1985 жылғы Англиядағы полицей қызметкері қаны төгілуі

1985 murder in England

Keith Henry Blakelock QGM, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was murdered on 6 October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, north London. The riot broke out after Cynthia Jarrett 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 relations between the police and some people in the Black community. PC Blakelock had been assigned, on the night of his death, to Serial 502, a unit of 11 constables and one sergeant, dispatched to protect firefighters who were themselves under attack. When the rioters forced the officers back, Blakelock stumbled and fell. Surrounded by a mob of around 50 people, he received over 40 injuries inflicted by machetes or similar weapons, and was found with a six inch long knife in his neck, buried up to the hilt. Detectives came under enormous pressure to find those responsible. Faced with a lack of scientific evidence—because for several hours it had not been possible to secure the crime scene—police officers arrested 359 people, interviewed most of them without lawyers, and laid charges based on untaped confessions. Three adults and three youths were charged with the murder; the adults, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite (the "Tottenham Three"), were convicted in 1987. A widely supported campaign arose to overturn the convictions, which were quashed in 1991 when scientific testing cast doubt on the authenticity of detectives' notes of an interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself. Two detectives were charged in 1992 with perverting the course of justice and were acquitted in 1994. Police re opened the murder inquiry in 1992 and again in 2003. Ten men were arrested in 2010 on suspicion of murder, and in 2013 one of them, Nicholas Jacobs, became the seventh person to be charged with Blakelock's murder, based largely on evidence gathered during the 1992 inquiry. He was found not guilty in April 2014. Blakelock and the other constables of Serial 502 were awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for bravery in 1988.

Keith Henry Blakelock was born on 28 June 1945 in Sunderland. He joined the Metropolitan Police on 14 November 1980, and was assigned to a response team in Hornsey before becoming a home beat officer in Muswell Hill, north London. At the time of his death, he was married to Elizabeth Blakelock (later Johnson), with three sons, Mark, Kevin and Lee. Lee Blakelock, eight years old when his father died, became a police officer himself, joining Durham Constabulary in 2000. PC Blakelock is buried in East Finchley Cemetery.

Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, in the Borough of Haringey, north London (N17), emerged from the British government's policy from the 1930s onwards of slum clearance, in which poorly maintained terraced houses were bulldozed to make way for high rise social housing. Built between 1967 and 1973, the Farm consists of 1,063 flats (apartments) in 12 blocks raised on stilts, linked by first floor outdoor connecting walkways; no homes or shops were built at ground level for fear of flooding from the nearby River Moselle. At the time of Blakelock's death, the estate housed 3,400 people, 49 percent white, 43 percent African Caribbean. British journalist David Rose writes that by 1976 the Farm was already seen as a sink estate, and that by 1980 a Department of the Environment report had suggested demolition, although a regeneration project after the 1985 riots led to improvements. Sir Kenneth Newman, Metropolitan Police Commissioner from 1982 to 1987, regarded the estate as one of London's "symbolic locations", or potential no go areas, along with Railton Road in Brixton; All Saints Road in Notting Hill; the Notting Hill Carnival; and the Stonebridge Estate in Harlesden. The 1986 Gifford Inquiry into the rioting criticized the police for having adopted this attitude. The Royal Institute of British Architects blamed the unrest on Haringey Council's policy of "using the estate as a gathering ground for its problem tenants", combined with low rents that left no funds for adequate maintenance. The elevated linked walkways meant that the estate could be crossed without descending to street level. Combined with the ground level parking spaces beloved of drug dealers, these had turned the estate into what commentators called a "rabbit warren" for criminals, to the point where residents were afraid to leave their homes. From May 1985 police entering the estate regularly faced lumps of concrete, bricks, bottles and beer barrels being thrown at them from the first floor walkways. Dutch architectural historian Wouter Vanstiphout described the estate as it was at the time of the riots:

The riots in which Blakelock died took place within a wave of social unrest across England. Since the 1980 St. Pauls riot in Bristol, and particularly since the 1981 Brixton riot in south London, a series of incidents had sparked violent confrontations between black youths and largely white police officers. On 28 September, a black woman, Dorothy "Cherry" Groce, was accidentally shot by police while they searched her home in Brixton looking for her son, Michael Groce, who was wanted on suspicion of robbery and firearms offences. Believing she had died in the shooting—in fact, she had survived but was left paralysed from the waist down—a group of protesters gathered outside Brixton police station, sparking the 1985 Brixton riot that saw police lose control of the area for 48 hours. A photojournalist, 29 year old David Hodge, was killed when a breeze block was dropped on his head while he photographed the looting. Rumours spread throughout London at the end of September 1985 that more rioting was imminent, including in Bermondsey and the Wood Green shopping centre near Broadwater Farm. On 1 October there were disturbances in Toxteth, Liverpool. The police searched all vehicles entering Broadwater Farm that day; the following day they found a petrol bomb on the estate.

