i'm sharanjit leyl with bbc world news. our top story: the us secretary of state, rex tillerson, has made a parting statement, hours after learning on twitter that donald trump a russian nerve agent was used to attack a former spy. sergei skripal and his daughter yulia were taken ill over a week ago in the west of england. they/showhugethunksaf"rcefalting welcome to hardtalk, i'm sarah montague.

the woman who first coined the slogan black lives matter is the american, patrisse khan—cullors. she first used it as a hashtag on a friend's facebook post back in 2013. since then, black lives matter has taken off as a political movement around the world. she has now written about her own experience of growing up in a poor black family in california and how she is convinced that if racism and state violence against african—americans can be stopped, then other problems in the black community such as poverty, poor education and crime will disappear too. is she right? and does a movement founded on a hashtag have any part to play in finding a solution? patrisse khan—cullors,

welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. when you typed #blacklivesmatter to the bottom of your friend's facebook post, what were you thinking? i was thinking that our generation wasn't going to allow george zimmerman to have the end of the story in trayvon martin's death. george zimmerman was the man acquitted of the death of trayvon martin. the moment he was acquitted, i was full of despair but rather quickly understood there had to be a new conversation about anti—black racism in this country and arguably in the world. but there must have been cases before that irritated

you and irritated others. what made it about that moment that made you feel that and made it travel as it did? i think it was witnessing george zimmerman and the trial against him actually be a trial against trayvon martin. i think it was spending an entire year waiting for a justice system that has historically been terrible to black communities give this white—passing person a pass to go home after murdering a child. i think it was spending time in my life seeing over—policing in my neighbourhood, over—incarceration in my neighbourhood and it came to a head when george zimmerman was acquitted. this was an unarmed black man, a youngster, a teenager. yes. you've written about it in your book, when they call you a terrorist, and talking

about your experiences, when you talked about incarceration of those around you, your own father, your brother sent to prison for the things they had done wrong. sometimes. and sometimes it was because they were hurting. my father was a drug addict. he was on and off of crack cocaine. in the us, we have the war on drugs and so for my father, what he needed was care. he needed dignity and instead he was given a jail cell, he was given policing. my brother, whose only crime has been mental illness, he has schizoaffective disorder, these should not be crimes, they should be illnesses as they are. but those cases, neither of those peculiar to race, are they?

those cross all races in the united states. of course. drug addiction and mental illness is an issue that everybody faces. it's a universal issue. what is not universal is the criminalisation of black people in particular and i think important. what we see with my brother, for instance, a big black man, in his early years, intervention shouldn't have beenjuvenile hall. the intervention should have been mental health treatment and that is different in mostly white communities and i have spoken to folks who read the book who said, i relate so much to your brother's mental illness but i did not have to experience what he experienced because i am white. you talk about large family, and you grew up, your mother was working a lot of the time, you were brought up by an older brother. yes, yes. and you saw, you talk about when you are 12, i think, one of your

earliest experiences. with the police, i was arrested and detained at my school. i had been smoking weed in the girls‘ bathroom. and the incident with the police didn't happen that day, it happened a couple of days later in which a police officer came into my classroom and whispered into my teacher's ear and the next thing, i am being summoned to the front of the classroom, handcuffed in front of my classmates and walked down the hallway where i was stopped and frisked and they told me to call my mother and let her know why i had been arrested in school. and you were taken to... the principal‘s office. so aged 12, the police were called. because people will listen and think, yourfather did drugs, he was on crack. you were smoking weed when you were 12. why...what is wrong in a way with trying to police that? i think what we've noticed over the last 15, 20 years is the war

on drugs didn't actually stop drug use. it didn't stop drug selling. in fact, the war on drugs was just an excuse to criminalise some of the most marginalised communities. i think was also important, and i talk about it in my book, is that i went to a middle school with mostly white kids and in my experience, had this particular experience when i went to my friend's house, and she introduces me to her brother who, you know, just a young white kid, and she opens up his door, and his countertop is full of drugs, literally. every drug. i had never seen that many drugs in my life. and i kind of looked over at her and she didn't really bat an eye but it was in that moment that i understood,

