Rapper Wretch 32 and his father speak out about 'police brutality' after taser incident

Forty-five seconds of unsteady video encapsulates the gulf of trust between Britain's black community and the police.

It's mid-April.

The height of lockdown.

Police are looking for a suspect.

They find his 62-year-old father coming out of a bedroom at the family home.

In the video – from an officer's body camera - he comes into view as he falls heavily, tasered and unconscious, down the stairs.

"I'm lucky to be alive,"’ says Millard Scott; who still walks with limp, almost two months later.

The taser is a weapon meant to be as act of self-defence in the course of an arrest or to stop an escape.

Mr Scott believes he was shot because he was black.

"It seems to me we're being singled out and targeted," he told ITV News.

The Metropolitan Police dispute his version of events and deny any racial motive. They insist he was warned before the taser was discharged.

Protests have erupted across the world, sparked by the death of George Floyd. Credit: PA

But whatever the truth, it is the latest incident fuelling antipathy and swelling support for the Black Lives Matter protests of the past week.

Another of Mr Scott's sons is the rapper, Wretch 32. It was not him police were looking for.

For all his success, he now warns his own children to be wary of the police.

"I've grown up in a household with a dad and uncle and I’ve watched them fight against police brutality," he tells me.

"I'm thirty five now and I have to have the same conversation with my children that my father and grandfather had with me.

"That means there’s no progression."

In Tottenham it's a generational struggle.

The trigger changes each time, but the anger that fuelled the riots here as long ago as 1985 is still evident.

The same fury that blazed across London in 2011 after the police shooting of Mark Duggan feeds today into a perception of inequality in every facet of life.

Even during the coronavirus lockdown, members of the black community have been twice as likely as their white counterparts to be fined for breaking the lockdown.

Mark Duggan (top left) and Cynthia Jarrett (bottom left) died in Tottenham. Pictured right: a store which was burned down in the Tottenham riots in 2011. Credit: PA

Two teenage boys tell me to be young and black is to be stopped and searched as a matter of routine.

"We're put to the side, but we see lots of white people walk by, but we're the only ones singled out," says the 17-year-old.

His friends adds: "Once the police search us and find nothing they say we will catch you next time."

Both will be at the next protests.

Black Lives Matter.

It's a movement that offers them that rare commodity - hope.