Britain: Soul Searching in Scorched Ruins, Brixton Riots Stir Anguish

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Two weeks ago, in an operation known as Swamp '81, 150 plainclothes police, along with 50 uniformed bobbies were staked out in the worst areas of the neighborhood to combat the crime wave. In the first four days of their operation, the police made 150 arrests In doing so, they stopped and questioned more than 1,000 people, invoking Britain's 150-year-old Sus (for suspect) law. The statute allows the police to question and even detain random suspects if there is reason to believe they may be planning to commit a crime. Overuse of the Sus law is a frequent complaint, not only in Brixton but elsewhere in the country. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to be arrested under the law, and black community leaders in Brixton claim that harassment rates run far higher than that. In Brixton, moreover, the law appears to have been used more widely than anywhere else. Said one white Brixton youth, who claimed to have been searched eleven times: "I've lived in lots of areas of London, and I've never known repression like you get here."

Thus there were indications that police action had helped to fan the other resentments smoldering in the neighborhood. Indeed, just three months ago, the borough of Lambeth, where Brixton is located, had investigated police-community relations in the area and found them "extremely grave." A Lambeth committee had recommended that the Sus law be abolished. Then Parliament indicated that it would prepare the necessary legislation for effective repeal, but it was still pondering the legislation when Brixton exploded. What added a final poignancy to the violence was the fact that the extra police details in Brixton were to have been withdrawn within a very few days.

Whatever the government finally decides, Home Secretary Whitelaw indicated that it would not abandon its monetarist austerity for the sake of financial subsidies to depressed areas like Brixton. Said Whitelaw: "The idea that you can buy your way out of problems in different areas I don't believe to be sound and the Americans have found it that way." Britons may now be finding out something else that the U.S. has already discovered: the road to racial harmony is long and arduous.

—By George Russell. Reported by James Shepherd/London