Death of Keith Blakelock

Who is Death of Keith Blakelock?

Keith Blakelock, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was killed on the evening of Sunday, 6 October 1985, during rioting on the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London. The violence broke out after a local black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home the previous day. It took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of relations between the police and black communities.

PC Blakelock had been assigned on the night of his death to Serial 502, a unit of 10 constables and a sergeant dispatched to protect firefighters. When the rioters forced the officers back, Blakelock stumbled and fell. Surrounded by a mob of around 50 rioters, he received over 40 stabbing and cutting injuries inflicted by machetes or similar, and was found with a six-inch-long knife buried up to the hilt in his neck. He was the first constable to be killed in a riot in Britain since PC Robert Culley was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell, London, in 1833.

Detectives came under enormous pressure to find the killers, amid tabloid coverage that was sometimes openly racist. Faced with a lack of forensic evidence, they resorted to mass arrests and charges based on confessions only. Of the 359 people arrested, most were interviewed without access to lawyers. Three adults and three youths were charged with murder based on untaped admissions they were said to have made to police. After the adults, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, were convicted of their crime in 1987, a campaign arose to overturn the verdicts; Silcott was even briefly elected honorary president of the London School of Economics. The convictions were quashed in 1991, after forensic tests cast doubt on the authenticity of detectives' notes from an interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself. Two detectives were charged with perverting the course of justice, and were found not guilty in 1994.