"...Black youths as young as 12 were routinely arrested for activities as innocuous as waiting for a bus or looking in a shop window. In many cases, these youths – predominantly male – were taken off the street and physically assaulted, either in the back of a police van or at the local station. Often they would be detained for days, without their families’ knowledge. And often they would be wrongly accused of a crime such as theft or conspiracy, in which case it became their word against the police’s. More than 90% of convictions in sus cases were on the strength of police testimony alone.
“The police was brutal. You’d go to the police station and you were terrified. When you tried to meet any authority, you were made to look very small. You were made to feel less of a person. It was basically ‘white right’.”
“You have to cast your mind back to a time in which it was rare to challenge directly the evidence of the police,” says Boateng. “But a group of us came to the view that we had to be prepared to call them liars. We had to be ready to challenge them and bring home to magistrates that they themselves were being watched by the community..."
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