Black British experience. So it does make it difficult. But most of the officers that do it, they want to. And they want to make you feel a certain way, and they want to reinforce that power dynamic.
And that shouldn't be the way forward. And often, many of these searches end up with no further action. It's not really an effective tool. 78% of stop and searches, no further action. With only about 8% leading to a conviction. So that tells you within itself that it's something which needs to be used in an effective way, based on evidence and reasonable grounds and not just on a hunch. My response to those figures, three out of five Black children being strip-searched by officers, it just showcases the issue that we have that officers and adults feel that it's necessary to do something so intrusive. And I keep using the word trauma because trauma is a driver for the negativity in our communities, especially with a lack of mental-health support. And we don't access enough mental health and therapy because Black Africans and Caribbeans, it's seen as a sign of weakness, historically.
We have a real racially motivated outlook towards young people when it comes to crime. But also the adultification of young people within those areas. It just, it shouldn't happen. We talk about young Black boys in education that may have growth spurts. You know, 6-foot-4, 13. There's a real fear around the physicality of a Black boy. A Black man. And that's something that's been embedded over time. You go back to Margaret Thatcher when she came to power in '79, '80. There was this fear of the Black man, the Black mugger, the person who was going to be the Black robber. And these seeds have been sown over time. That's at the forefront of many people's minds.
And because they've already been dehumanized in that thought process, this doesn't matter. Because if you don't have empathy, you don't have understanding of what that will feel like, then you don't care. And that's why I do what I do and speak about it. Because I know what it feels like to be assaulted by an officer. I know what it feels like to be adultified by police officers and within education. But until you actually feel something, experience it, you won't understand it. There needs to be guidelines in terms of how we then safeguard that young person. Whether it's justified or not. How do we protect them? That's probably one of the most dehumanizing things that's happened to some people. It's happened to my cousin, last year at the hands of the TSG, just as he was delivering food as an Uber Eats rider. Ended up being in a cell, being strip-searched, no phone call, disappeared for 17 hours. Like, he hasn't recovered from that. Many of these young people are not going to be able to recover from that. They don't have the support. But, quite simply, many of these officers, if that was their child, would they agree to it? I don't think they would.
So, the Territorial Support Group, TSG, they are an enforcement arm of the police, the Met Police Force in London. They have different vans, so blue vans, and they police events mainly, public-order events as well and protests and things like that. But before the TSG were created, we had the SPG, which was the Special Patrol Group. Now, my uncles and grandparents, they were routinely policed by the SPG. So the SPG used to go around and literally just pick up Black boys, Black men, assault them, put them in a cell, and then release them without charge. And it was all based on sus law, suspicion that they were criminals. So the SPG was disbanded, I believe, in the late '80s. And then we had the TSG, which was created, which is basically the same thing, just revamped with a new name.
So they go into communities, again, policing communities, targeting people that might be criminals in their eyes or drug dealers, whatever it may be. But they use stop and search. And also Section 60, which is being able to search people without reasonable grounds, which is a special police power. The TSG undo a lot of the good work of neighborhood teams that the police have in communities. They routinely come in, and it's enforcement before engagement. They don't want to ask questions. They go in heavy handed, cuffs on, using force, and they ask questions after. They get to impart that violence without any recourse, without any repercussions.
And that doesn't help. It really doesn't help. And that's a real issue within our communities. And that's where a lot of these incidents happen, negative incidents where disproportionate force is used against people. So the TSG have a lot to answer for. We see young boys being handcuffed, being restrained, knees being put on their chest whilst they're on the floor, hands around their neck. Like, even after what happened to George Floyd. If it was carried out in a different manner, if things were defused and deescalated, then we would still have some of these people here today. Even the other day, young man, De-Shaun Joseph, 14, in Croydon, stopped by police.
They thought that he was a criminal and just committed a crime, but they restrained him and had a grown adult with both knees in the back of this young man who was facedown on the floor. And he thought he was going to die. In the interview that he gave, he says, "I thought I was going to die." And how do you counteract that trauma? Who's going to give that young man support? Who's going to apologize to him? Because it's not going to be the Met. We talk about Joy Gardner, same thing, suffocation. And these are not isolated incidents. So that means that there's something going wrong within those processes, within those systems and the people that we have who are supposed to be enforcing the law, because these things shouldn't be happening.
Based on the evidence I've come across, a lot of the police-custody deaths in relation to Black people and the ones that I've come across have been highly suspicious. And, again, the evidence that is used to then convict or not convict the officers who are involved in the case and being charged isn't really forthcoming. The criminal justice system and the powers that be protect a lot of officers when these instances happen. I think that's one of the reasons we don't get the justice we deserve. There's a database of officers, hundreds of officers that have committed crimes. And these names, a lot of them are withheld, and they're protected. They probably shouldn't be protecting these criminals, because day-to-day criminals are not protected by the media or anybody else. We've had, I think, 390 police-custody deaths with the Met Police since 1990. And disproportionately, Black people are at the heart of that. And there have been a number of incidents. You know, with Kevin Clarke, who was basically suffocated. He said, "I couldn't breathe." Nobody listened to him. He ended up dying in police custody. And this is something that's routinely happened. Dalian Atkinson, ex-football-player for Aston Villa, who had issues with mental health but was killed at the hands of the police. Was Tased nine times, kicked in the head by an officer, which all attributed to his death. But that officer was actually charged, but only got eight years. That's not justice for me. That's not justice for the family. The fact is, this man abused his power. So did his colleagues, and were aware of it, and no one stopped it. But these are state-assisted deaths, and I feel that they're protected by the powers that be. There's a different set of rules for officers when it comes to the law. So we have to be consistent in terms of how we enforce the law. And until these things stop and we get true justice and criminals within the police force are going to prison for minimum terms, life sentences, for taking people's lives, we're not actually going to change our perception of the police.