oh, both of our communities are not just using drugs but selling them, except my community has been criminalised for it and he was not afraid at all about the police being in his neighbourhood. in fact, i never saw the police in his neighbourhood. and your brother, your brother monty's experiences in prison, and we should set this in the context of the prison population. 14% of the united states are black but the prison population, 38% are black. you are five times more likely to be incarcerated if you are black. and the experience, and you didn't particularly know, what your brother was going through, it was many years later you discovered. yes, i knew he had been abused by the police but i wouldn't know the extent of the abuse or the fact that he was tortured until probably a decade later.

and how did you find out? i came across an aclu 86—page complaint, the american civil liberties union, and i'd just happenped to see it in my email inbox, i opene it up and saw they were suing the sheriff's department and that piqued my interest, i'd had a terrible incident with the los angeles sheriff, so i read the 86—page complaint within the power and it was story upon story, 70 sworn statements from prisoners but also two of those testimonies were from a jail chaplain who had first—hand experience of witnessing the police brutality inside a jail. and the second one was someone who worked for the aclu who witnessed a prisoner being beaten by the sheriff's department and it was almost that moment when i read it that i heard my brother's story and i called him, he had just been released from state prison, and said the sheriffs are being sued and he said finally, someone will getjustice. and asked him, what happened to you?

is this some of the things that happen to you? he said yes. it would be over six months to a year that he would tell us the extent of what he experienced inside a jail cell. which was what? brutally beaten by the sheriffs. he was in the middle of a manic episode. he was punched, kicked, he said he remembers a sheriff hitting a panic button and dozens of sheriffs coming out and stomping him until he blacked out and when you finally awoke, he was in a pool of his own blood. they never took him to the infirmary, to get medical care and they also had handcuffed him to his bedpost. and for about the next two months, they starved him, they turned off water in his cell, he was forced

to drink from toilet water and my mother had no idea where he was. she called up every single day trying to find her son. she went there every single weekend trying to visit her son and for about two months, the sheriff kept him from us. it prompted you then to take action. in fact, you did it through artwork. you were in your late 20s? i was about 27 when i first delved into taking on the sheriff's department. i did an intimate art piece portraying state violence and it was a way to process what i had read and what my family had experienced but it was also a way to amplify the issue. i wanted to bring this conversation to la county but one of my friends came and saw the performance and said, this isn't enough. this is a great piece

but you've got to do more. this is happening right now. and i did. i would start the first organisation that centred people most directly impacted byjail violence. and that was an essential first campaign because it resulted in civilian oversight. exactly. but that happened after black lives matter. there are many more black men in prison then you would expect from the prison population. 14% of black men in the united states, 38% in the prison population. why do you think that is? it's because we spent the last a0 years creating laws that criminalise poverty. that criminalise some of the most marginalised people. and so what happens is, you have someone who is going to school, going to high school and instead of having counsellors, they have police officers on the campus so what might be something that got you sent to the principles of this 30 years ago is now something that will get you a misdemeanour or a felony. what we have is a community

of people who are struggling to raise their children, feed their children, give their children shelter and so might try to steal food and instead of dealing with the issue of poverty, we have people criminalising poverty. but poverty affects whites just as much as blacks. yes, and racism becomes the key factor. race and the history of race inside the us becomes very important for us to delve into. but where it is at play? are you saying that more black people are poor because of racism? yes, and also say in more black people i could analyse because of racism. but there are some interesting statistics highlighted

