Another new upload to the excellent dorlec01 YouTube channel.
This short report covers a lot of ground – the background of the killing of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney teacher Blair Peach being killed by police at an anti-fascist demonstration and of course the general racism and brutality of police in Hackney at the time.
These factors lead to the Hackney Teachers’ Association calling for the Police to be excluded from schools. Their position is summarised in the extremely convincing Police Out of School document which is also available on this site. As you can hear in the report, their proposals were taken up by 18 (about a third) of Hackney’s schools.
The lack of an acknowledgement from police representatives of the deep seated issues in their own force is troubling, but perhaps not surprising: “what has happened to us in the past – is in the past. We must look to the future”.
It’s hard to say in retrospect whether people actually believed that cops spending time disco dancing with kids whose older brothers and sisters still faced daily racism would achieve anything or whether it was a PR stunt. But we do know that serious police brutality and corruption in Hackney continued well into the 1990s.
The Radical History of Hackney 