Days on from the acquittal of Martyn Blake, attempts by people who should know better to stir up outrage around the shooting of Chris Kaba have continued. 

Councillor Claire Holland of Lambeth Council, for example, mourns the “loss of a young person at the start of their adult life, with so much ahead of them”, without dwelling on the facts about Kaba’s life and death, and calls for “change” in policing, without the slightest clarity about what change is needed. I am unable to find similar words of mourning from Councillor Holland about the deaths of the many young victims of gang violence who have fallen in her borough. 

Yet some claim that it is wrong to mention the background of gang violence at all. Labour’s Kim Johnson MP has stood up in Parliament to condemn the use of “racist gang tropes to justify the killing”.

Now, it is certainly true that Mr Kaba’s gang membership does not justify his shooting. The justification for his shooting was that he was recklessly driving a vehicle that had been flagged for its association with firearms incidents even after being ordered to stop by firearms officers. This would have been valid reasoning from the police whoever he had turned out to be. His criminal past — the subject of reporting restrictions specifically to stop it from affecting the trial — is useful in explaining what led up to this event.

But I’m interested in the use of the term “racist gang tropes”. The implication appears to be that there is something problematic about suggesting that Mr Kaba was involved in gang crime. Yet it is not even remotely disputable. He was an open member of the 67 gang and had bragged about its crimes in his rap songs. He had been convicted on numerous occasions, including for possessing a knife and for possessing an imitation firearm, and he had been served with a domestic violence protection order related to the mother of his child. He is suspected of participating in two separate shootings in the days that led up to his death (a fact which might explain why he was keen to escape from the armed police officers, as he would otherwise have ended up in a cell). 

One can debate the conclusions that should be drawn from this, but one cannot deny that it is true — and how can something be a “racist trope” if it is true?

I believe that people use the term “trope” to imply that a claim is unreliable if not outright false. This is strange. A “trope” is defined as a “common or overused theme or device” — akin to a cliché. A clichéd nature can make a plot point tedious in a television series or a description lacklustre in a novel. But it need not make it inaccurate. 

The right can be responsible for the misuse of the “trope” charge as well. Earlier this year, Sir Alan Duncan accused various members of Conservative politicians of “exercising the interests of another country” and “doing the bidding of Netanyahu”. 

In response, right-leaning commentators accused Duncan of employing “an old antisemitic trope”, “an age old trope”, “a disgraceful trope”, “classic antisemitic dual loyalty tropes” et cetera.

Duncan’s claims were more disputable than the descriptions of Mr Kaba. Still, none of these commentators were disputing his claims. They were just dismissing them on the sole basis of their being “tropes”. If they were “tropes”, they seemed to think, then they had to be untrue.

Why? Is it impossible that politicians could be serving the interests of other states? The Commons Standards Committee doesn’t seem to think so. They have a lot of concerns about “special interests”. 

Nor, importantly, was Sir Alan — whatever the rights and wrongs of his arguments — singling out Jewish politicians (which would of course have been antisemitic). As well as the Jewish Lord Polak, he named, among others, Lord Pickles, Tom Tugendhat and Michael Gove.

Duncan was the subject of an internal investigation by the Conservative Party over his comments and was subsequently cleared.

Ironically, “trope” has itself become a trope

Perhaps the truth about “tropes” is that we should be careful with them. They represent the sort of claim which is vulnerable to misuse. For example, CNN decries the “trope” that “Muslims want to wage holy war by way of Jihad”. To be sure, it is easy to imagine a Muslim being called a terrorist merely because they are a Muslim, or a black man called a gangster merely because he is a black man, or a Jewish politician being accused of “exercising the interests of another country” merely because they are Jewish. Nasty stuff. But the dangerous falsity of such unfounded allegations is coterminous with the existence of rational and substantive allegations. Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas and Al-Shabaab, among others, do in fact want to wage holy war by way of Jihad. You can call that a “trope” right up until the bombs go off.

Ironically, “trope” has itself become a trope — a description which is vulnerable to misuse on the basis of rhetorical and ideological convenience. But people can still use the concept if it happens to be appropriate. I won’t charge them with peddling tropes.