Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(12)
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.’