Death
On 15 March 2011, Emmanuel died, from a stab wound police say was self-inflicted, while the police were searching his house in Hillbury Road, Warlingham, Surrey, an hour and a half after officers arrived with a search warrant. A post-mortem examination revealed that he had died from a single stab wound to the heart. He is survived by his mother, son, daughter, sister and three brothers.
His death was investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. In their final report - which was neither made public nor made available to Emmanuel's family - the IPCC concluded that there was no evidence justifying the pressing of criminal charges against any of the four officers present at the house during the raid. Nonetheless, the report also pointed out flaws in the police raid and called on the MPS to improve the planning and execution of their drug seizures. However, Smiley's family raised concerns about the investigation, claiming that the IPCC “had let down” and that many “unanswered questions” remained. The conditions surrounding his death and the subsequent investigation were also questioned by members of the general public, his death often being considered in the context of police brutality and other black people dying in police custody. A study into the causes and consequences of the 2011 England riots, led by the London School of Economics in collaboration with the British newspaper The Guardian, identified Emmanuel's death, perceived by some as a prominent case of police abuse, as a contributing factor to the riots.
Read more about this topic: Smiley Culture
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
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“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
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