Around the same time as Bristolians were organising themselves against a colour bar, white nationalist activity in Britain was gaining ground. The National Front, a whites only, anti-immigration and far-right political party, was stoking anger and resentment among British people. Formed in 1967, the National Front has close links to white supremacist movements globally. At the height of their growth in the 1970s, party members adorned themselves with Union Jacks and St George’s flags, as though they felt their politics represented the epitome of Britishness. Just over a decade after its formation, the National Front stood over three hundred people in the 1979 general election, and won almost 200,000 votes. Despite the growing popularity of white nationalist politics in Britain during the 1970s, it was black and Asian people who were considered volatile members of society. The National Front’s membership eventually dwindled by the 1980s, but the sentiment of the party found its home in other forms of activism.
In the 1970s, police officers often wielded a section of the then archaic 1824 Vagrancy Act. The section in question gave the police the power to stop, search and arrest anyone they suspected might commit a crime. This Vagrancy Act came to be known as ‘sus laws’ (taken from wording of the Act that described a ‘suspected person’). Because the police didn’t keep statistics on those they were stopping under the Act, it’s difficult to know just how many people were bothered by the police for the crime of not looking respectable.37 Anecdotally, anti-racism campaigners insisted that black people were being unfairly targeted by sus laws. The notion of who does and who doesn’t look suspicious – particularly in a British political climate that just ten years earlier was denying black people employment and housing – was undoubtedly racialised.
Sus laws ensured a fraught relationship between black people and the police. This was intensified by public panic about mugging and muggers. In 1972, a violent and fatal street robbery in Handsworth, Birmingham led to near constant press coverage of street robberies for the following year. ‘Mugging’ was an American term, imported from police statements and press coverage in black-concentrated cities. The fear of mugging was imported, too.
Street robberies have always existed in Britain. But the importation of the word mugging brought with it a coded implication that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly black, and that mugging was an exclusively black crime. Newspapers reported that it was a new trend. The fear of mugging was about so much more than the fear of crime and violence; it was about the anxieties of those who had been scared of black liberation struggles in the 1960s, and their intense fears around race, reparations and revenge.
There was at least one documented incident of police officers arresting black boys for the crime of looking like criminals. On 16 March 1972, at Oval train station in south London, a group of plain-clothes white police officers targeted and tackled four young black men – who also happened to be members of a radical black organisation – on public transport, later testifying in court that ‘it was clear they intended to pick the pockets of passengers’. But the only witnesses for the prosecution were the police themselves, and the accused young men had no stolen property on them.38 The Oval 4 were imprisoned for two years each, but were released a year early on appeal. Every single one of them maintained their innocence.
While the police were busy arresting black people for looking suspicious, the National Front were capitalising on national anti-black feeling. In 1975 they organised a march against black muggings, which they led through London’s East End. A year later, they found another white-power cause to support. Leamington Spa bus driver Robert Relf became a national news story in 1976 when he put up a sign outside of his house that read ‘For sale to an English family only’. A previous version of the sign was even more extreme: ‘To avoid animosity all round positively no coloureds’. The sign contravened the Race Relations Act, and he was asked to take it down. He refused and was imprisoned for contempt of court. Relf promptly went on hunger strike. The tabloid press used his imprisonment as ammunition to argue against what they called ‘political correctness’. Meanwhile, for the National Front, his were the actions of a martyr. They launched a campaign in support of him, and organised ‘Free Relf’ protests.
Ideas of blackness and criminality were becoming inherently interlinked. In 1984, three years after sus laws were scrapped, stop and search was introduced. The initiatives seemed barely different. But while sus laws allowed the police to arrest anyone they thought was loitering with intent to commit a crime, the new laws meant police had to have reasonable belief that an offence had already been committed before stopping and searching a suspect.39 While the police line has always been that such tactics prevent crime, black people have always been disproportionately targeted under stop and search (research in 2015 revealed parts of the country where black people were seventeen times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.)40 These were (and still are) sus laws by a different name.
Between 1980 and 1982, with the country in recession, unemployment for black and Asian men rose by roughly 20 per cent – in comparison to a rise of just 2 per cent for white men.41 Despite black and Asian people becoming a firm fixture of the British urban landscape, some white communities were still uneasy about their presence. There was a feeling among some that unemployed young black people chose not to work, and instead took up lives of social aggravation. In a radio documentary broadcast on BRMB Radio Birmingham in 1982, PC Dick Board, a police officer working in the city, made his feelings about unemployed young black people clear. ‘Let’s be fair,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about a certain type of people now. We had all these reasons in the twenties and thirties, and we never had this. We never had the soaring crime rates, and what we now know as the American phrase “mugging”. Which is robbery with violence. We have a different sort of person, who by hook or by crook is going to get his own way at the expense of everybody else. Even his own kind. That’s the point. Never mind this unemployment business, we’ve got a situation here now that is being used deliberately and there’s no question about it, they couldn’t care less whether they’ve got a job or not, in fact they’re happier without them.’ He continued: ‘All this is complete twaddle about they’re looking for jobs and “I can’t get a job” and all this . . . A lot of them use their colour as leverage against us . . . they use it, and they use it very well. There’s enough people in this country prepared to listen, and turn a blind eye to what these people do.’42
When PC Dick Board spoke about ‘what these people do’, I think he was referring to crime. Alongside recession-fuelled unemployment came heightened fears of crime in inner cities that stigmatised entire areas where black and brown people lived.
