Prominent British BLM activist shot and critically wounded

Post Reply New Topic

Prominent U.K. Black Lives Matter demonstrator Sasha Johnson is in critical condition after being shot in the head in London on Sunday.

As Reuters reports, London's Metropolitan Police did not identify Johnson, but her identity was confirmed by her political party.

Johnson, 27, sits on the executive leadership committee of the Taking the Initiative Party, which said in an Instagram post that the shooting occurred early Monday morning.

“It is with great sadness that we inform you that our own Sasha Johnson has been brutally attacked and sustained a gunshot wound to her head. She is currently in intensive care and in a critical condition,” the political party said. “The attack happened in the early hours of this morning, following numerous death threats as a result of her activism.”

A friend of Johnson's, told the BBC that doctors had performed surgery on Johnson and it had gone well. Imarn Ayton said that Johnson had been at a party and she did not believe the activist was the shooter's intended victim.

"As far as I am aware... this incident is more related to rival gangs as opposed to her activism," Ayton told the BBC.

House party in Peckham at 3am with gang members in attendance.

Suggestions are that she got caught in the middle of something and she wasnt the intended target

A friend, Imarn Ayton, said she did not believe Johnson was the intended target.

"As far as we are aware, she was at a party," she told the BBC. "There was a rival gang that may have heard about someone being in that party that they didn't feel quite comfortable with or trusted and so they resorted to driving past and shooting into the garden, and one of those shots obviously hit Sasha Johnson.

"But I don't believe she was the intended victim."

Inspired by that unexpectedly catalysing moment, which came a week after the killing of George Floyd, Ayton is now a figurehead for British activism. She went from battling depression and issues of self-confidence to becoming the fired-up founder of the Black Reformist Movement, a brand-new non-profit that aims to eradicate institutionalised racism wherever it’s found in Britain. What’s more, she did it all in the space of just six months.

Now, after a summer of grassroots protests have left the newscycle, and focus turns to three-tier local lockdowns, Ayton wants to challenge the British government to make tangible, permanent change. It’s a big ask but she believes that Acts of Parliament are the only way to keep the energy up.

“We have to be as pragmatic as we can,” she says. ​“The world is governed by legislation and law, so we should make that a priority.”

So how did these young men get here?
Yusuf says most of the boys he started secondary school with are now in gangs.
He once dreamed of being a footballer, but says he was let down by school and a government that "only cares about itself".
"They're not talking to the people in the council estates, they're talking to people in Chelsea," he says.
He didn't have to look far for a different path.
"I gave up on myself. In the borough like, this is the life. You don't need to look for it, it's there."

Speaking three days after Jah’s murder, Rachid wondered what has happened to his city. “It’s like living in a war zone. You’re free but you’re not free at the same time. You’re constantly asking yourself: how did it come to this?”

Three years have passed since the government loudly launched its first serious violence strategy. Backed with £40m of Home Office funding, the strategy hailed a “real step-change” in how the UK tackled “violent drug-dealing gangs” and their recruitment of vulnerable youngsters.

But not only do the killings continue, the gangs themselves have proliferated. Former Home Office adviser and director of the National Centre for Gang Research Simon Harding believes the taskforce has made little difference because it was obsessed with the wrong target. “It should have been focused on tackling poverty, inequality. These are the main drivers of violence.”

Instead of an innovative approach to dismantle the cycle of drug-fuelled violence, it repackaged the strategy kickstarted by Richard Nixon and his “war on drugs” 50 years ago.