Colin Roach

Colin Roach Biography

Colin Roach was a 21-year-old black British man who died as a result of a fatal gunshot wound having entered a police-station reception to answer allegations concerning theft, him having been released from jail several days earlier. A subsequent inquest ruled his death was suicide - him having placed the barrel of a shotgun in to his mouth before squeezing the trigger - inside the entrance of Stoke Newington police station, in the London Borough of Hackney, on 12 January 1983. Amid allegations of a police cover-up, the case became a cause célèbre for civil rights campaigners and black community groups in the United Kingdom. The death was made famous by the late civil rights protester and singer Sinéad O'Connor's song "Black Boys on Mopeds". Prior to Roach's death, Hackney Black People's Association had been calling for a public inquiry into policing in the area, alleging that there existed a culture of police brutality, wrongful detention of black people, racial harassment, and racially motivated "stopping and searching." Ernie Roberts, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said that there had been "a complete breakdown of faith and credibility in the police" in the area and the Commission for Racial Equality called for a full inquiry into both the death of Roach and the policing in Hackney generally. In June 1983 a coroner's jury returned a majority verdict of suicide. INQUEST, the United Kingdom pressure group founded following the death of Blair Peach at the hands of police in April 1979, was highly critical of the coroner's directions to the jury, and said that he had wrongly pointed them towards a verdict of suicide.