Here was a qualified lawyer, a champion of civil rights, acting as judge and jury on a case about which the facts have yet to be established fully He also took it upon himself to deliver the sentence. The police, he said, “will not understand what they have done until one of them has been killed”.This type of language is all the excuse that a tiny minority needed to justify looting and rampaging through Brixton. The attack on PC John Tisshaw, knocked off his motorcycle by a gang, might easily have led to his death.This violence has served to obscure the genuine and justified unease about the case of Wayne Douglas, a black man who died last week in police custody in Brixton His death requires an independent investigation. Only in this way will the scale of economic and social injustice be reduced or removed altogether.

And only in this way, too, will we be guaranteed stable race relations.The writer is project manager, ICEL, Lambeth Directions.. Brixton does not need people like Rudy Narayan. It has been suggested that the only way the black community can develop is through the creation of employment opportunities, which will enable both the unemployed and professionals to contribute meaningfully towards economic and social improvement.The absence of a proper strategy of investment in black businesses and community organisations badly damaged the confidence of the community in the whole concept of local economic regeneration. Although my own organisation’s input is seen as small, it is contributing in a significant way through its various construction training programmes, business advisory service schemes and our growing partnerships with community enterprise groups – local and national.My company’s activities are funded by Brixton Challenge and Lambeth Council as part of a local labour scheme which involved helping many unemployed people – both black and white – into employment and training within the construction industry.If we are ever to have development in Brixton and Lambeth generally, every effort should be made by all parties to ensure that there is no repeat of Wednesday evening’s incident.

Since then, funds have been allocated for economic regeneration in inner cities, but small black businesses in Brixton are still to benefit sufficiently from such initiatives. Over the past years, tensions between the police and the black community in Brixton have mounted considerably. The recent deaths in police custody of two young black men have caused the situation to get out of control, incensing black families in the wider community. This has given rise to violent protests, as we saw on Wednesday evening.

While I do not condone acts of lawlessness, we have to remember just how the community feels about injustices meted out to young men in particular. The most recent police statement, about young black men being involved in mugging incidents, has only served to worsen an unstable relationship between the police and the black community in London overall.
In 1981, Lord Scarman, in the aftermath of the violent upheavals in Brixton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and other areas, recommended strongly that government invest more in inner-city areas to encourage minority groups to be more involved in the political process of development and change. But the real problem is the young people on the streets who are not engaged in society – through the schools, through the economy, or through the family – and whose disastrous pattern of alienation may only be part of a chain of violent reactions to which society is yet to find an answer.Lambeth: then and nowPopulation1981: 246,000, of which 25% belonged to non-white ethnic groupsNow: 258,500, of which 30% belong to non-white ethnic groupsUnemployment1981: 10%Now: 13.6%Housing1981: 8,250 households lacked one or more basic amenityNow: 3,529 households lack one or more basic amenity1981: 22% owner occupied; 33% rented privately; 45% rented from a local authorityNow: 36.2% owner occupied; 26.9% rented privately; 36.9% rented from a local authoritySocial services expenditure1981: pounds 117 per capitaNow: pounds 363 per capitaSource: Lambeth Borough Council; the Scarman report (1981). But some 28 per cent of Brixton’s blacks are unemployed and – like their white counterparts in Leeds or Luton, or their Asian contemporaries in Bradford – seem increasingly to feel that there is no route out of unemployment.

Such perceptions create new realities.The rhetoric of race may be there – as may the outside agitators, the criminal gangs and the black separatist extremists, all of whom have been mentioned in the media in the quest for scapegoats Such factors are easy to isolate and to hunt. The whole area will continue to sink, many observers believe, until the situation gets out of control.If it has not done so already. This week’s violence was not as intense as that of 1981 but it may be just as serious. It points to the heart of the problem of Britain’s inner cities today – and it is not one of race, but of economics.Brixton today has far more mixed marriages than it had at the time of the 1981 riots. Residents speak of a general lack of racial hostility on the streets.