At 1:00 pm on 5 October 1985, a young black man, Floyd Jarrett, who lived about a mile from Broadwater Farm, was arrested by police, having been stopped in a vehicle with an allegedly suspicious car tax disc, on suspicion of being in a stolen car. It was a suspicion that turned out to be groundless, but a decision was made several hours later to search the home of his mother, Cynthia Jarrett, for stolen goods. In the course of the search, she collapsed and died of heart failure. David Rose, a British author and investigative journalist, writes that the pathologist, Walter Somerville, told the inquest that Mrs. Jarrett had a heart condition that meant she probably only had months to live. The police, without a search warrant, had let themselves into the house using Floyd Jarrett's keys, without knocking or announcing themselves, while his mother and her family were watching television. The family said that an officer had pushed 49 year old Mrs. Jarrett, causing her to fall. The officer denied this; the police said she had simply collapsed. When it became clear she had stopped breathing, the same officer tried to revive her using mouth to mouth resuscitation, to no avail. The pathologist testified at the inquest that the fall may have been a precipitating factor; the jury returned a verdict of accidental death, following the coroner's direction that such a verdict would mean Mrs. Jarrett had been pushed, but perhaps accidentally.

According to Rose, Cynthia Jarrett's death was "not just a spark but  a flamethrower aimed at a powder keg". Protesters began to gather outside Tottenham police station, a few hundred yards from Broadwater Farm, around 1:30 am on Sunday morning, 6 October. Four of the station's windows were smashed, but the Jarrett family asked the crowd to disperse. Later that day, two police officers were attacked with bricks and paving stones at the Farm, and a police inspector was attacked in his car. The next few hours saw some of the most violent rioting the country had experienced. By early evening a crowd of 500 mostly young black men had gathered on the estate, setting fire to cars, throwing petrol bombs and bricks, and dropping concrete blocks and paving stones from the estate's outdoor walkways, knocking several police officers unconscious, despite their NATO helmets. The local council's community relations officer said there was a "shifting convoy of ambulances: as soon as one was loaded up with injured officers, another would move up to take its place". Four senior officers were in control of police deployment in the area that night: Chief Superintendent Colin Couch, who was the Tottenham Division Chief, Chief Superintendent David French, Superintendent William Sinclair, and Chief Inspector John Hambleton. Apart from Blakelock's death, 250 police officers were injured, and two policemen and three journalists—one from the Press Association and two from the BBC—suffered gunshot wounds. At least 30 shots were fired from three firearms, the first time shots had been fired by rioters in Britain. At 9:45 pm the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Newman, authorized the deployment of specialist police armed with plastic bullets and CS gas to be used "as a last resort should all else fail"; it would have been the first use of plastic bullets during a riot in Britain. The unit arrived at 10:20 pm, but the senior officers at the scene refused to use them, apparently to the dismay of junior officers. The rioting continued until the early hours of the morning.

Detective Chief Superintendent Graham Melvin of the Serious Crime Squad was placed in charge of the investigation a few hours after the killing, at 2:00 am on 7 October. With 150 officers assigned full time, the inquiry became the largest in the history of the Metropolitan Police. Born in Halifax in 1941, Melvin had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1960, then the Criminal Investigation Department. He had studied at Bramshill Police College, served with the Flying Squad, and was known for having solved several notorious cases, including that of Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler. He became a detective chief superintendent in March 1985, when he joined the elite International and Organised Crime Squad (SO1).

Melvin's first problem was that there was no forensic evidence. Senior officers had not allowed the estate to be sealed off immediately after the attack, which meant that the crime scene had not been secured. Witnesses and those directly involved had been allowed to leave without giving their names, and objects that might have held fingerprints had not been collected. Police had not been allowed into the estate in great numbers until 4 am on 7 October, by which time much of the evidence had disappeared. Whatever remained was removed during Haringey Council's clean up operation. Melvin therefore resorted to arresting suspects—including juveniles, some of them regarded as vulnerable—and holding them for days without access to lawyers. Of the 359 people arrested in 1985 and 1986 in connection with the riot, 94 were interviewed in the presence of a lawyer. Many of the confessions that resulted, whether directly about the murder, or about having taken part in the rioting, were made before the lawyer was given access to the interviewee, according to Rose. When people did confess to even a minor role in the rioting, such as throwing a few stones, they were charged with affray. One resident told the 1986 Gifford Inquiry into the rioting: "You would go to bed and you would just lie there and you would think, are they going to come and kick my door, what's going to happen to my children? It was that horrible fear that you lived with day by day, knowing they could come and kick down your door and hold you for hours." The inquiry heard that 9,165 police officers were either deployed on the estate or held in reserve between 10 and 14 October 1985. Thus, argues Rose, the police created, or at least intensified, a climate of fear in which witnesses were afraid to step forward. Melvin defended his decision to hold people without access to legal advice by arguing that lawyers, unwittingly or otherwise, might pass information they had gleaned during interviews to other suspects. He said under cross examination during the 1987 murder trial that, in his view, "the integrity of some firms of solicitors left a lot to be desired"; he believed solicitors were being retained by people who had an interest in learning what other suspects had said.

