Janet’s battle goes on, 13 years after brother’s death on police station floor

A LOT of people will think they know Janet Alder. She is easily dismissed, and has been, as a caricature Miss Black And Angry – she lost her brother in an accident and used the tragedy as a platform for accusing all and sundry of racism.

As a judge said last week, however, she is “plainly an intelligent and highly articulate individual” and she is charming and funny if you are not part of what she sees as a conspiracy to assume the best of the British police and ignore any evidence to the contrary.

If you believe in the essential decency of the average copper, it is easy to see why Janet, now 49, has exasperated almost every official she has dealt with since her brother Christopher died on the floor of a Hull police station, almost exactly 13 years ago. But listen to her and you hear why a portion of society has no faith whatsoever in the smooth faces which speak for the establishment.

To most of us, the death of a reggae singer called Smiley Culture last week probably barely registered. His family were given to understand he had stabbed himself during a police raid for drugs. An inquiry was immediately announced and respectable England assumed the full story would come out in the end. Janet Alder assumes the opposite. So do most black people and a lot of the white working class too, she reckons. And if you think she sounds paranoid, she will think you must be naive.

She says: “I like all sorts of people. I’ve got two mixed-race kids after all and my last boyfriend was a white guy. I don’t think everybody white is part of a conspiracy against me. But I think the criminal justice system is. I have come across too many people in it who just don’t have the bottle to be unpopular, even when they know something is wrong.”

She was among five children born in Hull to Nigerian parents. Their mother went home and their father had to put them in care, but saw them and paid towards their keep. Janet remembers the social workers being oblivious to his complaints when she was given coconuts to take to the school Harvest Festival. She got pregnant at 16 and her two children were grown and independent and she was a happy-go-lucky divorcee when the police called with the news about Christopher.

At the time, she was manageress of a costume jewellery shop in Burnley. She has said: “I used to be like everybody else, plodding along, believing the authorities knew what they were doing, that they were decent people who looked out for the public.”

Christopher Alder was 37, a burly ex-paratrooper and security guard, retraining in computer studies. At midnight on March 31, 1998, he was knocked down, by another black man, following an argument over a girl outside a club. He was then arrested for being woozily awkward at Hull Royal Infirmary. He died on videotape at Queens Gardens while the police carried on as normal, assuming he would wake up with a sore head. They were clearly shaken when he died on them and the official version of events remains a reasonable one... nobody meant or did any real harm and the CCTV tapes from the police station reveal nothing worse than everyday cynicism about the general public and a bit of thick-eared banter.

However, the “banter” included what seemed to be “monkey noises” offstage and a reference to “banana boats”, which was unconvincingly explained as slang for yellow overshoes. Janet, running the tapes over and over, believes she found more indications of racist attitude. But the audio quality was awful and the Crown Prosecution Service decided it was all either irrelevant or not convincing enough to be worth pursuing. To be fair, I took much the same attitude when hearing the tapes for the Yorkshire Post.

“But imagine coming across all that after losing your brother and then being brushed off by the police when you turn up to ask questions,” she says.

Add that to the memories of growing up black and in care in Hull in the 60s and 70s. And then add the frustration of watching the law ignore your very good questions while it plods slowly through its processes, its practitioners disappear on a regular basis on “their posh holidays” and most of the police officers concerned are paid well to retire early.

As Janet got angrier, the authorities tried to mollify her and made it worse. A Crown lawyer mentioned to her brother that he had represented a Nigerian person in Birmingham. Another said he was planning to hire an assistant from a deprived background who Janet would probably get on better with. A medical expert, theorising on Christopher’s death, said black people might be prone to breathing problems when unconscious because they had big lips. Janet found this sort of stuff crass beyond belief and, anyway, what she really wanted was anwers – to some suspicious but reasonable questions. How did her brother lose a loose tooth between the hospital and the police station? Was that it being picked up by an ambulancewoman on the videotape? If not, what was it? Why did nobody double-check the police denial they had used CS gas? Why were uniforms cleaned before they could be examined?

West Riding Police investigated Humberside Police but were stalled until after an inquest which took two years to organise. The coroner’s jury came up with a verdict of “unlawful killing”, on the basis that more care might have prevented it – “The only people who have ever done what was right” – according to Janet.

Under pressure, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged five policemen with manslaughter by negligence and misconduct in public office. But the case was thrown out, in 2002. Janet thought she could have put up a better one.

In 2004, under David Blunkett, the police complaints authority was remodelled and told to put an end to the saga. It reported in 2006 and gave Humberside Police a good ticking off. Otherwise, it was an enormous and meticulous picking over of what was already known. It reassuringly concluded that Janet Alder’s suspicions were unlikely to be correct. But that seemed to her to fall some way short of the standard of evidence she was entitled to expect.

The unanswered questions had become regarded as unanswerable. By this time, they probably were. But Janet thought she still deserved an explanation of why they had not been pursued much harder in the first place.

She was running out of legal aid and lawyers. But in September last year she ran her own civil action, for damages from the CPS for distress caused by racial discrimination. The judge, Penelope Belcher, gave her legal leeway to present her arguments. But she was clearly irritated by one of Janet’s witnesses, an activist known as Ruggie Johnson who had attended some meetings about the case with her. His line of argument, the judge summed up last week, was that all white people were racist to all black people all the time. She noted that even Miss Alder put her head in her hands and murmured “Oh shut up, Ruggie” at one point. But when her world was turned upside down, and she became a full-time campaigner, living on benefits, her best friends became the tireless politicians of assorted pressure groups and she does not reject them now.

“They opened my eyes and they supported me when I needed help,” she says. She stood as a candidate for George Galloway’s party, Respect, in the last election, but has been running down her political involvements “because I need to put some time into sorting out my own life”.

Judge Belcher decided Janet’s complaints about the CPS were legally inadmissible or there was a better explanation than prejudice in every case. But she did say: “I understand and share Miss Alder’s concerns as to the standard of the investigation undertaken by West Yorkshire Police into the actions of the Humberside officers.”

In short, Miss Alder had swung at the wrong target. And the CPS was entitled to claim its costs back.

Back at her current home, a one-bedroom flat in Halifax, Janet waits to see what happens next. She left Burnley to get away from a relationship with somebody who, she thinks, fell for her notoriety.

“I really never much liked being in the limelight, because I was conscious of the bad thing it was based on,” she says. “But then you find you attract people who want to be famous.”

She has a last arrow in her quiver – an application to the European courts, supported by the civil rights organisation Liberty, arguing that the inadequacies of the UK system, as exposed by her brother’s case, amounted to a governmental failure to protect the rights to life and freedom from torture. Even after 13 years, the Christopher Alder case is not quite over yet.

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