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:
“Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn’t he an archetype? Pioneers, Oh Pioneers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the United States. Yet we just can’t do with him. What’s wrong with him then? Or what’s wrong with us?”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Every one of my friends had a bad day somewhere in her history she wished she could forget but couldn’t. A very bad mother day changes you forever. Those were the hardest stories to tell. . . . “I could still see the red imprint of his little bum when I changed his diaper that night. I stared at my hand, as if they were alien parts of myself . . . as if they had betrayed me. From that day on, I never hit him again.””
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold. . . . Adolescents generally choose friend whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends.”
—Laurence Steinberg (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)