Death of Keith Blakelock - Media and Police Response

Media and Police Response

Rose writes that there was a racist media frenzy after the killing, placing intense external pressure on detectives to solve the case. According to Rose, the news coverage included the Sun newspaper comparing Labour's prospective candidate for Tottenham, Bernie Grant, to an ape, writing that he had given a press conference while peeling a banana and juggling an orange. Grant had caused uproar when he was reported as saying the police had been given a "bloody good hiding," though his statement was also reported as: "The youths around here believe the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding." The Daily Express—falling for one of notorious British hoaxer Rocky Ryan's stories—reported on 8 October that a "Moscow-trained hit squad gave orders as mob hacked PC Blakelock to death," alleging that "crazed left-wing extremists" trained in Moscow and Libya had coordinated the riots. The Met's commissioner, Kenneth Newman, told reporters that groups of Trotskyists and anarchists—black and white—had orchestrated the violence, a theme picked up by the Daily Telegraph and others.

There was internal pressure on detectives too from the rank and file, who saw their superior officers as sharing the blame for Blakelock's death. The journal Police, published by the Police Federation, argued that senior officers had pursued a policy at Broadwater Farm of avoiding confrontation at all costs, and that "community policing" had led to compromises with criminals, rather than a focus on upholding the law. As a result, the journal wrote, officers had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation that had developed on the estate.