Lessons ‘still need to be learned’ from the Brixton uprising 41 years on

It was April 10, 1981 when a crowd in south London erupted following rumours of police mistreatment of a black man.

The unrest saw around 5,000 people take to the streets, nearly 300 police officers and 60 others injured, and 150 buildings damaged or destroyed.

History remembers it as the Brixton ‘riots’ – but many who were there say this label risks ignoring the decades of police brutality and racism suffered by a community that was ‘crying out for a bit of peace’.

Lessons must be learned so similar tensions don’t spill over again, some have warned 41 years on.

‘I hate when people and the press call it “riots”, it was an uprising,’ Alex Wheatle, 59, who served four months in prison for his involvement as a teenager, tells Metro.co.uk.

‘These abuses were taking place for decades and it finally exploded. Many of us felt we’d be targeted anyway so we might as well take the fight to the enemy. It was a pressure cooker.

‘Today, those social kind of scenarios are in place for it to happen again. There’s a lot of anger out there, especially among young black people who cannot believe they’re still being targeted.’

Alex says everyone knew a story about a black person getting beaten by the police in 1981.

Tragedy struck in January of that year when 13 young black people were killed in a New Cross house fire that many suspected was started by a racist arsonist – no charges were ever brought.

Not long after, the Metropolitan Police launched ‘Operation Swamp 81’, a mammoth stop and search campaign that saw 150 plain clothes officers make 1,000 stops and 150 arrests.

‘I remember sometimes being stopped two to three times a day, at one point my afro comb was confiscated because they labelled it an offensive weapon,’ said Alex, author of novel East of Acre Lane, set around the time of the uprising.

‘I was basically a child but there was no concern for welfare, they used racist terms, they hurt you by manhandling you.’

As the black community in Brixton also struggled with high unemployment and poor housing, tensions rested on a knife edge.

The breaking point came when a black man called Michael Bailey was stabbed in a pool hall on Atlantic Road.

He ran away bleeding and was stopped by police who put him in a car and said they had called for an ambulance. The group that formed at the scene didn’t believe them though.

‘They weren’t helping him, why would they have him locked in?’ asked Christopher, 61 – not his real name – who was there at the time.

‘He was in the car for 30 minutes, he was bleeding. It looked like they were letting him die and they wouldn’t let us get access to him.

‘It just took one person to pick up a bottle, and that’s how it started.’

Within half an hour, the angry crowd was pelting officers with bottles, outnumbering them by around 100 to 30.

Inaccurate information that Michael had died that night and the search of a black minicab driver for drugs the following day led to packed streets.

Over the next two days, petrol bombs were hurled, dozens of buildings were burned to the ground, and shops were smashed and looted. 

‘Those who weren’t throwing were stealing,’ Christopher said. ‘We were young, to us it was exciting. It was more scary walking the streets and being beaten half to death by a police officer for nothing. It was a relief.’

The voice of black Britain could no longer be overlooked and similar protests swept across the country in the following months – including in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. 

Danny Francis, 55, remembers being hit by a policeman aged just 14 when unrest came to a head in Dalston, east London.

‘This van pulls up and the copper tries to jump out like those cop shows Starsky and Hutch, but he fell over,’ he said.

‘I thought it was hilarious and laughed and he grabbed me and clapped me over the head with a truncheon. I ran home and cried to my mum, that’s how young I was.

‘I thought “wait a second, I’m a kid,” but they didn’t see a kid. We’re still seeing that now with cases like Child Q.

‘The way they’re handling the young, they treat them as though they’re grown. You can’t do that, but the kid doesn’t know that.’

Alex served four months in prison for his involvement in the Brixton uprising and says he struggled with suicidal feelings after the sense of ‘injustice’ came on top of an incredibly hard childhood.

Meanwhile, Christopher says he spent more than a year in jail when police wrongly accused him of pickpocketing when he was waiting for a bus outside Woolworths the following year.

‘It taught me never to trust a police officer again,’ he said. ‘They’re all liars. That experience lived with me for a long time.’

Asked if he ever received any justice, he laughs: ‘They’d have a filing cabinet from one end of Westminster to the other with all the innocent black guys sent to prison for stop and search.’

The Scarman report into the Brixton uprising blamed ‘racial disadvantage that is a fact of British life’, recommending widespread changes to police training and law enforcement to create better relations.

Some 16 years later, the Macpherson report went further and named the Met ‘institutionally racist’ – a document that came about from 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence’s racially motivated murder in 1993.

Since 1981, many things have changed and Scotland Yard’s commissioner admitted this week he wants to get rid of hundreds of ‘corrupt’ officers who have so far avoided the sack.

But as yet more reports are filed, the decades slip by and the black community say they continue to be targeted.

In the last few months alone, an unarmed black man has been shot by police, it’s been revealed that black children are being disproportionately strip-searched and police have been forced to deny accusations racial bias swayed crucial investigations.

Nearly 80% of stop and searches made by the Met in the year ending March 2021 involved black people, while a YouGov poll in the same year suggested just 37% of black Brits trust the police.

It raises the question, was enough learned from the Brixton uprising?

Fury in the immediate aftermath of Chris Kaba’s death could have sparked another major confrontation, but this was avoided when the Queen died, Alex believes.

‘When’s the last time you heard a white person getting gunned down in the street by the Met without being armed?’ Alex asks. ‘We just don’t hear of that. So why does it keep happening to us?

‘I thought my children would never see this level of treatment. I just hope something doesn’t snap again.’

Danny too has has warned the lessons from the 1980s uprisings ‘cannot be brushed under the carpet and forgotten’.

‘They’re a major thing and we need to understand why they happened so they don’t happen again’, he said.

Meanwhile, Christopher claims much of the change seen within the police is the result of them being held to account by ‘everyone having a camera on their phone’.

‘I joined a table tennis team that had Met officers on it last year,’ he says. ‘All the guys on the team were quite alright. It doesn’t make me trust the police, it makes me know they’re not all the same.

‘But then two months ago, we were standing outside our friend’s shop and saw a black teenager riding his scooter on the pavement.

‘He wasn’t on the scooter when the police apprehended him and I heard him ask, “Why do you need my details? I’ve done nothing wrong”.

‘Not long after, there are literally 10 officers on this boy. One of them I caught kicking him in his side. I lost my mind.

‘If they’re doing this in broad daylight, what won’t they do in the night when no one can see them? That made me lose that little stripe I had for them. Again.’

Responding to this article, a spokesperson for the Met recognised the force is ‘not free of discrimination, racism or bias’, but added: ‘We are changing to build a Met which is.’

‘The Met is committed to becoming an actively anti-racist organisation that can be trusted by everyone in London,’ they said.

‘Since the terrible murder of George Floyd in the United States and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests two years ago, we’ve been focusing on a number of key areas.

‘These include ensuring racist behaviour has no place in the Metropolitan Police Service and increasing diversity in the organisation through recruitment and career progression.

‘We’re working hard to increase our officers’ understanding of different cultures and the history of policing different communities, particularly black communities.’

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