Carole Duggan, aunt of Mark, whose death sparked the 2011 riots, rejects police claims that her nephew was a dangerous gangster. That is, she says, a racist smear, and plans to dedicate her life to clearing his name
Carole Duggan doesn't want us to meet at her house, because she's sure it has been bugged. She thinks her mobile has also been tapped, so we don't decide on an alternative venue over the phone. We can't make arrangements by email, either, because her laptop was stolen in a recent break-in. It might have been just a random burglary, of course – but the thief was uncommonly tidy, didn't touch her cash and other valuables, and stole only the computer and a phone. Besides, even if no one is listening in, she's still wary about talking to me. The press keep twisting her words, she says, and she worries that whatever she says will be used against her by the Daily Mail and the Sun. So we agree to meet at the train station in Manchester, and take it from there.
Your opinion of what she says during the five hours we spend together will depend almost entirely on your opinion of the police. If you trust the police, you will probably believe their claim that her nephew was one the most dangerous gangsters in Europe, and had been armed with a gun when officers pulled him over. It will sound perfectly plausible that in that split-second drama, the policeman who shot him dead honestly believed he saw the gun in his hand. Angry relatives are either in grief-stricken denial about the kind of man Mark Duggan really was, or else so bound up in gangster culture themselves that they will say anything.
Duggan's worry is that most white people do trust the police, because they have no reason not to. "You don't realise until you see it for yourself. I've been around the black community all my life. You don't know otherwise, do you? So white people should try and step inside the shoes of a black person and really take on board what it might feel like." If they did, they would soon stop trusting the police, and would not take their word for it that a young man whose criminal record consisted of handling stolen goods (£250 fine), possession of cannabis (£30 fine) and driving while disqualified was in actual fact a violent menace to society. Duggan insists that her nephew was just a "family man" from an "ordinary family"– and in the absence of any factual evidence to the contrary, it comes down to her word against theirs. If you believe that the police can be racist, corrupt and quite capable of harassing, murdering and smearing a young black man for their own self-serving purposes, her version of events may sound horribly credible.
Critics accuse her of playing the race card against officers risking their lives to protect the public from an armed gangster whose colour was neither here nor there. But Duggan believes that had her nephew been white, he would still be alive. Only this week Doreen Lawrence described elements of the police as "still racist", and said of the Duggan case that "it seems as if it's more acceptable" for the police to shoot a black man. The Lawrences were just an ordinary black family who the police bugged and smeared to cover up their own corruption. It took years for that truth to be known, and Duggan believes that one day the truth about her family will also come out.
She and her sister Pamela, Mark's mother, grew up in Manchester and moved to the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London, in their late teens. Pamela fell in love with a Jamaican called Bruno, and when she went into labour with their first son, Carole helped deliver him. "Mark was such a loved and wanted baby. The Daily Mail has tried to make out he was a latchkey babymother fatherless boy, but he wasn't. Bruno was there throughout his life. Mark was brought up on love."
Duggan moved back to Manchester when Mark was three, studied sociology, anthropology and politics at Salford university and became a chef – but their bond remained strong, and he spent every school holiday with her in Manchester. He was a shy boy, she says – a bit of a homebody, and easily bullied. One of his primary school teachers told the Daily Mail that he was "the epitome of aggression", but she says none of Mark's old school friends even has any recollection of this teacher, and his claim is so wide of the truth that "I think he was put up to it." When Mark struggled to adjust to secondary school, and began truanting, the 13-year-old moved to Manchester to live with his aunt.
"To me education was really important. He could barely read or write when he arrived, but he left here with a proper education. He had the ability, and I gave him the confidence." Claims in the press that her younger sister's marriage to a notorious Manchester gangster introduced Mark to crime are "a load of codswallop", she says angrily; her sister fled the marriage when her husband became a gangster, and "Mark never knew the Noonans. Where they're getting confused is my older sister, who's mixed-race, had a son – and it was him who knew the Noonans." Her only doubt about that chapter in Mark's life is a quite different one. "I question myself sometimes, because I'm white, and I believe the world is your oyster, it's out there for you to go and find – and that's what I used to tell Mark. But was I right to say that to him? Because he was black. And the world is not his oyster. Black people are restricted. So did I give him a false picture of society?"
When Mark returned to London at 17, he soon acquired his criminal record, and she worried that he was straying into trouble. But he fell in love with a childhood friend, Simone, and "all he wanted was to be daddy and have a family, being hands-on and changing nappies. They were a proper family." He bought and sold cars, opened a clothes shop on the Broadwater Farm estate, and though he and Simone had periods apart, his commitment as a father never faltered.
