A youth charity founder and former gang member who was shot by police while he was allegedly unarmed has accused officers of failing to understand that “people can change”.

Sharif Cousins was shot in the chest on 26 July last year near his home in Rubery, Birmingham. The 42-year-old, who says he was out buying cigarettes with his friend, insists he was unarmed and had his hands up when he was shot. He has not been charged with any crime in relation to the night of the shooting.

Cousins has previously spent a total of 15 years in jail, including eight years for pointing a gun at a police officer’s head, but he says he has not been involved in crime since his release in 2011.

Describing the night he was shot, Cousins said he was walking down an alleyway when he was ambushed by armed police. “I put my hands up. I don’t know if it was too slow for them, but that’s when I felt a pain in my chest,” he said.

“I looked at the policeman’s gun and it was smoking. And I looked down and saw my chest smoking. I could see all the air from the evening sucking into my chest. I looked at the police officer and said: ‘You just shot me.’”

The bullet entered Cousins’s chest, broke his ribs, punctured his lung and became lodged in his back. He spent nearly a month in hospital, much of it in a coma.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is due to publish its report into the incident in the coming weeks and Cousins is planning to sue West Midlands police once the findings of the inquiry have been published.



Cousins’s friend Jamael Scarlett was arrested at the scene and later convicted, and sentenced to 16 years in prison for three counts of possessing a firearm and ammunition. It is not thought that Scarlett was armed when Cousins was shot, but police said Scarlett had discarded ammunition near Cousins’s house and that the ambush was part of a wider operation that led to six people being jailed for firearms offences.



“I was with Jamael, but whatever he was involved with, that was him, not me,” Cousins said. “I don’t know about his life. I knew he was straying towards certain things. I was trying to be a mentor to him.”

Cousins was previously a member of the Birmingham gang the Burger Bar Boys, which has been locked in a feud with a group called the Johnson Crew. He said he was “very remorseful” about his past crimes.

In 2012 he founded New Day Foundation, aimed at deterring young people from getting “sucked in” to gang culture. The charity received national publicity and in 2013 Cousins was quoted by the BBC as saying he had left jail feeling he “didn’t want to be part of the problem any more”.

Cousins told the Guardian that he left prison to find his area of Handsworth in Birmingham was “out of control”. He said: “I thought, ‘these kids are trying to be like me. Basically, I started all of this,’ so I wanted to try and rectify my mistakes and steer kids away from the same path that I went down.”

He closed the charity in 2014 because of a lack of funding. Since then, he says, he has been harassed by the police, being arrested by armed police a number of times but only ever charged for driving offences and resisting arrest. West Midlands police confirmed that he had been arrested a total of seven times since 2014.

“Police don’t think that people can turn their lives around,” he said. “You can be doing all the charity work, but they think, ‘once a criminal, always a criminal’. I know that’s how they’re trained to think, but they need to understand that people can change and realise the error of their ways.”

The father of four says that following his shooting he finds it hard to leave the house and is on medication for anxiety and depression. “My life is totally ruined. They’ve shot me and basically just tried to tuck it all under the carpet and demonise me in the media,” he said. “I want some explanations and I’m not going to rest until I get those explanations.”

A petition started by Cousins’s 19-year-old daughter Sariah calls for a public inquiry into the “unjust treatment of black males” by the police and the judicial system.

“My community was very shaken by this incident and have since lost all faith in West Midlands police,” she wrote. “Normally black men don’t survive to talk about these events so they get swept under the carpet more easily. Well, my father did survive this , and will be talking, so let’s see this get brushed under the great rug.”

Deborah Coles, the director of the charity Inquest, said a disproportionate number of people who died following the use of force by police were black and minority ethnic.

“The racial stereotype of the black man as gang member, criminal and dangerous, when woven into police culture and practice, can lead to the disproportionate and fatal use of force. Too often there are attempts to demonise the individual concerned to deflect attention from police conduct,” she said.

“This case points to the police mentality of ‘once a gang member, always a gang member’, you can’t change and you will always be associated with that [gang] label. The implications of this narrative are deeply concerning, as seen by this case.”

Cousins’s shooting was the first time a West Midlands police officer had shot someone since 2000. The force pointed the Guardian to a previous statement on the incident, saying it would not comment further util the report by the IOPC was published.

In the statement, temporary assistant chief constable Kenny Bell said: “We respond to every individual on a case by case basis – we use all information available to enable us to provide an appropriate police response. For example, if we have information that someone has access to firearms or has used a firearm at any point, that individual could face a response from armed officers.

“The public would expect us to respond to a potential threat in an appropriate and proportionate manner. We have a duty, not only to protect our officers, but also local communities.”