The continuing plague of police brutality against Black men has kept this song relevant more than 30 years after its release.
Colin Roach was a 21-year-old Black man living in the London borough of Hackney in 1983, when police tried to pull him over, apparently thinking the moped he was driving was stolen. Hackney, a racially diverse area, was infamous for its police brutality, so instead of stopping, Roach drove to a police station. Once there, according to a coroner’s inquest, he then shot himself to death, despite copious evidence that it was a frame-up.
Roach’s death and the ensuing cover-up became a nationwide cause celebre, something like the Mumia Abu-Jamal case in the U.S. It was still in the news when Sinéad O’Connor wrote the song in 1989, released the next year on “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” calling out then-PM Margaret Thatcher’s hypocrisy in condemning the Tiananmen Square massacre.
After police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2016, Shea Rose, a singer/songwriter/performance artist from Boston, released a riveting cover of the song, which she enhanced last year with this impressive video interpretation.