But he was constantly harassed by the police. "What people don't seem to understand is that PC Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham in the 80s on Broadwater Farm, so most of the black kids who grow up on Broadwater Farm are persecuted by the police, because they are paying the price of PC Blakelock's murder. Mark wasn't a trouble-causer, he wasn't argumentative. He was like Bruno – Bruno got through life by having a laugh and joking around."
Why does he look like a moody gangster in so many photos? A signature picture of his sullen scowl is endlessly reprinted in the press, but this ubiquitous image has been artfully cropped; the original shows him standing in a cemetery holding a heart-shaped memorial plaque to the stillborn child he and Simone lost, which casts his expression in an altogether different light. "But they never show that, do they?"
As for photos of him posing with gangster-style, pistol-hand gestures, "It was alright for Madonna to do it, and it's alright for Adele to do it – but not a black person. We watched Come Dine With Me, and there was a man with a picture of a gun with bullets coming out of it. Now that wouldn't be seen as gangsterism, would it? But if that was a black person's house – ooh look, he's promoting guns. But because he's white, it's seen as art. It's so blatant. It's racism. We live with this on a daily basis." The press have made much of his nickname, Starrish Mark, but Duggan says it had nothing to do with the local Star XX gang. "Mark got into rapping and poetry not long before he died, and Starrish was a rapping name. He never had no alias or AKA or street name, he was just Mark."
When Mark was shot dead on 4 August 2011, his two sons were visiting Duggan. She pretended her TV was broken to keep them from seeing the news, and when the subsequent rioting eventually subsided, she had to take them home to London in a taxi, to dodge reporters waiting at the station. Their mother broke the news that their father was dead – and the family has been imploding ever since.
"The smear campaign that has been sustained against the family has been a nightmare." Press reports of a "gangster-style funeral" were absurd, she says. "It was a traditional funeral – that's why we had a white carriage and white horses, a sign of peace." If it looked lavish, that's because it was organised by other family members, who ran up an £8,000 bill that no one could afford. "I just think they got a bit carried away. We weren't capable of organising the funeral. I lost two and a half stone. It was like being on another plane."
Bruno couldn't cope. "He couldn't say Mark's name, he couldn't deal with the meetings, he couldn't talk about Mark – he just used to sit there staring at a picture of him, saying, 'They killed my son.'" He died of cancer within a year. Mark's younger brother has "gone to pieces"; his weight has plummeted, and his scalp is dotted with bald patches where clumps of hair have fallen out from stress. His mother, Pamela, has been diagnosed with cancer, is heavily medicated and virtually housebound, while Mark's children are traumatised and struggling. Duggan has been too busy looking after them to work, and has come close to losing her house.
When the inquest opened last autumn, she says it's true that witnesses were sometimes barracked – but not by the family. Random members of the public with grievances against the police would turn up and heckle – and the family had to send a note to the coroner to make sure he knew it wasn't them. Never once did they or their lawyers dream the jury would return a verdict of lawful killing."Everyone was expecting an unlawful killing verdict, but I thought that's too ambitious, I know the system is stacked against us, it may be an open verdict. Everybody was devastated. It was as if the jury was listening to a different case."
For legal reasons it's not possible to present in full her theory about why Mark was killed. But she does not believe he was travelling with a gun, nor that the police thought he was. She believes they set him up, shot him and then planted the gun at the scene. The IPCC has apologised for "inadvertently" telling the media that Mark had opened fire, but as the IPCC didn't even arrive on the scene until after this false claim had been reported, Duggan is convinced the police issued it. She believes they murdered her nephew to deliberately provoke a riot which would see off the threat of government cuts to their budget, justify their demands for increased powers, and mobilise a regeneration of Tottenham to drive the black community out of the Broadwater Farm Estate, making way for private buyers. And they got away with it, she says, by smearing Mark as a gangster.
This week the family lodged an appeal for a judicial review, and Duggan has become a full-time campaigner, speaking at events for similar campaigns all over the country. She is a formidable advocate – educated, articulate, indefatigable and hugely likable. "Mark's murder was political. I'm not going away and they're not shutting me up. There are too many unanswered questions. I'm selling my house to free myself so I can fight on, because this is not the end." She has advised the IPCC on how it needs to be reformed, endorses its plan to replace its police staff with civilians trained to carry out its investigations, and intends to apply for a position herself. "We need an independent body that works. And I'd like that role."