The summer of 1981 saw more riots across the country – in Brixton, on 10 April, in Toxteth, Liverpool on 3 July, Handsworth, Birmingham on 10 July, and Chapeltown, Leeds, in the same month. The social conditions of each area were very similar. Poor. Black. In both Brixton and Toxteth, police behaviour was a contributing factor. Brixton, the first riot of the year, was sparked by the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Swamp, in which they performed over a thousand stop and searches in just six days.43 When police officers stopped to help a wounded black boy, a crowd approached them, and the situation escalated.44 In Toxteth, the police gave chase to a black motorcyclist, believing his vehicle was stolen. He fell from his bike and the police tried to arrest him, only to be confronted by an angry crowd. Again, the situation escalated. Riots, it seemed, were contagious.
Because history is written by the winners, evidence of police harassment of people of colour in the early 1980s is hard to come by. But the Newham Monitoring Project bucked that trend. The organisation formed in 1980 after Asian teenager Akhtar Ali Baig was murdered by a gang of white skinheads on his way home from college. The following trial saw a judge comment that the murder was ‘motivated by racial hatred’.45 Frustrated by a lack of implementation of laws against racism, people in the community clubbed together to offer logistical support
against racist harassment, and the Newham Monitoring Project was born. The grass-roots organisation campaigned against racist violence – including violence enacted by the police – until 2015, when it was forced to shut down due to lack of funds.
One part of the Newham Monitoring Project’s work took place in the form of their annual reports, and their 1983 report gives a glimpse of what it was like to be black in east London at the time. During that year, the project received seventy-six reports of police harassment. Of those who were harassed by the police and subsequently arrested, forty-seven were released without charge. Those who were charged by the police were later released. Case studies in the report reveal a portrait of black families under siege. ‘The home of Mr N and his family has been searched 4/5 times this year alone,’ the report reads. ‘Each time the police officers have had warrants with them, made out for stolen goods. Each time they have found no evidence and therefore have preferred no charges . . . the family expect their home to be invaded at any time. They live in constant fear of the next visit by the police.’46
There was also the case of forty-five-year-old Osei Owusu, who, after police turned up at his home asking to breathalyse him, refused. Minutes later, ‘while he was in the bathroom in his house, 10–12 police officers smashed their way in, breaking down his front door. He was then dragged naked out of the bath, brutally assaulted with truncheons, and taken to Forest Gate Police Station. Once at the police station he was breathalysed. Three breathalyser tests on him failed.’
In one incident, police officers targeted a whole family. ‘John Power was walking home after having been to a youth club,’ the project recorded. ‘As he was walking a police car drew up alongside him, by the pavement. The police officer in the car shouted, “Oi, come here you black bastard.” John carried on walking. Then, fearing something may happen, [he] started to run home. The police officers followed him to his house, got to the front door, opened it and pulled John out and then proceeded to beat him.’ When his father intervened, ‘the police officers started beating him up as well.’ When John’s sister saw what was happening and screamed in fear, ‘the police officer asked her to shut up and then pushed and hit her. All three were then put into different vehicles and taken to East Ham Police Station. They were then charged with obstruction and various charges of assaulting police officers.’
At the same time of this intense police brutality, there was also a movement towards restoring the eroded trust between people of colour and the police. Taking their lead from the United States, the police began to enact a new strategy. Community policing put officers in touch with people in local areas so that residents could get to know them. The late Chief Constable John Alderson strongly argued in the early 1980s that police should have more human involvement with the places they policed.47 But this kind of community approach did not work to the benefit of black people. The Newham Monitoring Project’s 1983 report highlighted this with a case in which an innocent black schoolboy was detained by the police. Eleven-year-old Shaun Robertson’s secondary school had given a police officer who was investigating a robbery the names and addresses of every black child who attended the school. When the police officer mentioned that one of the suspects had two protruding front teeth, a school staff member let them know that Shaun had been to the orthodontist that same day. It was in this way that he became a suspect.
Camden’s Committee for Community Relations described the double nature of the police in their 1984 Annual Report, writing ‘Police strategy is two-faced. The brutality, the racism and the denial of civil liberties are meant, in the main, to be hidden from public view. The counter to this is “community policing”, “neighbourhood watch”, “the police/community consultative committee”, “Community Liaison Officer” – all part of a public relations exercise to convince us that the police have a genuine interest in the community’s well-being.’48
Oral histories from black people who lived through this time tend to maintain one common thread – that the police were not protecting them. The riots of 1981 saw a renewed interest in social cohesion from both local authorities and national government. An inquiry commissioned by the government was carried out by Lord Scarman to investigate the causes of the Brixton riots. The report was published by the end of that year. It recommended that the police put more effort into recruiting new officers from ethnic minority backgrounds. However, it concluded that institutional racism was not the problem – and instead pinpointed ‘racial disadvantage’ as an urgent social ill.
