Toxteth to Spanish Town

Toxteth had burned in 1981. Thirty years later, Tottenham burned, and then Brixton, and then Hackney, and then cities across England. The Jamaican and Caribbean community found itself, as it had before, at the centre of a national crisis that it had not started but could not escape

Briefing

• Mark Duggan shot and killed by police in Tottenham, 4 August 2011.
• Protests outside Tottenham police station escalate into nights of rioting across England.
• Caribbean community leaders condemn both police conduct and the violence that followed.
• Looting and arson in Brixton, Hackney, Birmingham; families describe fear and loss.
• Government announces review of gang strategy; Caribbean community concerned about profiling.

The Toxteth riots of 1981 had lasted nine days. They had produced the Scarman Report, which had recommended a series of reforms to the relationship between the police and the communities they policed. Thirty years later, in August 2011, England’s cities were burning again. The immediate cause was the killing of Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man from Tottenham, shot by armed police officers on 4 August 2011 as they moved to arrest him. A peaceful vigil outside Tottenham police station on the evening of 6 August escalated into violence. By the following morning, Tottenham High Road was a scene of damaged buildings and burned vehicles. By the end of the week, the violence had spread to Brixton, to Hackney, to Croydon, to Birmingham, to Manchester, to Salford, and to cities and towns across England that had no obvious connection to the original event beyond the shared conditions — economic deprivation, alienated young people, a contested relationship with the police — that had made it possible.

The connection to Toxteth was not merely historical. The communities at the centre of the 2011 riots were, in many cases, the same communities that had been at the centre of the riots thirty years earlier: Caribbean-heritage communities in inner-city areas of high unemployment, poor housing and a policing relationship defined by mistrust on both sides. The names of the areas had changed in some cases; the underlying conditions had not changed as much as the Scarman reforms had promised.

The Community’s Response

The Jamaican and Caribbean community’s response to the 2011 riots was not uniform, and it was not the response that the tabloid media tended to represent. The community condemned the looting and the arson. Businesses owned by Caribbean families had been damaged. Community centres that had served the community for decades had been threatened. The violence was not in the community’s interest; it was in the community’s streets, and the community was among its victims.

But the community also held, alongside its condemnation of the violence, an understanding of its context that was not available to those who looked at the riots without the history. The killing of Mark Duggan was not an isolated event. It took place in a context of stops and searches, of the use of force in encounters between the police and young Black men, of a relationship between parts of the Caribbean community and the Metropolitan Police that had been damaged by incidents stretching back decades. The community did not need 2011 to know that this relationship was broken; it had been saying so for years, in community forums and in evidence to parliamentary committees and in the pages of community newspapers, without receiving a response adequate to the scale of the problem.

The Political Response and Its Limits

David Cameron’s government responded to the riots with a combination of tough rhetoric and a series of reviews and consultations. A review of the government’s gang strategy was announced. An expansion of the use of water cannons was discussed. The courts worked through thousands of cases arising from the riots at speed. The sentencing, which community organisations and legal commentators observed was notably severe compared with equivalent non-riot offences, drew criticism from civil liberties groups and from some in the Caribbean community who noted that young Black men appeared disproportionately represented in the courts’ caseloads.

The government also commissioned a review of the riots that produced, in November 2011, a report from a panel chaired by Darra Singh. The panel held listening events in areas affected by the riots, including events where Caribbean community members could contribute their perspectives. The report’s conclusions — about the role of unemployment, about the failure of public services, about the relationship between the police and young people in deprived communities — were not, in substance, different from the conclusions of the Scarman Report thirty years earlier. The policy response in the years that followed was, again, less comprehensive than the analysis warranted.

Spanish Town and the View from Jamaica

In Jamaica, the August 2011 riots were watched with a complicated mixture of concern and recognition. Spanish Town, in St Catherine, had its own experience of community violence, its own complicated relationship with policing, its own young men whose encounters with state authority were defined by force rather than trust. The Jamaican family networks that stretched from Spanish Town to Toxteth and from Kingston to Hackney carried the news of the riots home. In churches in Kingston and in family conversations in rural parishes, people asked about cousins and grandchildren in England, about whether they were safe, about what was happening in the country their parents and grandparents had gone to.

The riots of 2011 reopened, in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, a long-running conversation about the experience of Caribbean people in Britain. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination had raised concerns about racial inequalities in the UK’s criminal justice system in its periodic reviews. Those concerns looked, in August 2011, not like abstract worries but like descriptions of events that were being watched in real time from living rooms across Jamaica and the Caribbean. The community that had sent its young people to Britain, that had trusted Britain’s promise of opportunity, was watching those young people now in circumstances that had not been promised and that, in the autumn of 2011, still had no resolution in sight.