On Tuesday 2 March, BBC2 will put out a documentary, Who Killed PC Blakelock?. Watch it. It attempts to detail events that occurred on a summer's evening in 1985 when all hell broke loose on the Broadwater Farm council estate in Tottenham, north London.
Relations between blacks and the police had reached rock bottom. The local commander had ignored Scotland Yard's new "softly, softly" policy, which was meant to correct the racially prejudicial policing that had provoked young blacks across the
nation into violence. The commander made blacks on Broadwater
Farm the focus of special attention. They included Winston Silcott, a young militant who had a history of criminal activity.
The commander had prepared for a revolt. A special headquarters in Wood Green was stacked with the riot gear that the Met had developed in the four years since the Brixton riots. On that fateful day in 1985, the police stopped and searched Floyd Jarrett. His licensing and insurance details were found to be defective. The police went to his mother's address to search for evidence. Cynthia Jarrett collapsed and died. Young blacks swiftly constituted themselves into an army and went into battle. The police were outmanoeuvred. A fire was set deliberately to lure them into a vulnerable position. Blakelock and others were trapped. They took a beating and had to retreat. Blakelock stumbled and fell, and was murdered there and then.
The film captures these hard facts as well as the passion and emotion that informed them. It is unsparing in its exposure of a rotten police investigation into the murder that led to Silcott's wrongful conviction. But you will watch the documentary from beginning to end and not realise that the overwhelming majority of people living on that estate were white.
The fuel for the flames that night is missing. Police treated whites in one way and blacks in another: that was the basis of the explosion. And though it contains many dramatic reconstructions, the film avoids showing the police as the brutes they were. We are told that Mrs Jarrett died when police visited her home, of how young blacks were often stopped and searched. But these events, so crucial in provoking death and destruction, are not reconstructed. The audience is left to think that blacks are by nature hysterical, while the police try their best to be good and reasonable. The devil was in the detail.
