INTERNATIONAL reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson says it is not only in Jamaica that people die while in police custody.

“I know that here in Jamaica deaths in police custody is an issue. But its not only here in Jamaica – in England it is a big issue,” Johnson said.

The Clarendon-born spoken-word performer, who came to poetry as a young activist out of the Black Panther Movement, said that between the 1970s and 1990s deaths in police custody in England – where he has been living for more than forty years – was so bad, he was motivated to write a poem titled, Licensed To Kill.

According to Johnson, a number of blacks died while in police custody during this period.

“In the black community, through the 70s, 80s and 90s we saw a frightening rise in the incidents of black people dying in police custody in England.”

He was speaking last Thursday at a fundraising poetry recital dubbed Legacy of Garvey at Liberty Hall in Kingston. Johnson was the featured poet.

His comments came in the wake of the completion of the Crawle murder trial, which found Senior Superintendent of Police Reneto Adams and corporals Patrick Coke and Shane Lyons not guilty of murdering four people. The verdicts, however, drew sharp comments from the popular Channel 4 television station in Britain.

Channel 4 accused the trial judge, Chief Justice Lensley Wolfe, of being biased in his summation to the jury. The report further declared that should SSP Adams be re-instated in the Jamaica Constabulary Force it would sour the relationship between Britain and Jamaica.

Other negative reactions to the Crawle judgement also came from human rights lobbyist and representative of Amnesty International, Piers Bannister on the Nationwide News Network on which the Channel 4 report was aired.

However, without making references to any of these reports, Kwesi Johnson said: “… nowadays the whole situation has even gotten worse because, as people would know, this fellow Menezes, who was not even black, was taken out by the police in the so-called fight against terrorism in England. So I wrote a poem about deaths in custody, and I called it Lincensed To Kill.”

The Menezes to whom Johnson referred, is Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot by the London police because they thought he was a suicide bomber.

Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem, Lincensed To Kill, highlights a number of outstanding cases of deaths in police custody in England.