Forest Gate to Kingston

Forest Gate, in the London Borough of Newham, sits in east London’s arc of migration and settlement. Its Caribbean community had been there since the 1950s, sharing the area with South Asian communities, with Irish communities, with the successive waves of people who had found, in east London, a place where newcomers could begin again. In 2002, the world outside that community had changed in ways that were making the space for newcomers, and for those who had been there for decades, feel less safe

Briefing

• Britain joins US-led coalition in War on Terror; Afghanistan occupation underway.
• Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 comes into force; extended stop and search powers.
• Caribbean community organisations raise concerns about racial profiling post-September 11.
• Macpherson recommendations assessment: race equality in policing progress deemed insufficient.
• Jamaica 40th independence preparations begin; diaspora community events planned across Britain.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place in the United States, but their consequences reached Britain immediately and in multiple forms. The British government’s declaration of support for the United States and for the subsequent military operations in Afghanistan was unequivocal. The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, passed with exceptional speed through Parliament in the weeks after the attacks, extended existing anti-terror powers and created new ones. The security landscape — in airports, on public transport, in the intelligence services’ activity and in the Metropolitan Police’s operational priorities — changed significantly and remained changed into 2002.

For the Caribbean community in Forest Gate and across east London, the post-September 11 security landscape raised concerns that were specific to their experience. The extension of stop-and-search powers, the intensification of police operational activity in areas with large non-white populations, and the emergence of a security culture in which non-white identity was, in practice if not in law, a marker of potential suspicion — these were conditions that the Caribbean community recognised from its own history. The community had been subject to stop and search under the sus laws in the 1970s and 1980s; it had seen those laws amended and then replaced by powers that produced similar outcomes. The new security legislation was different in its stated purpose, but its potential effects on Black communities were recognisable.

The Racial Profiling Concern

In the first half of 2002, Caribbean community organisations were raising concerns about the application of the new security powers. The concern was not that terrorism was not a genuine threat: the attacks of September 11 had killed thousands of people, including British citizens, and the threat of further attacks was real. The concern was about how the powers that had been created to address the threat were being used, and whether their use was disproportionate in its effect on non-white communities that had nothing to do with the specific terrorist threat that had motivated the legislation.

The data was difficult to assess in 2002 because the new powers were new, but the pattern of previous security legislation suggested that powers created for one purpose were often used more broadly, and that their broader use fell disproportionately on communities that were already subject to elevated levels of police attention. The Caribbean community’s institutional memory of the sus laws, of the Scarman riots of 1981, of the Macpherson inquiry’s findings about institutional racism, was brought to bear on the new security environment with a combination of realism and wariness that reflected decades of experience.

Macpherson: Three Years On

The Macpherson Report had been published in 1999. By 2002, three years into its implementation, the community’s assessment of its impact was mixed. The report had produced real changes in some areas: a new definition of racially motivated crime, new procedures for recording and investigating racial incidents, a new duty on public authorities to promote race equality. The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, which the Macpherson recommendations had helped to produce, placed positive duties on public bodies that went further than previous legislation.

But the structural changes in policing that the report’s language had implied — a genuine transformation of the culture of institutional racism rather than a revision of procedures — were not, by 2002, visible at the scale the community had hoped for. Stop and search statistics remained disproportionate. Complaint and discipline procedures remained opaque. The “institutional racism” that the report had identified was not, community organisations argued, a problem that could be resolved by procedure changes alone; it required a deeper change in the culture and training of the police service that was proceeding, if at all, very slowly. The Caribbean community had welcomed the Macpherson Report as a vindication. Three years on, it was asking what vindication had actually produced.

Jamaica Forty Years: Looking Back and Forward

The fortieth anniversary of Jamaica’s independence, due in August 2002, was being prepared in the first half of the year in diaspora communities across Britain. Forest Gate’s Caribbean community, like Caribbean communities elsewhere, was organising events that would mark the anniversary: church services, cultural celebrations, community gatherings that brought together the first generation with the second and third in an affirmation of the connection to Jamaica that the diaspora had maintained through four decades of independence.

The fortieth anniversary invited reflection on what those decades had produced. Jamaica in 2002 was a country that had achieved things that were, in global terms, remarkable: a cultural output, in music and sport, that was disproportionate to its size; a diaspora of millions that had enriched the countries it had settled in; a democratic tradition that had survived the stresses of post-independence politics without collapsing. But Jamaica was also a country with persistent economic difficulties, a homicide rate that was among the highest in the world, and a structural inequality that the decades of independence had not resolved. The World Bank‘s assessments of Jamaica’s development placed it in a category of middle-income countries with high inequality and significant governance challenges. The anniversary was a moment for taking stock of all of this: the achievement and the unfinished business, together.