Black resistance to British policing by Adam Elliott-Cooper

Author:Adam Elliott-Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

Figure 4.1 Tottenham Defence Campaign flier/bustcard

Tottenham is a racialised place, generally associated with its large Black community,22 and it also has a strong history of Black resistance to policing (Chapter 1). The leaflet reaffirms a sense of place, with the first-person-plural pronoun ‘us’ used to invoke a collective sense of self in the local community. The bust card encourages residents to resist the police: ‘DO NOT accept any charge including cautions, answer any questions (whether it be in a van or interview or otherwise), or sign anything without speaking to a legal advisor. There is no such thing as a “friendly chat”.’ This implicitly communicates to residents that the police may use deception in order to incriminate an individual. At the bottom, the small print explains that it has been produced by the Newham Monitoring Project (NMP), an ‘independent anti-racist and civil justice organisation’, and it gives their twenty-four-hour support telephone number. NMP worked closely with TDC in 2011–12; both Tottenham and Newham became places that exhibited an outward-looking anti-racist solidarity against policing.

This meeting in 2011 mirrored events following the 1985 Broadwater Farm uprisings in Tottenham. Police violence twenty-six years earlier had compelled the Black community of Tottenham to form a defence campaign (Chapter 1). During this period, Tottenham became part of the ‘front line’ in the battle against police violence, along with other Black communities in Brixton (south London) and Notting Hill (west London).23 Long-standing community organiser Stafford Scott was part of both the 1985 and 2011 defence campaigns in Tottenham. He is worth quoting at length here:

When I say Tottenham’s a front line, I don’t mean Tottenham’s a place where people come to sell drugs and do things like that. When I say it’s the front line, I mean it’s at the fore of a battle against this onslaught of this militaristic, racist police force. And the reason we’re at the fore of that battle, is because we had to set up a defence campaign, because we had to rise up, because the police took the life of a Black woman in Tottenham, and we stood up to them … It’s the place where they want to get but they can’t. It’s the place where PC Blakelock lost his life … And ever since then, they’ve ensured that it remains a symbolic location.24

While Black resistance and policing are associated with what both Scott and the British press refer to as the ‘front line’,25 Tottenham and Broadwater Farm are places racialised as Black, a ‘symbolic location’. Scott says they are ‘a place where they want to get, but can’t’. In saying this he does not necessarily mean that the police cannot enter the physical place that is Tottenham. What remains clear, however, is that the police, and the state in general, cannot quell the spirit of rebellion felt by those on the ‘front line’. The dual nature of the front line became clear one chilly October evening in 2011 when around a dozen members of TDC were distributing leaflets on a Tottenham council housing estate.

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