Mark Pennant, aged 15, was arrested on 9 October 1985 and charged with murder two days later, the first to be charged. Born in England to West Indian parents, Pennant had been raised in the West Indies until he was nine, after which he returned to the UK; he was diagnosed with learning difficulties and was attending a special school. Arrested and handcuffed at school, he was taken to Wood Green Police Station and interviewed six times over the course of two days, with a teacher in attendance. His mother was not told that he had been taken into custody, and the police reportedly told him that she had refused to help him. He told the police that he had cut Blakelock and kicked him twice, and he named Winston Silcott as the ringleader, and several others, including another juvenile, Mark Lambie. When charged with the murder, he asked the teacher who accompanied him: "Does that mean I have to go and live with you?" He described almost a ritualistic killing and said that Silcott—whom he called "Sticks"—had forced him to make his "mark" on Blakelock with a sword. According to David Rose, Hill described inflicting injuries to Blakelock's chest and leg that did not match the autopsy report.

According to David Rose, a former detective inspector called the Blakelock investigation a "pre scientific inquiry, it was all about how to get Winston Silcott convicted, not discovering who killed Keith Blakelock." By the time of the murder, local police saw Silcott as the "biggest mafioso in Tottenham  running the mugging gangs, paying them with drugs", according to another former senior officer in Tottenham. Silcott was 26 years old when he was arrested, the oldest of the six charged with murder. He was born in Tottenham in 1959; his parents, both Seventh day Adventists, had arrived in England from Montserrat two years earlier. He told Rose that he had experienced racism throughout his entire upbringing, particularly from the police. After leaving school at 15, he took a series of low paying jobs and in 1976 began breaking into houses. The following year he was convicted of nine counts of burglary and sent to borstal for a few months, and in 1979 he was sentenced to six months for wounding. In September 1980 he stood trial for the murder of 19 year old Lennie McIntosh, a postal worker, who was stabbed and killed at a party in Muswell Hill in 1979. The first trial resulted in a hung jury; a second trial saw him acquitted. In December 1984 Silcott was arrested for the murder of a 22 year old boxer, Anthony Smith, at a party in Hackney. Smith had been slashed more than once on his face, there were two wounds to his abdomen, a lung had been lacerated and his aorta cut. Silcott was charged with the murder in May 1985 and was out on bail when Blakelock was killed in October that year. At first he told police he had not known Smith and had not been at the party, although at trial he acknowledged having been there. He said Smith had started punching him, and that he had pushed Smith back but had not been carrying a knife. Silcott was convicted of Smith's murder in February 1986, while awaiting trial for the Blakelock murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment; he was released in 2003 after serving 17 years. After the conviction he told his lawyer he had indeed known Smith, that there had been bad blood between them, and that he had stabbed the man in self defence, because one of Smith's friends had had a knife.

