Word: brixton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Britain as a whole was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary William Whitelaw reported on a personal visit to Brixton, conducted during a lull in the rioting, and announced that a respected and nonpartisan peer, former Jurist Lord Scarman, would investigate the causes of the violence. Firebrand M.P. Enoch Powell, a Tory turned Ulster Unionist and a longtime opponent of nonwhite immigration to Britain, warned that "you have seen nothing yet." Five M.P.s demanded "a vigorous policy" of subsidized repatriation of nonwhite immigrants. The ruckus spread as far away...
...policemen and housewives sifted through the scorched rubble in the South London neighborhood of Brixton last week, some oldtimers were reminded of the damage caused by the blitz in World War II. This time the damage was self-inflicted. For three nights, the crowded, hardscrabble neighborhood of 62,000 had been torn by the worst interracial rioting the country had ever experienced. Gangs of predominantly black West Indian youths hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at hundreds of riot police. Waves of other youngsters took part in an orgy of burning and looting By the time a tense calm finally returned...
...social explosion occurred a year ago in the seaport city of Bristol, where a police drug raid on a cafe provoked both blacks and whites to take to the streets. Twenty-one policemen and nine civilians were injured in clashes, but property damage was far less extensive than in Brixton. To many analysts, unemployment and poor housing were the common denominators in both cases. A key difference, however, is that Brixton is now known as London's Harlem. Since the '50s it has been a traditional settlement area for West Indian immigrants, because it is close...
...more immediate cause of the riots, according to many Brixtonians, was the provocative behavior of the overwhelmingly white British police force (only 286 blacks and Asians belong to the 117,000-member police force in England and Wales). In the past two years Brixton had been targeted by the London police as a high-crime area deserving of special attention. An average of 90 burglaries, muggings and assaults occurred there each week...
...invoking Britain's 150-year-old Sus (for suspect) law. The statute allows the police to question and even detain random suspects if there is reason to believe they may be planning to commit a crime. Overuse of the Sus law is a frequent complaint, not only in Brixton but elsewhere in the country. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be arrested under the law, and black community leaders in Brixton claim that harassment rates run far higher than that. In Brixton, moreover, the law appears to have been used more widely than anywhere else. Said...