Is it not possible, I ask, that she simply loved her nephew too much to see the truth about him? "No. I know I'm his aunt, but I'm real. I've lived out there, I'm not naive, far from it. And I know how far the police will go." Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.
Carole Duggan doesn't want us to meet at her house, because she's sure it has been bugged. She thinks her mobile has also been tapped, so we don't decide on an alternative venue over the phone. We can't make arrangements by email, either, because her laptop was stolen in a recent break-in. It might have been just a random burglary, of course – but the thief was uncommonly tidy, didn't touch her cash and other valuables, and stole only the computer and a phone. Besides, even if no one is listening in, she's still wary about talking to me. The press keep twisting her words, she says, and she worries that whatever she says will be used against her by the Daily Mail and the Sun. So we agree to meet at the train station in Manchester, and take it from there.
Your opinion of what she says during the five hours we spend together will depend almost entirely on your opinion of the police. If you trust the police, you will probably believe their claim that her nephew was one the most dangerous gangsters in Europe, and had been armed with a gun when officers pulled him over. It will sound perfectly plausible that in that split-second drama, the policeman who shot him dead honestly believed he saw the gun in his hand. Angry relatives are either in grief-stricken denial about the kind of man Mark Duggan really was, or else so bound up in gangster culture themselves that they will say anything.
Duggan's worry is that most white people do trust the police, because they have no reason not to. "You don't realise until you see it for yourself. I've been around the black community all my life. You don't know otherwise, do you? So white people should try and step inside the shoes of a black person and really take on board what it might feel like." If they did, they would soon stop trusting the police, and would not take their word for it that a young man whose criminal record consisted of handling stolen goods (£250 fine), possession of cannabis (£30 fine) and driving while disqualified was in actual fact a violent menace to society. Duggan insists that her nephew was just a "family man" from an "ordinary family"– and in the absence of any factual evidence to the contrary, it comes down to her word against theirs. If you believe that the police can be racist, corrupt and quite capable of harassing, murdering and smearing a young black man for their own self-serving purposes, her version of events may sound horribly credible.
Critics accuse her of playing the race card against officers risking their lives to protect the public from an armed gangster whose colour was neither here nor there. But Duggan believes that had her nephew been white, he would still be alive. Only this week Doreen Lawrence described elements of the police as "still racist", and said of the Duggan case that "it seems as if it's more acceptable" for the police to shoot a black man. The Lawrences were just an ordinary black family who the police bugged and smeared to cover up their own corruption. It took years for that truth to be known, and Duggan believes that one day the truth about her family will also come out.
She and her sister Pamela, Mark's mother, grew up in Manchester and moved to the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London, in their late teens. Pamela fell in love with a Jamaican called Bruno, and when she went into labour with their first son, Carole helped deliver him. "Mark was such a loved and wanted baby. The Daily Mail has tried to make out he was a latchkey babymother fatherless boy, but he wasn't. Bruno was there throughout his life. Mark was brought up on love."
Duggan moved back to Manchester when Mark was three, studied sociology, anthropology and politics at Salford university and became a chef – but their bond remained strong, and he spent every school holiday with her in Manchester. He was a shy boy, she says – a bit of a homebody, and easily bullied. One of his primary school teachers told the Daily Mail that he was "the epitome of aggression", but she says none of Mark's old school friends even has any recollection of this teacher, and his claim is so wide of the truth that "I think he was put up to it." When Mark struggled to adjust to secondary school, and began truanting, the 13-year-old moved to Manchester to live with his aunt.
"To me education was really important. He could barely read or write when he arrived, but he left here with a proper education. He had the ability, and I gave him the confidence." Claims in the press that her younger sister's marriage to a notorious Manchester gangster introduced Mark to crime are "a load of codswallop", she says angrily; her sister fled the marriage when her husband became a gangster, and "Mark never knew the Noonans. Where they're getting confused is my older sister, who's mixed-race, had a son – and it was him who knew the Noonans." Her only doubt about that chapter in Mark's life is a quite different one. "I question myself sometimes, because I'm white, and I believe the world is your oyster, it's out there for you to go and find – and that's what I used to tell Mark. But was I right to say that to him? Because he was black. And the world is not his oyster. Black people are restricted. So did I give him a false picture of society?"
When Mark returned to London at 17, he soon acquired his criminal record, and she worried that he was straying into trouble. But he fell in love with a childhood friend, Simone, and "all he wanted was to be daddy and have a family, being hands-on and changing nappies. They were a proper family." He bought and sold cars, opened a clothes shop on the Broadwater Farm estate, and though he and Simone had periods apart, his commitment as a father never faltered.
