Deslandes: The Police and Black-on-Black Crime

The Sun newspaper and Operation Trident. TheBigRetort discovers the (black) gangland shootout that never was.

On the 1st January 2010, at approximately 5am, following a New Year’s celebration at a family owned pub, Darren Deslandes, a 34-year old housing officer, was shot dead by a black assailant. (His younger brother “junior” still lays critically injured in hospital fighting for life.) "Wild West-style shootout,” the Sun proclaimed in bold writing, with the usual nodding unspoken emphasis to the scum involved. [Sun report, since removed, http://tinyurl.com/yjb82y4.] Or so a lazy staff reporter intimated…

Far from being gun-wielding, drug dealing black street thugs, Darren Deslandes and his brother Junior were only armed with a good education and a loving family, one that had provided foster care for nine children. In fact Darren and Junior were (if anything) plucked out of the air by one piece of prima fascia 'evidence' that stands out on a three-pronged fork: they were black. And as a result guilty in the eyes of the law.

Apparently, hours into a new decade, the armed officers from the Met Police’s black-on-black gun crime task force Operation Trident were quickly on the scene. (Trident’s involvement may be found to be the root – should that be ‘route’? - of the later erroneous newspaper copy.) But the officers must have had their views coloured by what greeted them that night... A black assailant had fled the crime scene leaving Darren and Junior Deslandes dying from a hail of bullets. However, curiously, the two victims were immediately treated as “suspects” - a view supported by the Sun. But with one gun, and one single ‘assailant’, how could this be?

Surrounded by armed police, death and coma quickly stalked the Deslandes pair – along with that lazy journalist. The Sun informed its readership that one brother was dead and the other critical following the ‘gun battle’. [Emphasis added.] But with only one gun - and one perpetrator, who had fled the scene according to witnesses, how could there have been a 'gun battle'? The Sun also had “witnesses” (unnamed) who claimed they had actually seen the “two men” who "simply drew guns" (plural) and who “started firing at each other after a heated row”.

"These two guys just appeared in the street and started shooting at each other,” the Sun's witnesses negatively enthused. "God knows what it was about but it must have been serious if they thought the only way it could be settled was to shoot each other." [Emphasis to underline that no one knew what it was about or why they should shoot ‘each other’? And neither did the Sun.]

The Deslandes brothers had done no such thing. Darren died, Junior slipped into a coma, reputations tarnished, guilt etched on their black, bloodied bodies - and across the Sun newspaper too. How could this be was a question rightly asked.

However, the anger of the family and friends of the Deslandes brothers does not solely focus on the Sun’s reporting. It is rightly seeking both an apology and a correction for that. Remarkably however, it is claimed that the Operation Trident officers did not intervene to save the brothers due to what were termed, ‘health and safety issues’. They were denied medical attention for half an hour. Officers apparently blocked the ambulance crew from attending in case the pair was armed. One 13 year-old brother was taken into custody and questioned at length. According to a family friend, “They seemed eager to establish a drug or gangster link.”

But there was none.

In the Deslandes pub however the Sun newspaper was read and Operation Trident’s consent to police the streets - it polices London with what it terms ‘the consent of the black community’- was one that the family endorsed. But would the Deslandes brothers have been treated differently if Trident took a less three-pronged fork-tongued approach to what is a black-and-white certainty? Gone are the days when the police may investigate themselves.