Soul Searching in Scorched Ruins

By George Russell

BRITAIN

The Brixton riots stir a wave of anguish and recrimination

As policemen and housewives sifted through the scorched rubble in the South London neighborhood of Brixton last week, some oldtimers were reminded of the damage caused by the blitz in World War II. This time the damage was self-inflicted. For three nights, the crowded, hardscrabble neighborhood of 62,000 had been torn by the worst interracial rioting the country had ever experienced. Gangs of predominantly black West Indian youths hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails at hundreds of riot police. Waves of other youngsters took part in an orgy of burning and looting By the time a tense calm finally returned to Brixton, the toll of violence was stark: 149 police injured, one of whom remained unconscious days later; 58 civilians hurt; 120 buildings damaged, including nine that were completely destroyed; 47 stores looted; 224 people arrested. The total property damage was estimated to be as high as $4.4 million.

Britain as a whole was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary William Whitelaw reported on a personal visit to Brixton, conducted during a lull in the rioting, and announced that a respected and nonpartisan peer, former Jurist Lord Scarman, would investigate the causes of the violence. Firebrand M.P. Enoch Powell, a Tory turned Ulster Unionist and a longtime opponent of nonwhite immigration to Britain, warned that "you have seen nothing yet." Five M.P.s demanded "a vigorous policy" of subsidized repatriation of nonwhite immigrants. The ruckus spread as far away as New Delhi, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on an official visit to India, was confronted by demonstrators protesting Britain's new immigration restrictions. A group of 23 pickets was arrested after throwing placards at her limousine.

What caused the riots? What could be done to prevent a recurrence? What did it all say about the kind of multiracial society that Britain has become after absorbing 1.9 million nonwhite immigrants since the 1950s? A similar social explosion occurred a year ago in the seaport city of Bristol, where a police drug raid on a cafe provoked both blacks and whites to take to the streets. Twenty-one policemen and nine civilians were injured in clashes, but property damage was far less extensive than in Brixton. To many analysts, unemployment and poor housing were the common denominators in both cases. A key difference, however, is that Brixton is now known as London's Harlem. Since the '50s it has been a traditional settlement area for West Indian immigrants, because it is close to the center of London and also offers cheap and plentiful housing. About one-third of Brixton's residents are black, and in some areas the concentration reaches 70%. Among young blacks in Brixton, the unemployment rate is 67%, compared with a 27% rate among Brixton youths in general.

A more immediate cause of the riots, according to many Brixtonians, was the provocative behavior of the overwhelmingly white British police force (only 286 blacks and Asians belong to the 117,000-member police force in England and Wales). In the past two years Brixton had been targeted by the London police as a high-crime area deserving of special attention. An average of 90 burglaries, muggings and assaults occurred there each week.

Two weeks ago, in an operation known as Swamp '81, 150 plainclothes police, along with 50 uniformed bobbies were staked out in the worst areas of the neighborhood to combat the crime wave. In the first four days of their operation, the police made 150 arrests In doing so, they stopped and questioned more than 1,000 people, invoking Britain's 150-year-old Sus (for suspect) law. The statute allows the police to question and even detain random suspects if there is reason to believe they may be planning to commit a crime. Overuse of the Sus law is a frequent complaint, not only in Brixton but elsewhere in the country. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be arrested under the law, and black community leaders in Brixton claim that harassment rates run far higher than that. In Brixton, moreover, the law appears to have been used more widely than anywhere else. Said one white Brixton youth, who claimed to have been searched eleven times: "I've lived in lots of areas of London, and I've never known repression like you get here."

Thus there were indications that police action had helped to fan the other resentments smoldering in the neighborhood. Indeed, just three months ago, the borough of Lambeth, where Brixton is located, had investigated police-community relations in the area and found them "extremely grave." A Lambeth committee had recommended that the Sus law be abolished. Then Parliament indicated that it would prepare the necessary legislation for effective repeal, but it was still pondering the legislation when Brixton exploded. What added a final poignancy to the violence was the fact that the extra police details in Brixton were to have been withdrawn within a very few days.

Whatever the government finally decides, Home Secretary Whitelaw indicated that it would not abandon its monetarist austerity for the sake of financial subsidies to depressed areas like Brixton. Said Whitelaw: "The idea that you can buy your way out of problems in different areas I don't believe to be sound and the Americans have found it that way." Britons may now be finding out something else that the U.S. has already discovered: the road to racial harmony is long and arduous.

--By George Russell. Reported by James Shepherd/London

With reporting by James Shepherd/London

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.