The Double Injustice Campaign

Project Resist is supporting the families of Naomi and Fiona who have come together to make sense of why the police failed so abysmally in their duty of care to both women. In the absence of any other explanation for these failures, the families believe that the police were able to ignore both women simply because they were black, female and disabled. They are seeking urgent answers from the police in their struggle for justice.

"The campaign is important to me because, if the police had listened to my sister Fiona and Naomi, would both still be here. I've lost an important person in Fiona. The police should have done more when she went missing. They did nothing. We had to physically go and look for her ourselves, which we shouldn’t have had to do. I feel angry, really angry and hurt. How can they expect us to trust them at all? " (Elise - Sister of Fiona)

"We want to find mum’s body and lay her to rest. We need the future to be better than it has been for our girls and boys. I feel angry and hurt. You see on the video - the police didn’t care when they talked to us. Vulnerable people like mum and Naomi should be entitled to more support. "(Savannah – daughter of Fiona)

“The police cannot be trusted to do what they are supposed to do. It’s a big let-down. It took a year for him to go and kill another lady. If they had done their job, he would not have been in a position to kill for a second time. It’s hard to understand why." (Basil, father of Naomi)

Tragically, the deaths of Naomi and Fiona are only the latest, albeit particularly egregious examples, in a long line of cases where reports from women of abuse at the hands of violent partners have been dismissed and investigations into their subsequent murders have been botched.

The Issues

These cases raise serious questions about continuing police failures in responding to domestic abuse cases. Cooper was a serial perpetrator of high-risk domestic abuse against multiple women and had been convicted in Jamaica in 1989 for four offences of violence against women. Cooper had also been previously prosecuted in the UK in 1999 for the attempted murder of his ex-partner and it is understood that he had also been a suspect in multiple other violent offences against women. 

In Cooper’s sentencing remarks, the trial judge stated the following:

“You have a history of acting in a controlling and coercive manner to your sexual partners. In 1989 you were convicted in Jamaica for four offences of violence. Ms Hunte had made previous complaints to police about your controlling and coercive behaviour. Ms Holm had also made a previous complaint to police about your behaviour. She had also complained to friends that you had stabbed her with a screwdriver. Other women have also made similar complaints about your conduct. I am sure that you have, over many years, been a great danger to women.”

We hear about government claims of ‘clamping down on police failings’, and the police speak about treating domestic abuse as a ‘top priority’, ‘on par with terrorism’.

In practice, what we see is an endless repetition of the same failures year after year. There is a clear lack of political will needed to hold individual police officers and the wider criminal justice system to account.

Trust in the police and criminal justice institutions has continued to erode while the state fails to grapple with the institutional perpetuation of racism, misogyny, ableism, and abuse of power that dominates the policing of violence against women.