In the closing pages of his instructive biography, “Kill The Black First”, Michael
Fuller,60, is asked by an archivist:
“May i ask what you have done with your life?”
“At 16 i became a police cadet” said Fuller, “at 45 i was chief constable of
Kent. I’ve got a degree, two masters, three further postgraduate qualifications
and three honorary doctorates. By the time i left the police force, i was qualified
as a barrister and then i became Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of the Crown
Prosecution Service”.
Born in 1959 to Jamaican parents from the UK’s “windrush generation”, Fuller
rose to become Britain’s first ever chief black constable in 2010. This summary,
above, of Fuller’s achievements is found in the closing pages of his biography “Kill
The Black One First”, an appropriately charged title for one man’s revealing
account of personal triumph and experience of policing history and race
relations.
The young Michael was raised in a care home after his parents separated and his
mother returned to Jamaica, unable to support herself in London. He continued
to have a relationship with his father that warmed and strengthened over time
but was at first, and often, a source of confusion.Fuller attributes much of his character to “Auntie Margaret”, the young, British
woman who ran “Fairmile Hatch” as the care home in Crawley, a town in south-
west England, was called. She encouraged his childhood fascination with police
work but when she passed after a cancer diagnosis at 32 – just before she could
see him begin life as a police cadet – the young Michael was devastated. Auntie
Margaret’s nurturing becomes indelible and invaluable but from all evidence in
“Kill The Black One First”, Fuller is likely the most professionally successful of the
lot of kids that were raised in her care.
The adult Michael may attribute much of his moral constitution to “Auntie
Margaret” but it would seem even she was in awe of the young Michael who, as a
preteen, made unaccompanied annual trips from England to France, to holiday
with a pen friend. For this reason, while other students were given academic
subjects to work on, the young Michael was made to give a talk to his class on
“self-reliance”, a quality that was to serve him for life.
The young Michael’s self-belief would seem to be operated by an internal
mechanism that could be the combination of any number of factors that may
include early separation of parents and the feelings of rejection it instils,
acclimatising to new people and cultures, his natural brilliance and his ease with
academic pursuits, his knowledge of the oppressive racism in England, the
genuine love and care shown by his white care giver and his allegiance to his
black community – as far as he had one. In another individual, this same set of
factors could deplete self-esteem and induce resentment that could overwhelmed
and eventually crush. So what is it about “Michael Fuller” that has ensured alaudable career and loving family, as suggested by the bookend notes? The
answers is often clear but not always conclusive.
A thread of encounters with a kid who almost kills Fuller when he fails to
apprehend him for stealing denim jeans tells a different tale of redemption.
When Fuller is called to a school whose student had threatened a teacher, his
horror at recognising the kid as his assailant (“i regarded him with total disdain”)
is complicated by the arrival of the distraught mother. Rarely judgemental, Fuller
makes an exception for the kid who almost took his life: “he had chosen his path
and his future would be a pattern of criminal violence and jail for the rest of his
life”.
Rather than make him sympathise with troubled kids who turn criminal, Fuller’s
challenging upbringing is a source of moral force: “I don’t care how
disadvantaged a criminal has been. I doubt he had a worst start than I did. My
feelings are entirely, 100 percent for their victims”. Fuller’s tone in this passage
is final. This is the point at which much of society gives up on a child, and with
good reason. Done by an upright police officer who is black and knowing of the
causes of criminal trajectories in disadvantaged kids, the judgment is
authoritative and without the fore and after taste of racism if said by, say, a
white officer.
This means little to the jailed kid and his helpless mother. But the problem it
presents is an important one: should the black police officer have empathy for a
troubled black kid who the law will likely treat harshly? Or is the condemnation
better justified when done by such an officer? Turn the tables and the same
problem is as prominent: are some black people’s disgust of the police expected,considering the decades of hostility? Or are black police men, in fact, the best
solution to an “institutionally racist” organisation? The debate may remain
undecided and unending.
But then certain policy measures introduced by Fuller, at different points in his
career, has brought results that may not be reflected in the recent swell of
killings of young black men in the UK. “Perhaps it took a black officer to see what
was necessary and do it” said Fuller upon realising that the many murders were
often poorly investigated, on the assumption that they were all criminals but
“from now on we would go into black communities ask questions, find witnesses,
pinpoint killers and carry out the armed raids necessary to arrest them”.
Fuller’s other policing successes include the installation of CCTV in interrogation
rooms which speedily reduced the number of complaints for unfair or brutal
treatment brought against the police; he proposed the “Racial and Violent Crime
Taskforce”; he effected a Burglary Control Program; and he was the first chair of
the “Black and Asian Police Officers Association”. How much of these could have
been achieved, with any success, if there weren’t black officers advocating and
executing these measures?
—
The omission of Fuller’s romantic relationships loom the largest in all 300 pages of
the book. His first serious girlfriend as a young man was white but her race is
mentioned as a preemptive-afterthought. No such thing exists but if the reader is
willing to accept Fuller’s insistence that her race did not matter, it could also be
discounted by their youth. This is not true of the adult Michael who has courted,
married and had children with a woman. Her race does matter and easyexplanation could be Fuller’s fear that if it is known that his wife or partner is
white – despite his torturous history with racists superiors and inferiors – it would
greatly undermine any perception of him as a leading figure in the UK’s black
community. Tellingly, there’s only entry for “Fuller, Helen (wife)” in the index list
and scant references to “wife and children”.
One should also spare some thought for this partner – white, black or other – who
has been absented from her husband’s autobiography, when she is integral to at
least one half of the narrative as wife and mother of their children.
Two separate but related events bring emotional catharsis and symbolise triumph
as much for Fuller, as for the reader. His father, his friends and family were
nervous of, and possibly betrayed, by the young cadet’s resolve to join the force.
His father attended his graduation in the mid-70s and in Fuller’s own words:
“when we all marched past and he saw his son, the tall one at the back, the only
face among the many whites faces, well, there is an old video of him almost
bursting with pride and wearing an ear-to-ear smile”.
It was all that could matter to a teenage Fuller though many more years of insults
from sections of the black community and insufficient regard from the Met itself
were to come. An event in October 2007 changed this. During a march by the
National Black Police Association in a city called Bristol that was also a memorial
for the black officers who died on duty, huge numbers of black people turned up
to honour the entire contingent which Fuller recounts with pride and vindication,
surely:“I had spent years trying to involve the black communities in our work and
persuading officers criminality cannot be assumed from skin colour. I had
challenged prejudice and aspired to build genuine trust and community
confidence wherever i had worked. As i watched the crowds enthusiastically
cheering us, i now felt our contributions was finally being recognised. For the
first time in my career i felt kinship and a sense of belonging. It gave me great
hope for the future”.