Obstinate memory: the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings

Abstract

This commentary by the organisers of the ongoing People’s Tribunal on Police Killings (PTPK), which held its first hearings in London on 5–6 April 2025, describes key features of the background to and hearings of the PTPK. Despite an estimated 3,000 police violence related deaths in the UK, no criminal conviction of officers has ever followed an inquest, and the judicial system has acted to contain the struggles of the families of those killed by police. The PTPK provided a space for families to tell their narratives in an unfiltered way, and verbatim testimonies are included here. The authors are aware that these testimonies might well not accord with evidence presented at inquests and rulings by inquests and the Crown Prosecution Service. But the shared patterns of systemic treatment by the state as well as collective resistance needed to be documented. These testimonies were interventions of what Fero and Hutnyk term obstinate memory – which functions simultaneously as qualitative data, research method and political praxis. Families testified to decades of betrayal by coroners, prosecutors, complaints bodies and lawyers who maintain a fiction of accountability. The very language of deaths in custody is, it is argued, a deliberate state strategy of erasure. Instead, the PTPK proposes the term police killings; to name them as such is to challenge power. The collection of testimonies, expert witness evidence and panel judgments underpin a series of class actions that the PTPK is undertaking. Further tribunals are planned on state killings in prison, secure medical units and during immigration control.