Key Developments at a Glance
- 9–10 September 1985: Handsworth riots, Birmingham; two men die; community anger at police harassment and economic marginalisation reaches breaking point.
- 28 September 1985: Brixton riot triggered when Cherry Groce is shot by police raiding her home; she is left paralysed; Brixton burns for the second time in four years.
- 6 October 1985: Broadwater Farm, Tottenham; Cynthia Jarrett dies during police search; subsequent riot kills PC Keith Blakelock; community and police relations at their lowest point in decades.
- Live Aid concert July 13, 1985 raises £40 million for Ethiopian famine; Caribbean community participates in national fundraising; questions persist about aid effectiveness.
- Scarman Report recommendations of 1981 still not implemented; community organisations document the failures; pressure on Home Office intensifies after three riots in ten weeks.
- Edward Seaga PM Jamaica; Thatcher PM UK; community in Britain faces simultaneous crisis at home and economic difficulty in islands of origin.
The second half of 1985 is the most turbulent period the Caribbean community in Britain has experienced since the summer of 1981. Three major riots in ten weeks — Handsworth in September, Brixton in September, Broadwater Farm in October — constitute a sequence of civil unrest that is impossible to describe as coincidence or as isolated incident. Each riot is triggered by a specific event; each specific event occurs against a background of accumulated grievance, documented discrimination, economic marginalisation, and a policing philosophy that has failed to absorb the lessons of the Scarman Report published four years earlier. The community has been saying, consistently, through its organisations, its legal advocates, its newspapers, and its engagement with political institutions, that the conditions exist for precisely this kind of unrest. The conditions have not been changed. The unrest has arrived.
Handsworth: The Opening
The Handsworth riots of 9 and 10 September 1985 erupt in the Lozells area of Birmingham. The immediate trigger is a confrontation between police and a community member during a drug search. The disturbances that follow result in the deaths of two Asian businessmen, Kassamali and Amirali Moledina, killed in their post office; in the destruction of property across a wide area; and in the arrest of numerous community members. The response from the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, is to talk about the need for the community to ‘get a grip’ on crime rather than about the conditions that produced the riot. The community hears this response as confirmation that the government has not understood, or does not wish to understand, what it has been told.
Brixton: The Shooting of Cherry Groce
On 28 September 1985, police officers raid the home of Cherry Groce in Brixton, searching for her son Michael. Inspector Douglas Lovelock shoots Mrs Groce during the raid, hitting her in the chest. The bullet lodges near her spine and paralyses her. She is thirty-seven years old and the mother of six children. Her son was not in the house. The community in Brixton responds with a riot that lasts into the following day and produces widespread property damage. The shooting of Cherry Groce in her own home, in front of her children, is experienced by the Caribbean community as an expression of a policing relationship in which the community’s safety inside its own homes cannot be taken for granted. Inspector Lovelock is never criminally convicted; he is allowed to retire on health grounds. Mrs Groce spends the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
Broadwater Farm: Cynthia Jarrett and the Death of PC Blakelock
On 5 October 1985, police arrest Floyd Jarrett in connection with a stolen car in Tottenham. The following day, 6 October, police officers search the home of his mother, Cynthia Jarrett, at 259 Jarrett Close on the Broadwater Farm estate. Mrs Jarrett, who had a heart condition, collapses and dies during the search. She is forty-nine years old. The search had been conducted without a warrant. The community on Broadwater Farm, which had been engaged in a successful community development programme and had achieved a reputation as one of the better-run estates in Haringey, responds with a riot of extraordinary violence: petrol bombs are used, a firearm is discharged at police, and in the course of the riot PC Keith Blakelock of Tottenham police is isolated and killed. He is the first British police officer killed in a riot in many decades.
The killing of PC Blakelock is an act of terrible violence that the community does not and cannot justify. It is also an act that occurs within a context of terrible violence: the unlawful search of a woman’s home, her death during that search, and the history of policing on Broadwater Farm that community members describe as systematic harassment. Neither fact erases the other. Bernie Grant, the leader of Haringey Council and himself a Caribbean community member, makes the comment that the police got ‘a bloody good hiding’ — a comment that will follow him into his parliamentary career two years later. What Grant is expressing, clumsily and in a way that hands ammunition to his opponents, is the community’s fury. That fury is real, documented, and grounded in events that the community has experienced and reported and which have not been adequately addressed.
Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); Haringey Council; Metropolitan Police; Scarman Report (1981).
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