When Rod Charles first heard that his great nephew Rashan had died whilst being detained by a police officer, he assumed that the incident must have merited whatever action the officer took. Why wouldn’t he? Rod Charles had served for 30 years with the Metropolitan Police, retiring at the rank of Chief Inspector, and Rashan was a young man with low level criminal convictions.
That first news came on the day Rashan died, Saturday 22 July 2017. Rod recalls: “It wasn’t until 20 or 24 hours later, the Sunday morning, when a niece called me to say Uncle Rodney have a look at some footage what’s on CCTV which has been uploaded to YouTube. And it was when I looked at the footage on YouTube, that changed everything.”
Somebody had uploaded a few minutes’ fuzzy footage recorded on a mobile phone from a CCTV monitor in a Hackney supermarket. It showed a police officer pursuing Rashan into the shop, grabbing him from behind, hurling him to the floor with a combat throw, and heavily restraining him. It showed a second man joining the restraint, pinning Rashan down, and helping to handcuff him when he was limp and unresponsive.
