The Special Patrol Group, otherwise know as the riot squad, was notorious for heavy handed policing of strikes and demonstrations until it was eventually disbanded because of the level of violence it had meted out. The killing of Blair Peach at an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in Southall in 1979 was the worst example of the groups brutality. The SPG was also mobilised to police areas of high crime and had been active in Lambeth for a number of years especially around Brixton. The military style operations consisted of drop off points where police would disembark to stop and search individuals and groups in the street or raid people’s homes. The local police force had already provoked a reaction from the black community and their allies with the deaths in police custody of black prisoners and the beatings and heavy-handed policing of mostly black youth under the stop and search ‘sus’ laws.

Opposition came in the form of demonstrations outside Brixton police station and a public enquiry on police practices by Lambeth council which was published shortly before the Scarman enquiry into the 1981 rioting in Brixton. The police army of occupation lasted on and off for six or seven years during which time a considerable number of black youths and older black people were the victims of arbitrary arrest, detention, beatings, false imprisonment and deaths in police custody or during external police operations.

The SPG and police from several forces were drafted in to Brixton during the early summer of 1981 at the request of the local police force to deal with the high level of crime in the area. The area was also flooded with plain clothes officers. Called Operation Swamp 81 after Margaret Thatcher’s speech about being ‘swamped by alien cutures’, the police stopped and searched over a thousand people over the space of a week within the confines of the Brxton area alone. Hundreds were arrested. It only took once incident and the cumulative effect of years of racist harssment and brutality from the police to spark off the Brixton uprising of 1981.

The Brixton gay community, in a show of solidarity with the uprising, joined people on the streets at the time issuing a joint statement with the gay section of Brixton Housing Co-op supporting the struggle against racist police, poverty and oppression. The statement, along with others groups supporting the uprsiing, was mentioned disapprovingly in the House of Commons by William Shelton, Tory MP for Streatham. We were castigated for supporting ‘criminal actions’.