Camden’s Committee for Community Relations described the double nature of the police in their 1984 Annual Report, writing ‘Police strategy is two-faced. The brutality, the racism and the denial of civil liberties are meant, in the main, to be hidden from public view. The counter to this is “community policing”, “neighbourhood watch”, “the police/community consultative committee”, “Community Liaison Officer” – all part of a public relations exercise to convince us that the police have a genuine interest in the community’s well-being.’48
Oral histories from black people who lived through this time tend to maintain one common thread – that the police were not protecting them. The riots of 1981 saw a renewed interest in social cohesion from both local authorities and national government. An inquiry commissioned by the government was carried out by Lord Scarman to investigate the causes of the Brixton riots. The report was published by the end of that year. It recommended that the police put more effort into recruiting new officers from ethnic minority backgrounds. However, it concluded that institutional racism was not the problem – and instead pinpointed ‘racial disadvantage’ as an urgent social ill.
As a response to the report’s recommendations, Hendon Police College set up its first Multicultural Unit. In 1982, John Fernandes was a black sociology lecturer at the now defunct Kilburn Polytechnic. Being an employee of Brent Council meant that John and some of his fellow lecturers were temporarily moved over to the local police college to teach. ‘The Police College thought, oh my God, if [Lord Scarman’s] coming here, we’d better start doing something to show we are dealing with this problem,’ John told me over the phone from his home in the countryside.
Hendon Police College wanted John and his colleagues to develop a course about multiculturalism to teach to police cadets in training. Training to be a cadet was an internship-style scheme for young people that often led to full-time jobs in the police force. John was elected by his colleagues to head up Hendon Police College’s multicultural unit. But he immediately ran into problems. The first red flag was that the college wanted to put an emphasis on multiculturalism rather than anti-racism. ‘I was not very happy, as a black sociologist,’ he explained. ‘I wanted an anti-racist approach to it. Because the problem is not a black problem. It’s not my culture, not my religion that is the problem. It is the racism of the white institutions.’
To go about proving that his anti-racist perspective would be more useful, he had to do a bit of research. ‘If I was putting up a course as part of my submission on that course I had to provide evidence,’ John said. ‘I couldn’t just make a statement and say I want to do an anti-racist course instead of a multicultural course.’ He had to demonstrate that there was an already existing racist bias in the college’s new recruits. ‘As part of my research, I might have found that none of the cadets had a racist bias, maybe just a couple, so it’s not a problem, so I’ll do the multicultural course.’
His research saw him ask trainee police cadets at the college to write anonymous essays on the topic of ‘blacks in Britain’. The responses were shocking.
‘Blacks in Britain are a pest,’ read one essay.49 ‘They come over here from some tin-pot banana country were [sic] they lived in huts and worked in the fields for cultivating rice and bananas, coconuts and tobacco, and take up residence in our already overcrowded island . . . They are, by nature unintelegent [sic] and can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world.’
‘Housing conditions and facilities could be improved for them, but it is not worth it if they are going to abuse it,’ read another essay.
‘I think that all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society. On the whole most blacks are unemployed, like rastafarians [sic], who go round with big floppy hats, rollerskates and stereo radios smoking pot and sponging money off the state.’
‘The black people in Britain claim that they are British w [sic] the help off [sic] words e.g., I’ve lived in Britain all my life and so [sic] my mum. This is just a load of junk in my mind because white people who live in, say Mozambique are not considered to be part of the country. Blacks are let of [sic] too much by this I mean a Police Officer arrest a black [person] may be called Racial Predjudist[sic]. If all the blacks were deported back to Africa or wherever [they] came from there would be less unemployment and therefore money for the Government to use for creating jobs.’
‘When I saw them I thought, God almighty,’ said John. ‘That was why I had to make sure that it had to be an anti-racist course. So that I could explain to them, not to blame them for holding those views. You explain to them how it comes about that they all think the way they do.’ Having acquired his evidence, he didn’t take the essays straight to the Police College. Instead, he wrote up a syllabus for the course, and submitted it to Kilburn Polytechnic’s academic board. When he got the permission he needed from the board, he took the syllabus to Hendon Police College. ‘They were not willing to let me take the anti-racist stance,’ he said. The college also asked him to hand over the racist essays that his course was based on. ‘They were then arguing that I should give it to them because the students wrote them on the paper that was the property of the police.’ John chose not to hand over the essays.
Faced with a predicament, he decided to stop teaching at the Police College. ‘It was impossible to stay there,’ he told me. ‘How could I, as a black academic . . . I would be colluding if I stayed there and did the multicultural course. So I had to, whether my job was at stake or not. In all consciousness, since I’m black and I take an anti-racist approach, I had to leave. There was no way that I could stay there.’
Viewing the college’s attitudes as indicative of a wider problem, he turned whistle-blower. The press had got wind of what was shaping up to be a scandal. Eastern Eye, a documentary TV series broadcast by London Weekend Television (now ITV London), aired a thirty-minute programme focused on what John had found. On the programme, a senior at the Police College responded to the scandal, saying, ‘If I had the slightest suspicion that one of the young cadets had serious deep prejudices rather than shallowly expressed prejudices like that, then I would not recommend him to be a constable.’50
I asked John what happened to those trainee police cadets. ‘There were no names, these [essays] were anonymous,’ he said. ‘Although I would know who they are, I would not give their names. It’s professionalism.’ It’s impossible to know whether or not the essay writers went on to take jobs in the police force, or started careers in other professions. What we do know is that John Fernandes uncovered archaic attitudes that may have influenced policing at the time. His anti-racism course was sorely needed.