Leroy Logan: the man who risked everything to fight racism in the police force – from within
THE GUARDIAN- 29 October 2020
One day in 1983, while working in his research lab at the Royal Free hospital in north London, Leroy Logan received a phone call. The news was bad. It was about his father, Kenneth, a lorry driver.
“Dad was parked up in north London,” he remembers. “Two police officers said he was blocking the highway. He didn’t believe he was and started to measure the distance. They took the view that – as some police officers say – he had ‘failed the attitude test’.”
The result, Logan says grimly, was that right there, in the street, in front of everybody, and while his father screamed his name and address to anyone who might help or at least bear witness, he was beaten up. Comprehensively. Beyond recognition. “I walked straight past him at the hospital,” recalls Logan, pausing to collect his thoughts.
Distraught and enraged, he did what any son would do, offering maximum support to his father. Kenneth suffered facial injuries, two black eyes – and faced charges of obstruction and resisting arrest (of which he would later be found not guilty). But what is extraordinary is what Logan did not do. He did not tell his father that some weeks before, unbeknown to all but a very few confidants, Logan had himself resolved to become a police officer in the racial battleground that was London.