How the Media ‘Justified’ the Shooting of Chris Kaba and then ‘Conducted a Merciless Autopsy’ on his Life

You probably missed the shooting itself – the September 2022 killing of an unarmed Black man by police in South London was bumped from most news programmes by the death of Queen Elizabeth – but we doubt you missed the trial.

On Monday, Metropolitan Police officer Martyn Blake was acquitted for the murder of Chris Kaba, reopening wounds and wars about police violence and Black Lives Mattering. But it is not the court trial we want to talk about today. It’s the media one.

The end of the trial came with the lifting of reporting restrictions and a media feeding frenzy – about the victim. In the trial, the judge refused to allow “bad character” evidence relating to Kaba to be shared with the jury.

Officer Blake knew the car that Kaba drove had been linked to a recent shooting, but he did not know the identity of the driver, nor the alleged crimes Kaba is now widely reported to have committed as a member of South London’s ‘67 gang’.

Kaba’s criminal record formed no part of Blake’s decision to pull the trigger, but it will forever be used to rationalise his death, because the media decided to cash in on it.

Some headlines are more colourful than others. Kaba was “unmasked” by The Express, his “criminal past REVEALED” by GB News. The Telegraph dubbed him “a violent gangster”, TalkTV a “SCUMBAG”, and Breitbart used his criminality to conditionalise whether Black Lives Actually Do Matter: “BLM Folk Hero Chris Kaba Revealed as Violent Gang Member Suspected in Multiple Shootings”.

It is fanciful to expect the media to overlook such click-worthy content. But ask yourselves this question: do you believe police should be able to kill people who do not pose them an immediate threat, but may have committed crimes? To put it more simply: do you believe in capital punishment… without trial?

If your answer is no, then (as the judge in the trial ruled) Kaba’s alleged gang involvement is irrelevant to the rightfulness or wrongfulness of his death. The media appear to disagree.

Implicitly or explicitly, these headlines justify a death by dehumanising the dying man. They say: whether it was lawful or not, it was deserved. They say (to quote Spiked directly): “Chris Kaba was a gangster, not a victim.”

To Chantelle Lunt, ex-Merseyside police officer (turned BLM founder), it is no surprise that The Met police petitioned for Kaba’s history to be publicised.

In a conversation with Media Storm about institutional racism and policing, she said police forces often “problematise the victim, as opposed to the perpetrator”.

“They are gaslighters in chief,” Black Police Association founder, Leroy Logan, said of the Met Police, with which he served for 30 years.

When Blake was charged in 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley publicly condemned the CPS’ decision to prosecute, and scores of officers laid down their weapons in protest. 

Unlike the media showtrial now unfolding, the court trial hinged not on Kaba’s unknown identity, but on 13 seconds of activity – from when police vehicles surrounded his car, to the moment Blake shot him in the head (he claimed to have aimed for his central body mass).

For this to be a lawful killing, Blake had to believe his target posed an immediate threat to life. Kaba had no gun, but a vehicle can be used as a weapon – albeit with more difficulty when it is penned in, as police ‘vehicle containment’ operations are designed to do.

Once surrounded, Kaba drove backwards and forwards, presumably trying to ram his way free, which Blake told jurors made him fear for his colleague’s life.

He said: “I had a genuine belief that there was an imminent threat to life, I thought one or more of my colleagues was about to die… I felt I had a duty to protect them.”

This was the first time since joining firearms in 2016 that Blake had fired at a suspect.

It is on these grounds that Blake was acquitted, not on the grounds that Kaba ‘had it coming’. But focus by police and the media on the latter indicates something scarier than one man misjudging a 13-second scenario. It indicates they think the character justifies the killing.

In Media Storm’s episode ‘Policing: Behind the PR Machine’, former police officer Adam Pugh described similar attitudes following the 2011 police shooting of Mark Duggan, a Black man also deemed to have been unarmed.

“Seeing and hearing first-hand the attitude of fellow police officers towards Mark – that he’s a criminal, he deserved what happened to him – is ultimately why I decided to leave”.

Now note this: UK police are twice as likely to shoot people of colour than white people, Black people are over twice as likely to die in police custody, and no police officer who pulled the trigger has ever been found guilty of murder.

Ultimately, Blake’s assessment of Kaba’s life-threatening risk existed more in his head than in reality. During the trial, Blake failed to identify from footage of the incident which of his colleagues’ lives were in danger; the “great” speed at which he thought Kaba’s vehicle to be moving was identified as 12mph by the prosecution; and his defence relied in part on pleas of “perceptual distortion” – errors in memory caused by high-stress situations.

Perhaps it is not for us to re-examine evidence out of context and undermine the jury’s decision (though there is of course the open question of the need for judicial reform).

Perhaps, in this tragedy, fault is bigger than a single officer. Perhaps fault lies with a culture that dehumanises, discriminates, and delegates police officers to pull the trigger when reality doesn’t necessitate it, but perception does (even if distorted).

If Kaba’s death was caused by a distorted perception of threat, and such perceptions disproportionately lead to Black people being killed, perhaps we should question the role of the media in feeding these perceptions – as they press on with their merciless autopsy of a dead man.

“Had he not been killed,” Sky News reported, “Kaba would’ve stood trial for attempted murder”.

And that is exactly what should have happened. Unfortunately, Kaba’s death prevented any trial from ever taking place. But in lieu of proper justice, he has been tried by our media – with no presumption of innocence and no right to defence – and posthumously sentenced to death.

The headlines about Chris Kaba do not tell us much about his killing, but they certainly tell us a lot about the society in which it occurred and was acquitted.

Media Storm’s episode, ‘Policing: Behind the PR Machine’ is available wherever you get your podcasts.