I certainly won’t be seeing that Liam Neeson revenge film
Britain’s first black chief constable talks to JAMES MURRAY about the Taken star, how officers at the Met joked about bananas and used the N-word, and his journey from a care home to the top job at Kent Police
AS A BLACK man who spent 35 years as a police officer, Michael Fuller has fought racism all his life. And so he was particularly disappointed this week to read what the Northern Irish actor Liam Neeson had said in an interview to promote his new revenge thriller, Cold Pursuit. After discovering a friend had been raped by a black man Neeson, 66, admitted he toured the streets with a cosh, looking for a “black ******* ” to kill.
“It was a very clumsy way of trying to promote the film,” says Fuller, 59, who became Britain’s first black chief constable after a successful career tackling serious crime with the Metropolitan Police in London. “I’ve been a great fan of him and this has put me off him. I’m not impressed with what he said at all and I won’t be going to see the film. He is a role model – really respected and admired as an actor. The fear I have is that it shows retribution as something quite legitimate – and it is not.”
As a founding member of the Trident team set up by Scotland Yard to tackle black-on-black gun crime, Fuller knows where an urge for revenge leads: a cycle of ever-increasing violence culminating in murder. “It’s not good for society to focus on revenge and retribution and killing people. Society needs to stand up and say, ‘This is not legitimate’.” Fuller hopes the race row won’t lead to any confusion over the title of his memoir, out today, called Kill The Black One First. The title is a direct quote from a black man during the Brixton riots in south London in 1981. It was aimed at Fuller as he linked arms with white colleagues in an attempt to contain the mayhem.
He writes in the book: “There was immediately a roar. Guttural, like laughter, like fury – the fury of the mob and they all looked at me.” He emerged from the carnage of Brixton physically unscathed, but emotionally bruised. Fuller’s parents were members of the so-called Windrush generation, who come to Britain from Jamaica for a better life, but they split up soon after his birth as they struggled to cope with their new surroundings.
He was just 18 months old when he was taken into care at the Fairmile Hatch children’s home in Surrey where the person in charge, a remarkable woman called Margaret Hurst, showed him unconditional love and encouraged him to do the sort of things young boys do: climb trees, catch tadpoles, play football and walk the dog.
His idyllic rural childhood was shattered only when his birth mother turned up for one of her rare visits. She showed him no affection and his memories are of her chain smoking and constantly complaining about the cost of travelling to see him, as well as moaning about his father who was seeing other women and not giving her any money. She would even swipe his pocket money.
The young Michael had a much better relationship with his carefree father, who turned up at the home in a blue Jag, which “throbbed” with the sound of Marvin Gaye songs.
“I didn’t have a relationship with my mother at all,” says