Known as "Sticks" locally, Silcott was living in the Martlesham block of Broadwater Farm at the time of the riots, He told Rose: "And look, I'm on bail for a murder. I know I'm stupid, but I'm not that stupid. There's helicopters, police photographers everywhere. All I could think about was that I didn't want to lose my bail." Silcott was arrested for Blakelock's murder on 12 October 1985, six days after the riot; he was interviewed five times over 24 hours; Det Ch Supt Melvin asked the questions and Det Insp Maxwell Dingle took the notes. During the first four interviews, Silcott stayed mostly silent and refused to sign the detectives' notes, but during the fifth interview on 13 October, when Melvin said he knew Silcott had struck Blakelock with a machete or sword, his demeanour changed, according to the notes. It was this interview that led to Silcott's conviction for murder being overturned. According to a scientist who conducted forensic tests on the original interview notes, the detectives' notes from the portion of the interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself had been inserted after the other interview notes were written. At the time of Raghip's arrest, he had been drinking and smoking cannabis for several days, and his common law wife had just left him, taking their son with her. He was held for two days without representation, first speaking to a solicitor on the third day, who said he had found Raghip distressed and disoriented. He was interviewed by Det Sgt van Thal and Det Insp John Kennedy ten times over a period of four days. He made several incriminating statements, first that he had thrown stones, then during the second interview that he had seen the attack on Blakelock. During the third, he said he had spoken to Silcott about the murder, and that Silcott owned a hammer with a hook on one side. After the fifth interview he was charged with affray, and during the sixth he described the attack on Blakelock: "It was like you see in a film, a helpless man with dogs on him. It was just like that, it was really quick." He did not sign this interview, Rose writes, and after it he vomited. During a seventh interview the next day, Raghip described noises he said Blakelock had made during the attack. During the eighth interview, he said he had armed himself that night with a broom handle, and had tried to get close to what was happening to Blakelock, but there were too many people around him: "I had a weapon when I was running toward the policeman, a broom handle." He said he might have kicked or hit him had he been able to get close enough. Rose writes that Raghip also offered the order in which Blakelock's attackers had launched the assault. He was held for another two days, released on bail, then charged with murder six weeks later, in December 1985, under the doctrine of common purpose.

Of the 359 men and youths arrested, 159 were charged, including with affray and throwing petrol bombs, and 88 were convicted. According to The Times, the accused were "divided almost equally between black and white". Five defendants were 29 or older; most were teenagers or in their early 20s. The youngest was aged 12. The trial of the six accused of murder—Silcott, Raghip and Braithwaite, the adults; and Pennant, Hill and Lambie, the youths—began in court number two of the Old Bailey on 19 January 1987 in front of Mr Justice Hodgson. All were charged with murder, riot, and affray; Lambie was also charged with throwing petrol bombs. The jury consisted of eight white men, two black women and two white women. They were not told that it was Silcott's fourth murder trial, Silcott's barrister, Barbara Mills, a future Director of Public Prosecutions, decided that he should not take the stand to avoid exposing him to questions about his previous convictions. The press coverage of the trial included the publication on day two, by The Sun, of a notorious close up of a half smiling Silcott, one that "created a monster to stalk the nightmares of Middle England", as journalist Kurt Barling put it. Silcott said he had been asleep in a police cell when it was taken; he said he was woken up, held in a corridor with his arms pinned against a wall and photographed, and that the expression on his face was one of fear. Its publication constituted "the most gross contempt", according to the trial judge speaking to David Rose in 1992. No action was taken against the newspaper. The judge dismissed the charges against the youths because they had been detained without access to parents or a lawyer; in the absence of the jury, the judge was highly critical of the police on that point. Four armoured police vehicles waited in Tottenham as the jury deliberated for three days. One black female juror fainted when the verdicts were read out. Rose writes that the tabloids knew no restraint, writing about the beasts of Broadwater Farm, hooded animals and packs of savages, with the old jail cell image of Silcott published above captions such as "smile of evil".

A campaign to free the "Tottenham Three" gathered pace, organized by the Broadwater Farm Defence Campaign. They published an 18 page report in 1987 by Margaret Burnham and Lennox Hinds, two American law professors who had attended part of the trial, and who wrote that Silcott's conviction "represents a serious miscarriage of justice". Rose writes that the New Statesman and Time Out wrote sympathetic pieces, and MPs and trade unionists were lobbied. In May 1989 the London School of Economics students' union elected Silcott as the college's honorary president, to the dismay of its director and governors. Silcott resigned shortly afterwards, saying he did not want the students to become scapegoats.

