Death of Keith Blakelock

Death Of Keith Blakelock

The death of PC Keith Blakelock, an officer with the London Metropolitan Police, occurred on 6 October 1985 during rioting on the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London. The violence broke out after a black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home, and took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of the relationship between the police and local black communities.

Blakelock, who had joined the police five years earlier, had been assigned on the night of his death to a unit of 10 constables and a sergeant, known as Serial 502, who were dispatched to protect firefighters. When the officers were forced back by rioters, Blakelock stumbled and fell, and was surrounded by a mob of around 50 people. He received over 40 stabbing and cutting injuries, inflicted by machetes or similar, and the penetration of a six-inch-long knife into his neck. He was the only police constable to have been killed in a riot in Britain since Robert Culley was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell, central London, in 1833.

Three adults and three juveniles were charged with murder based on untaped confessions they were said to have given to detectives. The charges against the youths were dismissed by a judge because the accused had been detained without access to parents or a lawyer. The adults—Winston Silcott, Mark Braithwaite and Engin Raghip—were convicted in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The men became known as the "Tottenham Three" during a campaign to secure their release, and in 1991 the Court of Appeal overturned their convictions, after an Electrostatic Document Apparatus (ESDA) test suggested that at least one page of detectives' notes from an interview—during which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself, though he said the remarks were a fabrication—may not have been transcribed contemporaneously, contrary to the detectives' testimony at trial. In 1994 a jury found the detectives not guilty of perjury and of perverting the course of justice. Police re-opened the inquiry in 2003, and 10 men in their 40s and 50s were arrested and questioned in 2010, but the murder remains unsolved.

Blakelock and the nine other constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for bravery in 1988, while Sergeant David Pengelly, the unit's supervisor—who fought to save Blakelock and PC Richard Coombes, another officer who came under attack—received the George Medal, awarded for acts of great bravery.