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1,500 Word Synopsis
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Unsatisfactory and
limited housing with little or no facilities led to inevitable high levels of crime,
unemployment and the sad truth that when ‘these predominantly white officers only meet
members of the black community in confrontational situations, they tend to stereotype black
people in general’1, and therefore ‘racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the
behaviour of a few officers on the street’2 The two quotations used here are from two
different reports, almost two decades apart, however they form a very coherent sentence
...

The catalyst of the Brixton riots, which started on the 11th of April, was the system
that the Metropolitan Police started to adopt
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Within
six days nearly 1000 people had been stopped and searched, 118 were arrested
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The operation, named Swamp 81, resulted in
riots that included nearly 300 injuries to police officers, over 100 vehicles burned and up to
150 buildings damage; ‘It was… a resounding success’3 one local CID incredibly stated
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1

 Sir  W
...
 6  p
...
 Report  of  an  Inquiry  by  the  Rt
...
 The  Lord  Scarman  OBE  (London:  Pelican  Books,  1981)  p
...
 Fryer,  Staying  Power:  The  History  of  Black  People  in  Britain  (London:  Pluto  Press,  1984)  p
...
In this year, on the 22nd of April, Stephen Lawrence
was murdered whilst waiting for a bus and just under 14 years later two of five suspected
murderers were sentenced to prison
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Doreen Lawrence,
Stephens’s mother, made a statement which clearly detailed the racist prejudice demonstrated
by the police ‘My son was stereotyped by the police, he was black then he must be a criminal
and they set about investigating him and us’
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On April 10th 1981, police physically harmed a man outside a school and caused
serious head injury to a parent with a truncheon and arrested them for obstruction
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‘Next day, Brixton exploded’
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This in itself represents the on-going and unforgotten racist prejudice that was once
present in these particular places and thus why it was in these cities that the riots were able to
flourish
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Images of marches that took place in the
                                                                                                                       
4

 Sir  W
...
 42  p
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 Fryer,  Staying  Power:  The  History  of  Black  People  in  Britain  (London:  Pluto  Press,  1984)  p
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6 It is clear that the need for equality and different police tactics
and operations was dire, but what was being done to solve these problems, and were these
supposed solutions giving any answers to the problems
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The
reports were performed by respected and informed professionals and not left in the hands of
the police, whose conclusions would have undoubtedly been biased
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Detective
Superintendent Brian Weeden himself stated throughout the inquiry that mistakes had been
made which could have been avoided, including the fact that he could have arrested the
tipped off suspects for days after the murder on simple reasonable suspicion, but failed to do
so
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There was supposed footage of the murderers leaving their houses with black bin liners which
could well have contained evidence, and still no arrests were made
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The positive note to take from these events is that there were inquiries held into both;
they did not go unnoticed and ignored
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Another effort was that of the Macpherson inquiry; in July of 1997 a public
                                                                                                                       
6

 P
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inquiry was ordered, to be conducted by Sir William Macpherson, and was estimated to have
contained over 100,000 pages of documentation
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7 Within this statement
Macpherson not only acknowledged prevalent racism within the police force, but also that the
first stage to solving the problems was acceptance and admittance of fault
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8
Although Macpherson does not blame ‘racial disadvantage’ on the police, there is more
acknowledgement of the police’s fault than there was almost two decades before
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Despite this the Scarman report was contemporarily widely accepted and
acknowledged by politicians, the law, the media and community relations administrators
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New policies were introduced to help build trust between
communities of Britain and the law, explaining that community policing must be a method
which supports the community, and must not be sectioned off lightly ‘it is not something
which can be put into a separate box labeled ‘community relations’9, however this suggestion
cannot have been taken so seriously, as displayed by the case of Stephen Lawrence
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The Home Office stated that over 65 of the
                                                                                                                       
7

 Sir  W
...
6  p
...
 Report  of  an  Inquiry  by  the  Rt
...
 The  Lord  Scarman  OBE  (London:  Pelican  Books,  1981)  p
...
 Report  of  an  Inquiry  by  the  Rt
...
 The  Lord  Scarman  OBE  (London:  Pelican  Books,  1981)  p
...
One
must not forget that Macpherson’s use of the term ‘institutionalised racism’ will have been
the push that the police force needed to emerge out of their suspected hesitancy
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Doubt everything! The
reports give Britain different ideas of who is to blame in the two different analysed events,
and very different ideas of how to solve the problems within our own communities, but
neither focus on or blame the police entirely
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Britain has an established acknowledgment and definition of
racism, so much so that even the Metropolitan Police knew that the behaviour of its officers
throughout the Brixton riots was morally and lawfully unacceptable
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The sources that have been discussed are undoubtedly invaluable information for
academics and future cases alike, and could be used in many different ways to improve racial
prejudice in the country and judicial system
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 Macpherson  of  Cluny,  The  Stephen  Lawrence  Enquiry:  Report  of  an  Inquiry  by  Sir  William  Macpherson  
of  Cluny  (London,  1999)  C
...
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