But he was constantly harassed by the police. "What people don't seem to understand is that PC Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham in the 80s on Broadwater Farm, so most of the black kids who grow up on Broadwater Farm are persecuted by the police, because they are paying the price of PC Blakelock's murder. Mark wasn't a trouble-causer, he wasn't argumentative. He was like Bruno – Bruno got through life by having a laugh and joking around."
Why does he look like a moody gangster in so many photos? A signature picture of his sullen scowl is endlessly reprinted in the press, but this ubiquitous image has been artfully cropped; the original shows him standing in a cemetery holding a heart-shaped memorial plaque to the stillborn child he and Simone lost, which casts his expression in an altogether different light. "But they never show that, do they?"
As for photos of him posing with gangster-style, pistol-hand gestures, "It was alright for Madonna to do it, and it's alright for Adele to do it – but not a black person. We watched Come Dine With Me, and there was a man with a picture of a gun with bullets coming out of it. Now that wouldn't be seen as gangsterism, would it? But if that was a black person's house – ooh look, he's promoting guns. But because he's white, it's seen as art. It's so blatant. It's racism. We live with this on a daily basis." The press have made much of his nickname, Starrish Mark, but Duggan says it had nothing to do with the local Star XX gang. "Mark got into rapping and poetry not long before he died, and Starrish was a rapping name. He never had no alias or AKA or street name, he was just Mark."
When Mark was shot dead on 4 August 2011, his two sons were visiting Duggan. She pretended her TV was broken to keep them from seeing the news, and when the subsequent rioting eventually subsided, she had to take them home to London in a taxi, to dodge reporters waiting at the station. Their mother broke the news that their father was dead – and the family has been imploding ever since.
"The smear campaign that has been sustained against the family has been a nightmare." Press reports of a "gangster-style funeral" were absurd, she says. "It was a traditional funeral – that's why we had a white carriage and white horses, a sign of peace." If it looked lavish, that's because it was organised by other family members, who ran up an £8,000 bill that no one could afford. "I just think they got a bit carried away. We weren't capable of organising the funeral. I lost two and a half stone. It was like being on another plane."
Bruno couldn't cope. "He couldn't say Mark's name, he couldn't deal with the meetings, he couldn't talk about Mark – he just used to sit there staring at a picture of him, saying, 'They killed my son.'" He died of cancer within a year. Mark's younger brother has "gone to pieces"; his weight has plummeted, and his scalp is dotted with bald patches where clumps of hair have fallen out from stress. His mother, Pamela, has been diagnosed with cancer, is heavily medicated and virtually housebound, while Mark's children are traumatised and struggling. Duggan has been too busy looking after them to work, and has come close to losing her house.
When the inquest opened last autumn, she says it's true that witnesses were sometimes barracked – but not by the family. Random members of the public with grievances against the police would turn up and heckle – and the family had to send a note to the coroner to make sure he knew it wasn't them. Never once did they or their lawyers dream the jury would return a verdict of lawful killing."Everyone was expecting an unlawful killing verdict, but I thought that's too ambitious, I know the system is stacked against us, it may be an open verdict. Everybody was devastated. It was as if the jury was listening to a different case."
For legal reasons it's not possible to present in full her theory about why Mark was killed. But she does not believe he was travelling with a gun, nor that the police thought he was. She believes they set him up, shot him and then planted the gun at the scene. The IPCC has apologised for "inadvertently" telling the media that Mark had opened fire, but as the IPCC didn't even arrive on the scene until after this false claim had been reported, Duggan is convinced the police issued it. She believes they murdered her nephew to deliberately provoke a riot which would see off the threat of government cuts to their budget, justify their demands for increased powers, and mobilise a regeneration of Tottenham to drive the black community out of the Broadwater Farm Estate, making way for private buyers. And they got away with it, she says, by smearing Mark as a gangster.
This week the family lodged an appeal for a judicial review, and Duggan has become a full-time campaigner, speaking at events for similar campaigns all over the country. She is a formidable advocate – educated, articulate, indefatigable and hugely likable. "Mark's murder was political. I'm not going away and they're not shutting me up. There are too many unanswered questions. I'm selling my house to free myself so I can fight on, because this is not the end." She has advised the IPCC on how it needs to be reformed, endorses its plan to replace its police staff with civilians trained to carry out its investigations, and intends to apply for a position herself. "We need an independent body that works. And I'd like that role."
Is it not possible, I ask, that she simply loved her nephew too much to see the truth about him? "No. I know I'm his aunt, but I'm real. I've lived out there, I'm not naive, far from it. And I know how far the police will go." Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.