In 1981, fury, fear, and frustration reverberated across the capital's streets. In many retellings of these events, the 'racial tensions' of those early years of Thatcher's Britain 'erupted' into 'riots'. But 'racial tensions' seems a peculiar way of framing what was in fact many individual communities who all felt terrorised not only by white supremacist groups like the National Front, but also by racist police officers and the entire institution of rotten law enforcement. The Macpherson report, published in 1999 in response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence, condemned the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, a reality that was not news to the ethnic minority population of the capital. Indeed, the lived experienced of over-policing was viscerally felt by multiple generations. But that over-policing was only one side of the coin; prejudicial policing not only criminalises marginalised groups, it also fails to protect them. Saturday n...