United Friends and Families Campaign (UFFC) is a London based coalition of campaigns by the friends and the families of people who have died in police custody, prisons and psychiatric hospitals and have not received justice. The aim of the coalition is to prevent such deaths from occurring and to bring an end to these deaths occurring.
The coalition supports the families to organise demonstrations, speak to the media, hold regular vigils outside police stations, demand inclusion in a policy conference about deaths in custody, and entreat the judicial system to respond to the massive evidence of police brutality.
In 1999 the group held the first Annual Remembrance Procession from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street, where a rally is held every year to demand justice from the Prime Minister and the government.
In July 2001, Migrant Media made the Injustice film about deaths in police custody between 1969 and 1999, as a tribute to the organisation and as a documentary of the struggle for justice.
They supported the No shoot to kill campaign in 2005 after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed by SO19 under the Metropolitan Police's shoot to kill policy.
The coalition includes the families of:
- Olaseni Lewis
- Sean Rigg
- Roger Sylvester
- Leon Patterson
- Rocky Bennett
- Alton Manning
- Christopher Alder
- Brian Douglas
- Joy Gardener
- Aseta Simms
- Paul Jemmott
- Harry Stanley
- Glen Howard
- Ricky Bishop
And the following campaigns:
- Simon Jones Memorial Campaign
- Jean Charles de Menezes Campaign
Famous quotes containing the words united, friends, families and/or campaign:
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“If we are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the ancient world, that no metamorphosis could hide a god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which runs, “The Gods are to each other not unknown.” Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about “the way things used to be.” But that doesn’t mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it’s cracked up to be. . . . Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a campaign was to the soldiers of the Empire.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)