‘“You are killing me. You are killing me”, Paul screamed. And they did, in fact, twice. First of all, they killed his physical body and then the usual narrative of blaming the victim killed him again […] the collusion started at that very point and carried on throughout the years to the time of inquest and beyond.’

Patricia Coker, mother of Paul Coker giving testimony at the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings UK in 2025. Paul Coker was killed by police while in their custody in 2005. 

Paul Coker’s killing is recorded by the British government as a ‘death in custody’. The deliberate use of the passive voice would suggest no perpetrator. Any crime is made invisible. 

But Paul Coker’s life was taken by identifiable British police officers. Twenty years later, the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings UK was convened in London and the linguistic trickery of ‘deaths in custody’ was confronted. 

The term ‘deaths in custody’ is well accepted by British society. It is currently in wholesale use by the media, the legal system, NGOs, charities. It is assigned to affected families for their use too. However, families participating in the Tribunal chose to firmly reject the term. Instead they chose the more adequate descriptions of ‘murder’, ‘killing’, ‘torture’, ‘terror’. They were joined by the writers Gargi Bhattacharyya and Gus John, as well as political philosopher Joy James in painting a horrifying picture of the machinations of race, media, state and criminalisation that dehumanises certain lives.

The public heard how the British justice system (typically an investigation by a police complaints body, Coronial Inquest, promise of reform) ultimately acts as ‘legal containment’ of the family’s attempts to access justice. For decades now, families have been silenced, obstructed, and terrorised by the state. 

Here, in its clearest form, the law is acting as a mechanism of state control. 

Popular justice mechanisms like people’s tribunals are an opportunity for victims of state crimes and supporters to disrupt the current legal order. To date they have taken various forms worldwide. Some have appropriated to a greater or lesser extent rituals associated with the normative legal system (‘witnesses’, ‘jury’ etc). In common, they have sought to examine state crimes (see for example Russell Tribunal on Palestine) or crimes that the state is unwilling to act on (see for example the People’s Tribunal on Wages and Working Conditions for Garment Workers in Sri Lanka 2011, Cambodia 2012, India 2012, Indonesia 2014.)

They are also a chance to imagine and practice alternatives. Unlike testimony in the ‘rational’ institutions of the state where the harm done can only be spoken of as an individual crime, people when free, recount violations of body, mind, spirit, family, community, life. Harm and violence can be described as experienced, challenging the idea of victimisation. 

In 2015 the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia was convened by women’s groups from the region. Around 500 women offered testimony, describing the harms and violence they experienced during the Yugoslav wars. Their accounts broke free of the curtailments of national and international law, stretching language and time to more accurately define crimes, as well as the social structures that enabled crimes to be committed and to continue to the current day.

The Women’s Court wanted to practice and advance feminist models of justice. In the years leading into the event, thousands of women took part in meetings and formalised groups locally. Care, support and education were all prioritised in keeping with the politics of care. These actions disrupted dominant state and social power relations. People became subjects of justice bringing about new relationships, knowledge and structures.

The UK Tribunal wanted to honour the legacy of families fighting and surviving beyond the support of the state. At its close, new legal and political directions were announced. There was a place for a range of views on justice and how best to achieve it. They called on witnesses, especially the next generation to join them and emphasised the need to connect movements internationally. (A European Intervention has since been held.)

Similarly internationalist in approach, the Women’s Court invited women from Algeria, Argentina, India, Palestine, and Congo. It called on all witnesses to practice the collective responsibility needed to achieve gender justice in their communities. 

Neither the UK Tribunal nor the Women’s Court were conceived of as a panacea for impunity; rather, both exercised the law as a site of resistance. Where the state uses its systems of power to narrow down what we should value, popular justice actions like these require us to come together in the in-between place of knowing and not knowing. Here our inter-dependency is valued. Here collective confidence, belief and imagination is truly a threat to the state. 

‘I really hope that something can come out of this to support especially the children. I don’t know what, but I think that there needs to be something because we are just sort of left to fend for ourselves. We’re in a place where we’re told to trust the state but we can’t and it’s a really hard thing to grow up with and navigate. So I think there really needs to be something.’

Rohey Jobe, daughter of Kebba Jobe, speaking at the People’s Tribunal on Police Killings UK in 2025. Kebba Jobe was killed by police in 2004.