Race Today, April 1976
[https://archive.org/details/ldpd_15976636_008/page/78/mode/2up] P78
A £25,000 advertising campaign directed at recruiting young blacks into the Metropolitan police force yielded no new recruits. This information formed part of the evidence presented by community relations chief, Commander Marshall, to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations. It is not simply that young blacks are refusing to join the police force. Commander Marshall states that they are otherwise active::
“Recently, there has been a growth in the tendency for members of London’s West Indian communities to combine against police by interferring with police officers who are effecting the arrest of a black person. . . In the last 12 months, 40 such incidents have been recorded. Each carries a potential for large scale disorder.”’
Nowhere in the Commander’s evidence are we informed of the State’s policy in dealing with these conflicts. He simply describes them as doing nothing “‘to ease the mounting pressures with which operational officers are being burdened.”
The reality is different. Police officers, while through one side of their mouths preach ‘good community relations’, demand, through the other, their pound of flesh.
It was in the summer of 1970 that they introduced the charge of affray as a weapon of retribution and repression. The charge was first used against blacks in the notorious Mangrove 9 case. This is how they proceed. An incident takes place — a clash between police and young blacks — and several young blacks are arrested. Ordinary charges follow, for example, assault, threatening behaviour etc. Meanwhile, another process is set in motion. A senior police officer is placed in charge of the investigation.
He collects statements from police officers and from sympathetic civilian whites found in a door to door search near the scene of the incident. He knows what he is looking for and these statements are peppered with the right terminology. The case papers are then forwarded to the Director of Public Prosecutions and lands on the desk of a legally qualified civil servant working in that department. Reading through the evidence, the civil servant spots the right terminology and returns indictments of affray. This usually takes a period of five to six weeks after the original incident.
The defendants appear in court on the original charges and one fine morning are confronted with the charges of affray. Briefly, this charge is defined as ‘fighting to the terror of the Queen’s Subjects’, the latter being the terrified civilians who witnessed the incident behind their window curtains. Affray charges carry limitless terms of imprisonment. Side by side with the introduction of affray as a political charge, the black community evolved a counter strategy — militant and aggressive crossexamination of police officers in the courts, propaganda and mobilisation of the black community outside of the courts. In order to execute the former, the black community had to find or create lawyers.
White lawyers are notorious for defusing the reality of confrontation that pervades these trials. To carry on propaganda and mobilisation campaigns outside the courts we have had to surface our own publications, established journals being either notoriously pro-police or in the pursuit of ‘fairness to both sides’, whatever that means, they fail to grasp the reality of the black experience altogether. In recent cases of affray, as in the Cricklewood and Hornsey trials, a battery of black lawyers were in attendance. Today, both these lawyers and the publications which seek to represent black interests are under attack.
Listen to Commander Marshall in evidence to the Select Committee: “Nevertheless, continual editorial vilification of police and other social agencies, distorted accounts of court proceedings, and repetition and exaggeration of unsubstantiated and one sided complaints of police ‘brutality’, which forms the sterile basis of a number of ethnic newspapers and periodicals, have a cumulative effect on the state of police/black relationships. .
Not charges of affray, mind you.
Black lawyers have not escaped either. In the Hornsey Trial, eight young blacks were charged with affray following clashes with police in North London. The defence briefed 16 barristers, a lead barrister and a junior for each client. The trial judge, Judge Clarke QC, proceeded, before hearing evidence, to interrogate the black lawyers. Only two, he suggested, were qualified to act as leading counsel. Nowhere in the regulations is it stipulated that a barrister must be this or that before he is qualified to lead. Next, Clarke got out the Law List and questioned the barristers about their dates of call and the addresses of their chambers. It seems he was questioning whether they were barristers at all. This became clearer when he cross questioned barrister-at-law, Gary Webb, as to why his name was not on the list. No one could remember, in the history of the law courts, such a humiliating attack on counsel.
It would appear that the struggle for ‘good black/ police relations’ has become so crucial for the police that they and sections of the judiciary are prepared to attack all progressive black institutions to secure it.