WHO NEEDS THE by Andrew Hornung SCARMAN REPORT?

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WHO NEEDS the Scarman report? Not the working class people of Brixton. Only a few months before, the Working Party on Police/Community Relations produced a report which document scores of cases of police harassment, racism, indifference and lawlessness.

Scarman refers to scornfully as not helpful establishing confidence the police...

Did anyone need a High Court judge to tell them that poor housing conditions, racial discrimination, joblessness and lack of recreational facilities lead people to believing that the system is not on their side? Did anyone need Lord Scarman to learn that Lambeth, the borough that Brixton is in, has got all those problems?

So what was report for?

Revolt

The spontaneous, militant, violent revolt of working class youth - mainly, but by no means exclusively, black - that hit Brixton last April and Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and other places in the summer has been evaluated by the Establishment as a foretaste of revolutionary class revolt.

They see in the 'breakdown of confidence in the pulice' a forerunner of a class conscious rejection of the myth of state neutrality and a conviction on the part of workers that their only power lies in their own strength.

Scarman is an urgent operation by the ruling class to seek to reassure conservative blacks that things will get better. It buys time for a rethinking of the different strategies for repression.

Prejudice

Of course, Scarman overzealousness and racism. Nothing systematic, of course.

'The direction and policies of the Metropolitan Police are not racist. I totally and unequivocally reject the itack made on the integrity and impartiality of the senior direction of the furce.

The criticisms lie elseacere - in errors of judg===: = iack of imagination and Terbit. but not In ple 594:232: §555..: dispiays a complete ignorance of constitutional arrangements for controlling the police; it is an in¡ustice to the senior officers .: he force.

So there! The answer to hundreds of allegations and over a decade's experience is to refer to 'constitutional arrangements'. We really needed an on-tne-spot inquiry for that!

It is admitted that 'illconsidered, immature and racially prejudiced actions of some police officers in dealing on the street with young black people' is a matter of concern. Even that racial prejudice does manifest itself occasionally in the behaviour of a few officers'. But all that is by way of exception, it has nothing to do with state policies and it all happens 'below the level of the senior direction of the forces' Scarman is true to form. His reports on the Red Lion ONE OF the indicators of the present social and political crisis is the way in which different policing strategies are being hotly debated by senior officers and others out in the open.

Scarman's report contribases to one of the central diteres. ibe dispuse over fit brigade policing 'home-bear policing. Fire. brigade policing relies on a strong show of force and is less concerned with the question of public consent or confidence. Home-beat policing is designed to build up close relations with the community, the Square events, Grunwicks and Northern Ireland all accepted what no one could deny - that there are "excesses' - and refused to confirm the truth that these events newly exposed: that the state is an oppressor operating not in the interests of all, but in the interests of the capitalist class.

His reports indicated some of the strategic options the ruling. class would have to sort out but concentrated its recommendations on trivia. While we debate trivia, it is hoped, the ruling class will have better to control it. Scarman favours the second.

Of the Special Patrol Group operations launched under Commander Adams Scarman is critical, claiming that they only moved street crime to other areas. What concerns him most is that the operations, in his ries. led to both old erd roung black people losing • confidence it the police.

The operations weren't helped, says the good Judge, by being secret, something which the "insensitive' Adams justified in a TV interview by time to re group, re-think, re-plan and counter-attack.

Scarman criticises the use of CS gas, water cannon and plastic bullets, but he does not rule them out. He criticises the timing and lack of consultation associated with SPG actions and the similar 'Operation Swamp 81' stop-andsearch action, but does not rule out their future use. He calls for a review of the Public Order Act and of systems of police accountability, but recommends nuthing definite.

One of the few firm recommendations Scarman declaring, 'A good general never declares his forces in the prelude to any kind of attack'l.

Changing the Commander Adams was moved to traffic control], and changing the name [the SPG were withdrawn in favour of 'Operation Swamp 81'| didn't help. According to the Brixton Defence Committee. over 2.000 blacks were stopped in the week before the revolt.

Of course, Scarman's criticism is mild. He wonders whether the term 'swamp' wasn't insensitmakes is to make Police Liaison Committees statutory. Here he follows the time-honoured tradition of if you can't beat them, ask some of them to join you' He hopes that by co-opting 'official' black community leaders and incurporating them in a statutory system, it will be possible to buy them off.

Many such leaders (like James Hunt in Birmingham and Courtney Laws in Brixton) have lung ago established themselves as collaborators, and the statutory nature of such bodies will help seal them off from ive: was Brixton a jungle and its inhabitants jungle dwellers, or was 'swamp' simply a reference to Thatcher's remark about British culture being swamped by immigrants.

