In North London on the 4th or perhaps 5th of October 1985 a car driven by a young black male was stopped by the police.  It was immediately noticed that the road tax disc did not match the vehicle.  It was a none too clever substitute.  The driver made matters worse for himself by providing a false name, and was duly arrested.

At Tottenham police station the driver told his interviewers that his real name was Floyd Jarrett.  A decision was taken to conduct a search of his home address.  Four officers were detailed for the task.  For reasons one can only speculate the arrival of the officers caused panic among some of the occupants.  In the furore Jarrett’s mother, Mrs Cynthia Jarrett, collapsed.  She had a weak heart and this was the moment it gave out.  The police officers did everything they could to save her but she was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

The Jarrett’s home was close to the Broadwater Farm Estate.  Built in 1967 and known locally as “the farm” it was a soulless, concrete jungle replete with decks and walkways.  Long before 1985 it had descended to the status of a sink estate.  It was impossible to police.  During earlier years utter anarchy prevailed, with local youths bombarding patrol cars with everything from stones and bottles to fridges, TV’s and beer kegs.

By February 1985 things were a little better, at least on the surface.  Post Scarman, the emphasis had been shifted wholly to policing by consent.  “Stop and search” under the “Sus” Law, which had fuelled so much black resentment, was curtailed.  The onus now lay with the Met to work with “community leaders” and manufacture the goodwill of London’s minorities.  The effort seemed to bear fruit, and brought the farm to the point where, in February 1985, Princess Diana was able to pay a much publicised visit.

Beneath the surface, of course, tensions remained as before - certainly on the farm.  Among its residents were those whose impulse to commit crime was certainly not suppressed by community policing.  The gulf between a black underclass population and a white police force had not been bridged.  Perhaps all that really happened was that the black criminal obtained a certain leverage over the extent to which he was policed.

One of the levers was Broadwater Farm Youth Association, set up in 1981.  Among its services was advice for locals who thought they had been subjected to police harassment.  A founding member of the BFYA was a man named Winston Silcott.  He and his Association routinely complained about the policing of the farm and, in fact, had done so in the immediate run up to the events of 6th October.

That period was in any case tense.  A week earlier in Brixton, across to the south of the city, a black woman named Cherry Groce had been accidentally shot – and paralysed below the waist – by armed police raiding her home in search her son.  He was wanted for questioning in connection with an armed robbery.  Nobody on the farm failed to make the connection with the death of Cynthia Jarrett.  Two similar events within a week invited all the wrong conclusions, and there were plenty of people willing to make them.

It began with a modest crowd of young men “demonstrating” outside Tottenham police station at the death of Mrs Jarrett.  The windows were put in but nobody was hurt.  However, at 3.15pm that afternoon the brick-throwing took a more serious turn.  Two Home Beat officers were attacked and seriously injured. One had his spleen ruptured by a paving stone thrown onto his back where he had fallen.

The farm’s “community leaders” urgently called a public meeting and tried to channel the all too obvious anger into a formal protest at police actions.  They were shouted down.  As far as the crowd was concerned the time for formal protests was passed.

By now there were gangs of young men roaming the farm and the surrounding streets, armed with machetes, bars and knives.  A police inspector driving past the estate was attacked and his car windows were smashed.  A police van answering a 999 call was surrounded, attacked and damaged.  Riot control police were called to restore order, only to find that the mob had thrown up barriers and stocked up on petrol bombs.

By 6.45pm the scene was set.  Youths were rampaging through Mount Pleasant, Willan Road and The Avenue looting whatever they could.  Some 500 police had begun to arrive and deploy in cordons.  Protected only by their long shields, helmets and truncheons, they were subjected to violence of a lack of restraint unseen in a British city since Brixton in April 1981.  Then, at least, the mob didn’t use guns.  But on the farm there were shots fired – the first time in a riot on British soil.  In Griffin Road an officer was shot and seriously wounded.

At 9.30pm somebody started a fire, one of many which raged on the farm that night.  This one was in a newsagent’s on the first floor deck of Tangmere block.  A fire tender was called to the scene.  With characteristic malignity, members of the mob duly attacked the firemen.  Several police officers from Serial 502 were detailed to accompany the firemen and try to give them some protection.  The officers could not even protect themselves.  They were caught outside a stairwell by around forty men armed with sticks, knives and a machete, their faces masked.

One officer, PC Richard Coombes was slashed across the face.  Another, PC Keith Blakelock, was swamped by attackers and beaten to the ground.  There he was hacked to death, his head all but severed from his shoulders.

Perhaps this blood sacrifice to untrammelled black ferocity was enough.  News of it spread across the estate and, as rain began to come down, the violence slowly petered out.  By midnight fifty-eight police officers were in hospital, along with twenty-four others.

There was little remorse on the farm.  Haringey’s black mayor, future Labour MP Bernie Grant, announced that the police had been given “a bloody good hiding”.  The divide between black and white in this country has probably never been wider.

In the days that followed the riot about one in ten of the black youths of Broadwater Farm were taken in for questioning.  Six were charged with murder.  One of these, Jason Hill, was only 13.  In the event two of them, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite were found guilty, along with Winston Silcott.

Silcott became a national hate figure - “the smiling killer” - through the gutter-quality reporting of the trial and verdict.  There was never any sound evidence against him or the others, and subsequent forensic tests on the police notes of Silcott’s “confession” showed that what there was had been “added” later.  The three men became the “Broadwater Three” and the subject of a sustained campaign to get them freed.  They were all duly acquitted on appeal in 1987.  Two police officers were later tried in connection with their prosecutions, but were also found not guilty.  The whole affair was deeply unsatisfactory from all sides.  But it was policing which paid the political price, falling more deeply than ever into the clutches of the left and political correctness.

Today on its twentieth anniversary, the murder of PC Blakelock remains unsolved despite many attempts to get at the truth.  The young black men who took the life of this forty year old father of three are now forty or so themselves.  Every one has remained silent to this day.

PC Coombes recovered from his wounds but was never able to return to the force.  PC Blakelock was posthumously awarded the Queen’s Medal for Bravery.  There is a commemorative stone laid in his honour at Muswell Hill Broadway.