Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(14)
Early one September morning in 1985, police officers broke down the front door of the Groce family in Brixton, south London. The house they burst into was home to thirty-seven-year-old Cherry Groce, and five of her six children. The family heard banging and shouting. Cherry left her eleven-year-old son Lee in her bedroom to find out what was going on. When she went to investigate, she was shot in the chest by a police officer. In a later statement, Cherry said that as she lay on the floor bleeding, police officers continued to shout at her, asking where her oldest son was.54 Testimony from her son confirms this. Speaking to Channel 4 News in 2014, an older Lee recalled those early hours that changed his life. ‘I just saw her on the floor. Lying on the floor. And I saw this policeman standing with the gun. He was basically pointing the gun towards her with his legs apart, and shouting, “Where’s Michael Groce? Where’s Michael Groce?” I was standing up on the bed and I was shouting, “What have you done to my mum?” The policeman turned the gun to me and said, “Shut up!”’55 Michael Groce, twenty-one at the time, was suspected of being involved with an armed robbery. He didn’t live with Cherry when the raid took place.
Cherry was moved to St Thomas’ Hospital that same morning.56 Meanwhile, local people got hold of the news of Cherry’s shooting, and crowds began to gather on Brixton’s streets. To disperse these crowds, police responded by cladding themselves in riot gear. Clashes between the community and the police led to two days of rioting.57 There were burglaries and looting. Dozens of people sustained injuries, and a photojournalist trying to take pictures of the riot was killed.
In 1985, Tottenham’s Broadwater Farm estate was heavily policed. But after what happened in Brixton, all police officers were ordered to leave.58 On 5 October, nearly a week after the Brixton riots, Floyd Jarrett was stopped by the police while driving. His tax disc had expired. Because of a minor discrepancy between his car number plate and tax disc, he was arrested for suspected theft of the car. At Tottenham Police Station, off-duty officer Detective Sergeant Randall suggested to his working colleagues that Floyd’s house be searched for any other stolen goods. Keys to Floyd’s mother’s house were taken without his knowledge, and four officers let themselves in. One of those officers was DC Randall.
Inside they found Floyd’s mother Cynthia, her daughter Patricia, and her small granddaughter. Later that year, Patricia would give evidence to an inquiry about her mother’s death, in which she said, ‘I saw Randall take his left arm and put it around my mother’s shoulder and part of his body pushed her and she fell with her left arm out, breaking the small table.’ DC Randall said that he didn’t make contact with her. The inquiry, drawing on a coroner’s report, decided that DC Randall’s push was not deliberate, but that it had caused Cynthia Jarrett to fall. Either way, she collapsed. Cynthia was taken to North Middlesex Hospital, but died of a heart attack that evening. The same inquest that Patricia gave evidence to delivered a verdict of accidental death.
The following day, a crowd gathered outside Tottenham Police Station, calling for accountability for Cynthia’s death. According to a report from community activist and organiser Stafford Scott,59 DC Randall, the same officer who has since been proved to have been present for all pivotal points of the previous day, appeared at the window of the police station. Blaming Randall, protesters started to throw things at him. In the chaos that followed, over two hundred police officers were injured. A police officer, PC Blakelock, was killed by rioters.
A later inquiry into the events of that night commented: ‘Let us recall what the evidence of the inquest and Magistrates Court revealed: – 1) That the officers who first stopped Floyd Jarrett made computer checks on his car, apparently for no other reason than he was a young black man. 2) That they arrested him and took him into custody on suspicion that his car was stolen which had little of any reasonable basis. 3) That they made a charge against him of assault which was found to be false.’60 The officers’ subsequent claim that the Jarrett family had shouted at them and had become abusive towards them while they were searching the house was also false.
In Brixton, Cherry Groce’s gunshot wound left her paralysed from the waist down. Her children became her full-time carers. Twenty-six years later, aged sixty-three, she died of kidney failure. Her doctors confirmed that her death was directly linked to the gunshot wound. A 2014 inquest placed the responsibility of her death squarely on the police, finding that they failed to properly plan for the raid on the Groces’ home, including adequately checking exactly who was living there.61 That same year, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, head of the Metropolitan Police, apologised to the family.
Thirty years after the 1985 riots, and the cause of the abject neglect of black communities in Britain’s big cities was laid bare for all to see. Files from 10 Downing Street released to the National Archives revealed that Oliver Letwin MP, then an adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, chose not to accept proposals from cabinet ministers who were keen to implement positive action schemes in the inner cities and refurbish run-down and neglected estates. Letwin, still a Member of Parliament at the time of writing, refused these initiatives. ‘Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes,’ he wrote to Thatcher alongside inner cities adviser Hartley Booth. ‘So long as bad moral attitudes remain’, they said, ‘all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade.’62