Engin Raghip's solicitor was by now Gareth Peirce—who had represented the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six—and his barrister Michael Mansfield. Peirce applied for leave to appeal. She began to explore Raghip's mental state, arguing that his confession could not be relied upon, and arranged for him to be examined by Dr. Gísli Guðjónsson of the Institute of Psychiatry, a specialist in suggestibility. Gísli concluded that Raghip was unusually suggestible, with a mental age of between 10 and 11. Silcott was again represented by Barbara Mills and Braithwaite by Steven Kamlish. Mills noted the lack of photographic or scientific evidence, and argued that Silcott would have been unlikely to stop firefighters from extinguishing a fire on the deck of the Tangmere block, given that he was renting a shop there. Lord Lane, then Lord Chief Justice of England, dismissed the applications on 13 December 1988, arguing of Raghip that the jury had had ample opportunity to form its own opinion of him. Amnesty International criticized the decision, pointing to the problems with confessions made in the absence of a lawyer, and was criticized in turn by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, who said Amnesty had abandoned its impartiality. The ESDA test suggested that, on the third to sixth pages of the interview, no impressions had been left from previous pages, although these earlier impressions appeared throughout the rest of the notes. According to Will Bennett in The Independent, the test "also revealed an imprint of a different page five from the one submitted in evidence which was clearly the same interview with Silcott but in which he made no implicit admissions". Raghip and Braithwaite's appeal was heard a few days later and was also swiftly overturned. R v Raghip and others is regarded as a landmark ruling because it recognized that "interrogative suggestibility" might make a confession unreliable. The Crown prosecutor, Roy Amlot, conceded that the apparent contamination rendered all three convictions unsafe: "[W]e would not have gone on against Braithwaite, against Raghip, against any other defendants, having learned of the apparent dishonesty of the officer in charge of the case. I say that because the Crown has to depend on the honesty and integrity of officers in a case  The impact is obviously severe." Rose writes that the statement was "one of the more sensational speeches in English legal history." Braithwaite and Raghip were released immediately. Silcott remained in jail for the 1984 murder of Anthony Smith. He received £17,000 compensation in 1991 for his conviction in the Blakelock case, and in 1995 was offered up to £200,000 in legal aid to sue the police for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The Metropolitan Police settled out of court in 1999, awarding him £50,000 for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. He was released on licence in October 2003 having served 17 years for Smith's murder.

A second criminal inquiry was opened in 1992 under Commander Perry Nove, who appealed for help from the local black community. In January 1993 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) drew a distinction between the "kickers and the stabbers"—those who had kicked or punched Blakelock and those who had used weapons—and decided that the former could be called as witnesses in exchange for immunity from prosecution. By the end of 1993, Rose writes, Nove had identified nine suspects against whom at least two eyewitnesses would testify, supported by evidence such as photographs. The suspect list included Nicholas Jacobs, who in 2014 would be tried for Blakelock's murder, based on statements gathered during the Nove investigation, and acquitted. It transpired during Jacobs' trial that two of the witnesses who testified against him had been paid expenses to the tune of thousands of pounds during Nove's inquiry. In 1994 their lawyers applied for access to information from Nove's inquiry, on the grounds that it might help their clients; anything that implicated Silcott would support the detectives' contention that their interview notes were genuine and that Silcott had, in effect, confessed. The lawyers argued that the detectives should not be prosecuted until all related criminal proceedings had concluded. The day before the detectives' trial began in 1994, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the nine suspects would not be prosecuted because it was not in the public interest.

The trial of Det Ch Supt Melvin and Det Insp Dingle opened in June 1994 at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Jowitt. Only three people had been present during the disputed interview with Silcott—Melvin, Dingle and Silcott himself—and none of them gave evidence. During the fifth, when told there were witness statements that he had struck Blakelock with a machete or similar, the notes show him saying: "Those kids will never go to court. You wait and see. No one else will talk to you. You can't keep me away from them." Silcott denied ever having said those words. Several of the statements H–N originated from the juveniles who had been arrested shortly after the murder. They included Jason Hill, the 13 year old who had been held for three days in his underpants and a blanket, without access to his parents or a lawyer. (Hill received £30,000 in damages from the police over his treatment.) Hill had not been told that his statement was going to be read out in court during the detectives' trial; he first learned that it had been used when he heard it on television. Another statement was from Mark Pennant, also a juvenile who had been arrested during the first inquiry. Overall it appeared that Silcott was being retried. The detectives were acquitted on 26 July 1994 by a unanimous verdict. Both had been suspended during the case. Dingle retired immediately. Melvin was greeted as a hero when he returned to work, In December 2003, weeks after Silcott was released from jail after serving 17 years for the murder of Anthony Smith, police announced that the Blakelock investigation had been re opened, and would be led by Det Supt John Sweeney. Detectives began re examining 10,000 witness statements, and submitting items for forensic tests not available in 1985. In September 2004 the back garden of a terraced council house in Willan Road, near the Broadwater Farm estate, was excavated after a tip off. A female friend of Cynthia Jarrett, the woman whose death sparked the Broadwater Farm riot, lived alone at the house between 1984 and 1989, and according to the Evening Standard was one of the first on the scene when police raided Jarrett's house. Archaeologists dug up the garden, while surveyors used infra red beams to create a three dimensional map of the area. A machete was found and sent for forensic tests. Police also searched the garden for Blakelock's truncheon and helmet. In October 2004 his overalls were retrieved from Scotland Yard's Crime Museum for DNA tests. Nothing was found that could be used as evidence.

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