Kevin Blowe was born in 1968 in Southend, Essex. He grew up in Sussex and moved to London in 1987 where he studied politics. Kevin joined the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) while he was at university. The NMP was working on deaths in custody, and this led to his first contact with INQUEST.
In his interview, Kevin describes his work with the United Friends and Family Campaign (UFFC), working with INQUEST in the 1990s and becoming a board member later on. Kevin set up Netpol in 2009 after NMP disbanded and is still its director.
Listen to Kevin sharing his thoughts on the importance on an organisation like INQUEST working with grassroots groups.
No, when there’s a death in custody in Lambeth or Southwark and if there’s a well organised Copwatch group in that area with roots in that community, the ability to be able to mobilise people to challenge the police’s narrative and work with INQUEST to make sure that happens becomes so much easier, right?
So the difficulty is, is when you, when a custody death happens either there’s no support, or, there’s some charlatan who wants to jump on board because they see there’s an opportunity to kind of, you know, big themselves up or whatever. And INQUEST can’t be everywhere, it needs people to work with on the ground.
And part of the reason I think why the relationship with Newham Monitoring Project worked is because, because there were people on the ground, there was somebody you could go and talk to and say, what are we going to do about this, right? Ideally that situation needs to happen in other places as well and if there was a network of Copwatch groups or police monitoring groups, or whatever they want to call themselves, then there are people that INQUEST can work with if they find themselves in a situation where they need to, you know, find people to do the stuff that INQUEST can’t do, the people that need to move furniture out of somebody’s flat, for instance, or organising leafletting or a public meeting or whatever.
You can listen to more of his oral history in Series 2: Episode 6 of the Unlawful Killing podcast.
Listen to his full oral history interview at the Bishopsgate Institute.
