Black List!

“This is even more explosive than Prism, GCHQ eavesdropping on EU allies and institutionalised police racism combined,” claims whistle blower Ernie Shovel, who has revealed, exclusively to The Sleaze, a massive conspiracy by the UK’s law enforcement agencies. “They’ve spent decades building up a secret database which enables police officers to cross reference vehicles with the race of their drivers. The idea is that any moment they can tell if a speeding or badly parked car is owned by a black man and instantly send armed units to intercept it!” Shovel, a Home Office IT contractor who claims to have been involved in setting up the software used by the so-called ‘Operation Black List’, alleges that the scheme goes beyond an extreme form of enforcing motoring laws. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” the thirty-nine year old told us. “In effect the authorities have turned racial harassment in law enforcement into a scientific discipline!” Shovel believes that police forces across Britain can now track any black person driving an expensive car for their entire journey. “They have face recognition software which interfaces with the live feeds from speed cameras and CCTV cameras to automatically identify the race of any vehicle’s driver and flag them up if it is a ‘flash motor’, like a Five Series BMW, a Mercedes or a Range Rover, say,” he explains. “The vehicle is immediately followed by cameras and unmarked cars – if the driver makes the slightest mistake, they can immediately pull them over and plant guns and drugs on them! Moreover, through DVLA records they can pull up the registered keeper’s records and identify them – if the keeper doesn’t come back as black, roadblocks are immediately set up, the car stopped and the driver given a bloody good kicking!”

According to Shovel – who, fearing reprisals, has been forced to flee to the Isle of Wight, where he is currently seeking asylum from the Welsh Assembly from the safety of Cowes ferry terminal – ‘Operation Black List’ has its origins in the failures of earlier attempts at racially-based policing, such as ‘Stop and Search’. “The problem they always had was in accurately targeting criminals in the ethnic community,” he says. “The whole ‘Stop and Search’ stuff was completely random, whilst their attempts to gather intelligence by infiltrating black and Asian gangs with undercover police officers was a disaster.” Indeed, during the late 1990s, due to a shortage of non-white officers, the Metropolitan Police were forced to use white officers blacked up with boot polish to try and infiltrate several South London crime rings, with little success. “The whole idea of ‘Operation Black List’ was to bring some precision to their discrimination,” Shovel claims. “It all started with the premise that there is a correlation between young black males involved in crime and young black men driving flash cars – once that was established, the first stage was to compose a definitive list of such men owning such cars.”

Both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police have denied the existence of the operation, dismissing Shovel as a ‘fantasist’ and a ‘disgruntled ex-employee’, claiming that the only IT project Shovel had worked on was a road safety initiative aimed at identifying bad drivers. “It is quite ridiculous to suggest that we would instigate such a scheme as he describes,” declared a Home Office spokesperson, who also noted that as part of the Tory-led coalition government’s spending cuts, many of the speed camera’s Shovel claims are being used by the project, have been switched off. “Even if it were not technically unfeasible, it would run contrary to our well-established equality policies – I find the very notion that we might discriminate against the drivers of expensive cars quite offensive!”

Nonetheless, human rights activists believe that Shovel’s revelations have exposed the fact that not just the police, but the whole British establishment, are intrinsically racist. “I have no doubt that what Shovel says is true – it explains so much,” muses top civil rights solicitor Adam Rake. “The number of times I’ve been pulled over by the police on the flimsiest of pretexts whilst driving my Audi – they seemed to just home in me! Honestly, there wouldn’t be a police car in sight, but all I had to do was get in my car and pull into traffic and the bastards would be there, blue lights flashing! Now I know – they were bloody targeting me! It’s clear that this victimisation of black men, sanctioned by the Home Office, represents the deeply ingrained prejudices of our wealthy, white, ruling classes.” Rake points out that this isn’t the only instance of the police targeting innocent black people with intrusive surveillance: “Only recently it has emerged that the Metropolitan Police spied on the family of murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence in an attempt to find ‘dirt’ with which to smear them and discredit their criticisms of the police’s non-investigation of his death.”

However, ‘Operation Black List’ has been defended by one right-wing Tory MP as a legitimate tool in the fight against crime. “Now look, I know a lot of people are crying ‘racism’, but the fact is that we have to go along with the police here and their years of experience in combatting crime,” opines back bencher Sir Marcus Fork-Trowel. “The fact is that they’ve clearly established that these young black chaps are more likely to fall into crime than anyone else – no doubt due to their culture, with its lax discipline, encouraged by dope smoking and reggae music – so we just have to accept it. Under the circumstances it seems perfectly sensible to target them.” The operation’s focus on cars as a badge of criminality seems perfectly logical to the MP. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? These ethnic types are all telling us how disadvantaged they are and how they are prevented by prejudice from getting the top jobs, aren’t they?” he demands. “ So how can any of them possibly afford to drive any of those top of the line cars they drive, unless it’s through the proceeds of crime, eh?” He also believes that the surveillance of the Lawrence family should be seen in a positive light, as it confirms the Foreign Secretary, William Hague’s recent assurances to Parliament that only wrong doers had anything to fear from state surveillance. “Look, despite the intensive surveillance of the Lawrences the police couldn’t find anything to smear them with,” he asserts. “Obviously because they were law-abiding citizens they couldn’t be harmed by snooping! So you see, it really is only the guilty who have anything to fear!”