Crime In Brixton Case Study

Background
By the year 1981, a small town named Brixton was the undisputed capital of what was known as ‘black Britain’. A second generation of young black people was now growing up in Brixton who were British by birth and was expecting more from the country that was meant to be their home. Their forefathers were less demanding and according to Margaret Thatcher, were more grateful than the youth of the life that had been accorded to them by the Britons. Politicians of the time like Margaret Thatcher were not willing to accommodate the ‘entitled’ youth of the black community, in an interview in 1979, she said that the White Britons were ‘rather afraid that the country was being swamped by a people of a different culture’. Her comments sparked

For this reason, there was a rapid increase in the police patrolling the area known as ‘Swamp 81’, they would randomly stop and search any black male moving. This thoroughly agitated and alarmed the black community in Brixton, they were harassed, assaulted and intimidated in a place they called home. In other cities in Britain, the citizens were increasingly becoming frustrated by both the government and the police. In just one week and over a thousand stops by the police, Swamp 81 had pushed Brixton to the brink. It only took one local man being stabbed and requesting assistance from the police who instead were questioning the man, for everything to boil

Within minutes, there was a standoff between the police and the residents of Brixton, with thirty to forty youth surrounding a police Van with the stabbed man inside, as the residents thought the police were not planning to help him. They started throwing bricks, stones and even bottles at the police who were frantically calling for backup but even when the reinforcements came, the police were massively outnumbered on a scale that according to the sergeant had never been seen before. That’s when the riots