As a response to the report’s recommendations, Hendon Police College set up its first Multicultural Unit. In 1982, John Fernandes was a black sociology lecturer at the now defunct Kilburn Polytechnic. Being an employee of Brent Council meant that John and some of his fellow lecturers were temporarily moved over to the local police college to teach. ‘The Police College thought, oh my God, if [Lord Scarman’s] coming here, we’d better start doing something to show we are dealing with this problem,’ John told me over the phone from his home in the countryside.
Hendon Police College wanted John and his colleagues to develop a course about multiculturalism to teach to police cadets in training. Training to be a cadet was an internship-style scheme for young people that often led to full-time jobs in the police force. John was elected by his colleagues to head up Hendon Police College’s multicultural unit. But he immediately ran into problems. The first red flag was that the college wanted to put an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than anti-racism. ‘I was not very happy, as a black sociologist,’ he explained. ‘I wanted an anti-racist approach to it. Because the problem is not a black problem. It’s not my culture, not my religion that is the problem. It is the racism of the white institutions.’
To go about proving that his anti-racist perspective would be more useful, he had to do a bit of research. ‘If I was putting up a course as part of my submission on that course I had to provide evidence,’ John said. ‘I couldn’t just make a statement and say I want to do an anti-racist course instead of a multicultural course.’ He had to demonstrate that there was an already existing racist bias in the college’s new recruits. ‘As part of my research, I might have found that none of the cadets had a racist bias, maybe just a couple, so it’s not a problem, so I’ll do the multicultural course.’
His research saw him ask trainee police cadets at the college to write anonymous essays on the topic of ‘blacks in Britain’. The responses were shocking.
‘Blacks in Britain are a pest,’ read one essay.49 ‘They come over here from some tin-pot banana country were [sic] they lived in huts and worked in the fields for cultivating rice and bananas, coconuts and tobacco, and take up residence in our already overcrowded island . . . They are, by nature unintelegent [sic] and can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world.’
‘Housing conditions and facilities could be improved for them, but it is not worth it if they are going to abuse it,’ read another essay.
‘I think that all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society. On the whole most blacks are unemployed, like rastafarians [sic], who go round with big floppy hats, rollerskates and stereo radios smoking pot and sponging money off the state.’
‘The black people in Britain claim that they are British w [sic] the help off [sic] words e.g., I’ve lived in Britain all my life and so [sic] my mum. This is just a load of junk in my mind because white people who live in, say Mozambique are not considered to be part of the country. Blacks are let of [sic] too much by this I mean a Police Officer arrest a black [person] may be called Racial Predjudist[sic]. If all the blacks were deported back to Africa or wherever [they] came from there would be less unemployment and therefore money for the Government to use for creating jobs.’
‘When I saw them I thought, God almighty,’ said John. ‘That was why I had to make sure that it had to be an anti-racist course. So that I could explain to them, not to blame them for holding those views. You explain to them how i
t comes about that they all think the way they do.’ Having acquired his evidence, he didn’t take the essays straight to the Police College. Instead, he wrote up a syllabus for the course, and submitted it to Kilburn Polytechnic’s academic board. When he got the permission he needed from the board, he took the syllabus to Hendon Police College. ‘They were not willing to let me take the anti-racist stance,’ he said. The college also asked him to hand over the racist essays that his course was based on. ‘They were then arguing that I should give it to them because the students wrote them on the paper that was the property of the police.’ John chose not to hand over the essays.
Faced with a predicament, he decided to stop teaching at the Police College. ‘It was impossible to stay there,’ he told me. ‘How could I, as a black academic . . . I would be colluding if I stayed there and did the multicultural course. So I had to, whether my job was at stake or not. In all consciousness, since I’m black and I take an anti-racist approach, I had to leave. There was no way that I could stay there.’
Viewing the college’s attitudes as indicative of a wider problem, he turned whistle-blower. The press had got wind of what was shaping up to be a scandal. Eastern Eye, a documentary TV series broadcast by London Weekend Television (now ITV London), aired a thirty-minute programme focused on what John had found. On the programme, a senior at the Police College responded to the scandal, saying, ‘If I had the slightest suspicion that one of the young cadets had serious deep prejudices rather than shallowly expressed prejudices like that, then I would not recommend him to be a constable.’50
I asked John what happened to those trainee police cadets. ‘There were no names, these [essays] were anonymous,’ he said. ‘Although I would know who they are, I would not give their names. It’s professionalism.’ It’s impossible to know whether or not the essay writers went on to take jobs in the police force, or started careers in other professions. What we do know is that John Fernandes uncovered archaic attitudes that may have influenced policing at the time. His anti-racism course was sorely needed.
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race Page 4