by the african—american essayist debra dickerson, saying the race of criminals reported by crime victims matches the arrest data which suggests the police are not over arresting black people more than white people. i think that's an interesting statistic. what we have to look at is, where the police end up, which communities? i mentioned earlier, i am in a community where over—policing is happening. we have police from morning until sundown. and families and communities are being criminalised by police, but then you go to sherman oaks, which is a neighbourhood over, the same things could be happening and yet those communities aren't criminalised. it's a powerful statistic to suggest that when someone is reporting

a crime, they say they are black, they say they are white. that ratio is the same as the arrests made by police. you as the arrests made by police. might argue they ar around you might argue they are hanging around your neighbourhood more. when it comes to actual arrests made, if that matches those who are reporting crime... the question then becomes about conviction. do the people who get arrested, who ends up getting convicted? that is maybe where that statistic lacks. who is convicted of the crimes they say they committed, and what we know, time and time again, is that black folks are over convicted even of crimes they might have never done. crimes they may have done but instead of getting a misdemeanour, and infraction or getting to go home, they are convicted of it. 0k. so, the suggestion is that in a way, it is all through the system

even if you can't prove it. so the criminaljustice system itself is racist. definitely, definitely. and this is something that we don't need statistics for. i mean, statistics are important but there is a history of racism by the criminaljustice system. let's think about how many young black folks, how many black folks who had mob violence, using courts to identify black people and put them in jail or prison, giving them inflated sentences, giving them enhancements. there's a history of this in the us, both historically and also presently. there's a difficulty though which i noticed. perhaps it's been highlighted as one of the affects of campaigns like black lives matter, that one of the consequences is that you have police who are afraid to go into black communities. there was research done that said that 72% of police say they are less willing to stop—and—search. the difficulty of that is that it's the black community, the law—abiding members

of the black community, who will suffer from that, isn't it? yeah, and i think we have to look at why harm and violence is happening in communities in the first place. when we neglect looking at the root issues, then we get a country or a state or a city that uses police at the mental health providers, that uses police as social workers, that uses police as domestic violence workers and in fact that's not what they are. the police are the police. so the police are not the solution to that problem. precisely. but what i wonder is your relationship with the police because it was the rapper, tef poe, on this programme who said the police are at war with us. is that how you feel? of course. and i've felt that way since i was a child. the first experience i had with police, they were raiding my home as a four—year—old and they didn't look at me or my sister or my siblings or ask

us how we were doing. they ransacked our home, they brought in multiple police officers, they scared my mother and my family and so there's never been a moment in which black folks have had a healthy relationship with law enforcement. ok, so how do you get that? because presumably that's the aim. i think the aim is creating an environment where people feel safe. and safety isn't always a badge and a gun. we have an idea of safety that's largely been created by policing but safety is people being able to eat... sure, but to listen to you, you don't have solution... imean, you... police have a role in every area of society.

mmhmm, sure. but i'm trying to actually get to another point which is when communities don't have jobs, when they don't have access to healthy food, when they don't have access to adequate public education, harm happens and we need to talk about that and we have spent too much time talking about fixing the police and not enough time talking about how do we ensure black employment rates go up? how do we ensure black folks are able to stay in their homes and fight gentrification? i mean, these are the conversation that need to be happening. but i can imagine many in the black community thinking, hold on a second, i was mugged, i want someone to deal with that. definitely. i'm not saying don't. i'm saying we only talk about the police. i'm saying that becomes the central focus of our conversation. ok, but do you recognise that you need, in a way, if you're saying the police are at war with us, are you at war with the police? definitely not, definitely not. in fact, if you grew up in a black neighbourhood, you try to avoid the police. what you are often told is the police are behind us, don't look back, you don't

want to cause any attention. you don't want it to seem like you are doing anything wrong. so there's a way in which we often are making sure that the police, we are attracting attention from the police. also, you know, i come from the tradition of abolition and ijust want to be honest. eventually, i don't want to see the police being the ways in which our community deals with harm and violence. i think we have to think outside the box. this becomes a moment where it is about philosophy and we have to talk about how that philosophy meshes our practice. we didn't always have policing. but, in a way, i mean, here you are representing black lives matter which you founded and the answers, the sort of policies put forward on policing are the same whether it's in the black community or the white community, it's not like the black community wants something different from

