Smiley Culture: a campaign begins

Hugh Muir over at The Guardian has written a piece covering the growing campaign over the death of 1980s music star Smiley Culture (real name David Emmanuel):

There was anger, there were tears and it was standing room only in the Karibu Centre. Not everyone knew Smiley Culture, the reggae artist who died last week during a police operation to arrest him at his home, but everyone knew his music. And it wasn't just the music. It was also the fact that he fused reggae with a diction and landscape that was unmistakably British. Anglo/West Indian fusion is unremarkable now, particularly on the radio. Many say Smiley did it first.

Smiley's relatives contacted Jasper, and he chaired that community meeting at the Karibu. It looked like something out of the 1980s I told him the following morning. But surely things are different now; black officers, black investigators on the police complaints body; all the things you campaigned for. Why are we back to this? "There was small-scale, incremental progress," he concedes. "We don't have the horror of black men being murdered and the police doing nothing. But it's a mixed bag. Look at the deaths in custody; look at stop and search, up by 70%."

There is a public meeting being held at Lambeth Town Hall, details on the Smiley Culture campaign page.