Last Monday at 10pm, following a brief chase, two police cars hemmed in on an Audi being driven by Chris Kaba on Kirkstall Gardens, a narrow residential street in Streatham Hill, South London. Kaba, a twenty-four-year-old rapper who was set to become a husband and father in the coming months, was reportedly shot through the window of his car, and died from his wounds in hospital in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Police said Kaba’s car had triggered an automatic number plate recognition camera linking the vehicle to an earlier firearms incident. Subsequent sweeps of the area in which the shooting took place have found no non-police-issue firearm. In other words, he was unarmed.

Kaba’s death has left his community in a state of outrage. Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy told the Independent that local people were referring to the shooting as an ‘execution’, while  Kaba’s family have called the Met ‘totally racist’ and demanded a homicide investigation, which has now been launched. The family and Ribeiro-Addy were joined by Peckham MP Harriet Harman on Sunday in calling for the officer who shot Kaba to be immediately suspended.

Kaba is not the only person whose family have been left demanding answers and justice in recent months. On 4 June, another black man, Oladeji Omishore was tasered multiple times during a mental health crisis, falling into the River Thames. The subsequent statement from the charity Inquest said that police claimed that Omishore was ‘armed with a screwdriver’, which turned out to be a lighter he used for cigarettes. The IOPC then failed to inform his family that the object had not in fact been a screwdriver until more than a week after his death.

These events—from the actual killings to the numerous institutional failings—are shocking. But for too many, they are no longer surprising. Since 1990, there have been 1833 deaths in police custody or otherwise following police contact, but Benjamin Monk, the police officer last year convicted of the manslaughter of Dalian Atkinson, was the first since 1986 to be found guilty of unlawfully killing a member of the public while on duty.

In the past decade, the BBC estimate that 8% of those who died in custody were black, despite black people representing only 3% of the population. Black people continue to be five times more likely to have force used on them by police, nine times more likely to be stopped and searched, and eight times more likely to be tasered.

Statistics like these provide a clear counterpoint to the ‘bad apple’ narrative that has already been so thoroughly debunked, but continues to be rolled out at times like this. We are meant to live within the borders of a democratic state in which individuals are equal and free. Too often the criminalisation and violence to which black people are subjected makes our experience one of coercion and authoritarianism instead.

These inequalities have a history. In the British Empire’s heyday, the colonial state expanded its use of force across the globe to enable the seizure of land, resource extraction and wholesale exploitation of labour. In this context, colonial forces fostered a belief that their subjects had a natural propensity for violence—something to be aggressively kept in check. This notion never fully left the British elites; as the sun set on the Empire in the late twentieth century, increasingly militaristic policing was brought to Britain following the suppressions of uprisings in Moss Side in Manchester and Toxteth in Liverpool in 1981.

Even today, this sentiment plays an active role in polity. A spate of new laws passed under now-departed Home Secretary Priti Patel have granted the police more means to essentially suppress any protests considered to be ‘annoying’, and to criminalise those who participate in them. Much of this legislation was developed in specific response to 2020’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations, as well as the climate demonstrations of that year. In turn, people of colour who attend protests—for example, for justice after the shooting of an unarmed black man—may now find themselves at further increased risk of police aggression, deepening the spiral that haunts communities across the country.

But in London at least, the acceptance of a certain style of policing is beginning to crack. At the time of writing, the Met is currently in special measures after a series of horrific events in the past two years, including the murder of Sarah Everard (and the policing of her vigil), the treatment of the bodies of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and the strip-searching of Child Q. After the latter story was exposed, it emerged that the force had strip-searched 650 children in the space of two years, and that three in five of those strip-searched between the ages of ten and seventeen were black.

After Cressida Dick’s resignation in February, a new commissioner starting today amid this latest wave of anger has been tasked with cleaning up the force’s act. Dick, in no small part due to her role in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, had come for many to represent the cold brutality of the force, and the impunity enjoyed by its officers. But the continued killings show that a change in figurehead is far from enough: it must be those communities affected and those families bereaved by police violence that lead any real change, and it must be real accountability that meets those responsible. Only through grassroots mobilisation, with the question of a redistribution of power to those disempowered by the current system at its heart, can any real justice be obtained.