the approach to drugs, for example. i don't know about that. i don't think we've heard enough from black folks to really give a concrete answer. what we do know is that people want to make sure that in their life, that they don't have to train their child to keep themselves safe from the police. we don't want to always have the talk with our kid. i remember my mother sitting all four children down and saying to us, listen, when you come across the police, be careful because you might get killed. that doesn't happen in white communities. how do you feel now when you come across the police? scared. even now? even now, still scared. i have a somatic response to law—enforcement. i'm respectful. sometimes i have officers who do security for me at events so i'm grateful. and for me, it's not about individual law enforcement, it's about the system of policing and that, to me, is so important to name. i have police that are in my family.

but it's the system of law enforcement that we have to look at. you're talking about really changing the whole of society. iam. and you think that black lives matter has a role in that. i think we have, yes. some people say, look, it was a social, it was, for a while it was temporarily a fashion on social media. what makes it last though? because it is just a movement, isn't it? and yes, it's taken off but it's also been eclipsed by the latest social media movements, whether it's me too and time's up. yeah, all good friends of mine. but seriously, what makes it any more than a passing fad on social media? because those of us who created it are invested in building something that's bigger thanjust what's on social media. black lives matter quickly became a global network. we have a0 chapters across the world, across the us and canada and here in the united kingdom. with what aim?

militant action? sometimes, sometimes it's direct action, sometimes it's civil disobedience, sometimes it's interrupting business as usual so you can, similar to what act up did around the fight to get folks medicine while they were dying of aids. we are having a conversation about black people dying at the hands of the state and often times, nobody caring. interruption and direct action become... so it's about protesting against things, what, locally? localfocus is our aim and mission, but also, when i come to the united kingdom or canada, it's also to build relationships with folks that are using black lives matter, that a part of our network. but you are a protest movement, i mean you're not going to stand candidates, you're not going to endorse candidates? we might, we might. part of what we're doing now is looking into what it might look like to be candidates. there are folks that are thinking about running for office. we're in an exploratory phase.

under a black lives matter banner? yes. you are seeing this fairly confidently. would you? i've been approached to run for office. um, do i think it's... at what level? um, some folks are talking about state, some folks are talking about local office. just approached, i haven't said yes but it's a conversation and we've seen this in the trajectory of many movements, right? starting off as protest movements, on the ground, organising, and evolving into working on electoral politics. that's something that we... we've never been against that, we just didn't think that was going to be the first place that black lives matter aimed. so what, senator khan—cullors joins the other three black senators in the senate, is that the aim? i think the aim is to grow a movement that can actually change the material conditions for black people. but is that the way to do it, i wonder? is it too set to go right to the top of the political tree? sometimes it's both.

what i don't want to say is we have to abandon protest. some of the best movements are able to continue to protest, continue to fight and grow that movement while they have someone in office and who are elected officials. patrisse khan—cullors, thank you for coming on hardtalk. thank you so much. hello there. plenty to talk about in the weather story for the remainder of this week. we closed out yesterday in the south—west with a beautiful sunset. however, u nfortu nately, that's the place today where we will see some of the wettest and windiest weather courtesy of an area of low pressure moving in from the atlantic. it is bringing quite a lot of heavy rain and gale force winds to parts of portugal and spain. this low will sit out in the atlantic and influence the story for the next

few days to come. good news, a southerly wind will bring milder air across the country so if you managed to escape the rain and get sunshine, it will feel quite pleasant. quite a west—east divide with our weather today. central and eastern areas seeing the best of the sunshine and further west will see increasing and strengthening winds and rain, some turning heavy as we move through the middle of the day. gale force gusts through the isles of scilly, up into cornwall