There are many instances of where how we are received when we're complaining about crime and we are victims of crime, we are then made to feel like we shouldn't be victims of crime or that it's not important. In relation to Richard Okorogheye, who went missing, who was then found to have passed away, but when his mom went to the police station, she complained and said, "My son's gone missing, and we need to find him." And one of the officers responded by saying, "If you can't find him, how are we supposed to find him?" Just shows you the lack of empathy in policing. And even though we are victims in crimes, we're made to feel like criminals.
And that's a lot of the racial bias and stereotyping that we have to face. But there are numerous incidents of Black people going missing and reporting the crime or reporting it as a disappearance, and nothing happens. As a human being, how do you sleep at night knowing now that that person has died, is no longer here, and that was your response to his mom? There's got to be something within that recruitment process going wrong for us to be having these type of people attached to the police service. Especially the Met, but in other police forces across the country, there's a major failing in the recruitment. Are we doing tests and personality tests?
Are we doing tests around psychology, the psychology of people that are joining the force? How are we measuring these things, and how are we recruiting the wrong people over and over again? Parts of the Met, parts of police forces are deeply insidious because they don't want to change. And if colleagues are not actually calling this out, then you're part of that problem. You're part of the issue, despite all the good work and great work you might do in terms of policing. But you have to call it out. There was a man called Gwenton Sloley, who was training the police, much like myself, who was the subject of a targeted raid by a group of officers that he actually trained. They literally stopped him from earning a livelihood. So he took that to court and won the case, defamation of character amongst other things. And he was paid out hundreds of thousands for that mistreatment.
But also, they tried to destroy him. And some officers weren't happy that someone from the community that was a Black man was educating him around this and being paid to do so. And that's the reality of some of our police officers that feel that they're above the law and they can do whatever they want, and that's a really scary thought, because how far has that gone in history, you know? And how far will it go in the future? The Met have got a massive issue around public trust because of the way they've consistently mistreated communities. And this is not just about a Black British thing. This is about working-class people being oppressed in the way that the state has routinely oppressed many people across this world.
An apology is going to be the first thing, but the actions have to back up what you're saying. You know, how do you build trust and build a relationship that's never been there? It's by listening, being empathetic, and actually working in conjunction and in collaboration with these communities. That's the only way that we're going to build a relationship that's never been there. I think the transparency and accountability needs to be across the board. If senior Met officers are failing within their role, they need to be gone, not seconded into other roles. Just gone. You need to get this insidious side of the police out.
And you have to target individuals within that institution. And unfortunately, that's the only way that we can do that, because ultimately, more senior officers are still having these same outlooks and having these same conversations in rooms which are closed to us, and they're based on our stereotypes and racially motivated stereotypes. And until people change and have a more inclusive outlook towards people in general, then we can't solve these things within society, let alone an institution.
So, I've been training the Met Police since June 2020, so it's over two years now. And this was after a stop and search that I experienced during the first lockdown. And I saw these officers stop a young white boy and a Black boy. And it didn't look right. 12 officers around two boys. So I stopped in my car, wound down my window, said, "Boys, are you OK? Are you all right? Everything all right?" They shouted over, said, "Yeah, we're fine. Thank you for checking in." I drove around the block, back onto the main road, and then I saw the blue lights behind me, and I thought, "Oh, let me pull over. It's not for me." And then they pulled me over under Section 23, the Misuse of Drugs Act. And it was, "You look like a criminal. You look like you just made a drug deal. The car you're driving." And then I realized that they were children. They were 21, 22, 23. I was 37 at the time, and I said, you know what? I need to change this. I decided that, you know what? I'm going to train you how to talk to young people, especially Black youth, and how to engage with them positively, because you've done this to me for 24 years, and I had no solution.
And then six weeks later, I was in New Scotland Yard opening my first session around conscious bias, racial equity in policing, but also linked to stop and search. It's part of the solution. It's not going to be the solution. It's part of the solution and getting people to understand that we are all human and that we all want safer communities. So if we treat each other with that sort of respect and we work diligently in anti-racism and stand in anti-racism and challenge the systems that are in place, then we have better police service, but a better society, better community.
So, Mentivity is a mentoring organization that I founded in 2016. So we mentor young people for activity. Not just sports, not just music. We're talking about tech, we're talking about professional outlooks and saying, "I can be a lawyer. I can be a doctor." It's about really signposting young people towards their passions and moving towards your dreams.
We reached out to the Met for a statement and a spokesperson wrote in an e-mail: "The Met is committed to becoming an actively anti-racist organisation that can be trusted by everyone in London.
"Since the terrible murder of George Floyd in the United States and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests two years ago, we've been focussing on a number of key areas.
"These include ensuring racist behaviour has no place in the Metropolitan Police Service and increasing diversity in the organisation through recruitment and career progression.
"We're working hard to increase our officers' understanding of different cultures and the history of policing different communities, particularly black communities.
"We recognise the Met is not yet free of discrimination, racism or bias, but we are changing to build a Met which is."
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