The Death of Colin Roach and the Politics of Grief and Anger in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

This article examines the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney, in 1983, and explores the emotional politics of the campaigns that followed his death. These campaigns were focused on both determining the circumstances of Roach's death and highlighting tensions between the police and the Black community of Hackney. Using hitherto unpublished archival sources, local newspapers, and visual sources, the article documents racial politics in Hackney in the early 1980s and examines the relationship between race and policing at that time. The article argues that the experience and expression of grief and anger were critical to understanding the political problem of race and policing in London in the 1980s, to forming and mobilizing political communities, and to interrogating the power of the state. The article also argues that a critical element of the emotional economy around race in Hackney in 1983 was the indifference and lack of empathy of the police in Stoke Newington to ethnic minority communities. This lack of empathy not only illustrated the problem of race within the police force at this time but further fueled local campaigns to make the police accountable. This links the Roach case to a later turning point—the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which characterized the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist.