Keith Henry Blakelock QGM (28 June 1945 – 6 October 1985) was a British police officer who served as a London Metropolitan Police constable. He was murdered on 6 October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham. 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 (15-centimetre) 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.
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:
[T]here are elevated walkways, there are little stairs that connect them, there are these huge stairwells where the different elevated walkways come together ... there is a huge underground zone that is completely unmonitored, which consists of parking places ... so it's an incredible nest ... one of these typical modernist, multi-level network city constructions that make it extremely difficult for the police to exert any control over it, and it makes the police extremely vulnerable for attacks from behind, underneath, from the top.
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 9 September 1985, a month before Blakelock's murder, the arrest of a black man for a traffic offence triggered the 1985 Handsworth riots in Birmingham; two people were killed. 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.
5 October - death of Cynthia Jarrett
At 1:00 pm on 5 October 1985, a young black man, Floyd Jarrett, who lived about one mile (1.5 kilometres) 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.