But while there is a sharp dispute in police ranks about different strategies, all sides in the debate are trying to achieve the same thing: to crush any signs of rebellion and contain any moves towards selfassertion and self-organisation by the working class and by the overwhelmingly working-class black communities.

and Piyushi Kotecha

community pressure.

Clearly Scarman sees the breakdown of the liaison committee in Brixton as a crucial moment in the derelopment of the community as a political opposition. "They (liaison committees) must be statutory and not voluntary like the consultative committee in Brixton that broke down shortly before the riots.' Useless, cosmetic proposals are made relating to the need to recruit blacks to the police force, the need to give police more training, the need to make 'racially prejudiced or disciminatory behaviour' a special offence in the police discipline code, and the need to give young police officers more guidance.

The report spends many of its floundering pages on a description of the deprivation of the inner cities. Haven't socialists been saying this for decades? Is Scarman sayıng vambeth leader Ted Knight is right and Margaret Thatcher is wrong? Not at all. The problem is not so much lack of money as failure to get value for money. Unce again central government is exonerated.

So: the state isn't racist (the constitution tells us su); the police aren't racist or uppressive (our sense of justice to senior officers tells us so); the gevernment isn't adding to the problems of the inner city (Michael Heseltine tells us so).

Conclusion: there is no deep-going crisis - just a and the occasional 'failure of judgment' explanation for the Brixton riots:

'Brixton is the iceberg tip of a crisis of ethnic criminality which is not Britain's fault - except in the sense that her rulers unnecessarily imported it - but the fault of the ethnic community itself, from whom the cure must come, as has the disease.

Unfit 'If there are familios living in Railton Road in houses unfit for human habitation, should not this be soen as an indictment of the local youths who preter GR ON October 6, Mrs Savita Amin, her two young children, and three relatives were sleeping above their off-licence in Walthamstow, North East London, when a fire-bomber struck.

Five litres of petrol were poured under the door of the shop and six petrolfilled milk bottles placed next to the entrance of the A PUBLIC meeting on November 25, and a picket of the courts on November 30 called for the dropping 30, charges against eight youths arrested during the July riots in Chapeltown, Leeds.

Seven of these youths have been held since July without bail.

Over 71 youths were arrested in Leeds as a result of the riots - and most convicted soon afterwards, on the basis of statements given to the police before their solicitors were allowed to see them.

But these last eight

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to loll around on street corners smoking pot, for the price of which they could buy a lot of paint and plaster?' Hack Worsthorne is of course no impartial observer. He is a hired hack for the British capitalist class — a minority social group whose wealth is extracted from workers' sweat; and whose criminality and lust for profit have brought repeated bloody wars abroad and appression at home. These people and their children can be soon lotling around at racacourses, top West End stores, nightspots and Rivira resorts, squandering more in a day than & Brixton youth can possess in a year.

It is their vice-like grip on the ownership of the banks and means of production, and their preoccupation with profit, which stands as the obstacle to the nocessary expansion of industrial production, social services and housing.

But what of the youth of Brixton and similar areas whom Worsthorne would have us dismiss as lazy criminals? They are the victims of the system. Dead DUI INE SUMMIEr S TIOIS proved that they are by no means content to remain passive victims.

As: 0n0 Moss Side youth said, 'We are like caged animals. But as you know you can keep kicking caged animals and ane day they are anina to fiaht' It is precisely the rebellion of the youth against the oppression and degradation imposed on thom by capitalism that points the way forward for the working class. Mass action, not pious platitudes of 'liberal' judges and Royal Commissions, is the koy to defeating the Tory government and creating conditions to snatch the control and ownership of the economy from the hands of the capitalists.

United

The struggles of youth in the summer cut acress racist divisions: black youth united with white in commae strugglo agatest the police.

It is likewisa by action against the Tory government that the divisions in the working class as whole - between black and white, employed and unemployed, men and women - can be broken down.

The starting point must be the struggle now against every aspect of the capitalist attacks on the working class. In particular we must fight for the labour movement to take up the necessary task of defending black communities and households against racist attacks.

This means that workers' detence squads, drawing forces from the trade unions, Labour Party, political groups and organisations of the black communities, must be built. Such squads can build links between the most militant hiack and the labour movement, SUE while striking vital blows against the fascists on the streets.

Racists

And it means that the labour movement must put its own house in order: racists in the labour movement must be exposed and removed from leading positions. A new leadership must be built, committed to the struggle for mass action to achieve a socialist society.

It is the youth of Brixton, Moss Side and Texteth who must be our allies in this fight: it is Worsthorne and the capitalists and the racist state machinery who are the enemy.:

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points to 'bad judgments' by the police. Even a little