When Steve Margiotta chased a young bleeding man it sparked the Brixton riots and ultimately reshaped race relations in Britain
• With cuts and unemployment, could it happen again?
The policeman who sparked the 1981 Brixton riots – setting in train a summer of urban inner city unrest and decades of social reforms – went on to be an early pioneer of community policing, it has emerged.
Speaking to the Guardian for the 30th anniversary of the riots, former constable Steve Margiotta described his pivotal if largely accidental role in the tumultuous events, a story he has only been permitted to tell since his retirement from the police.
Margiotta's brush with history came on the evening of 10 April 1981 when, on patrol in the racially mixed south London suburb, he briefly chased a young black man who turned out to have been stabbed. In seeking to detain the youth and get help, Margiotta drew a crowd of local people who, shortly afterwards, began a weekend of violence directly mainly at a police force they considered confrontational and racist.
"The street was busy and through the crowd I could see this person running towards me, he was coming at quite a speed. He was coming straight at me and so I had to stop him. We collided, and as we got up his shirt came off the shoulder and I could see he was bleeding. I was also covered in blood. He kept on running and I set off in vain pursuit – just to help him as I could see he was badly hurt. Some other people maybe thought I was trying to arrest him. They were saying, 'What are you doing? Why are you chasing him?' It all started from there."
Then 27 and a probationary constable with just over a year's experience, Margiotta policed the first night of unrest before going on pre-arranged leave. It was only when he returned that he realised his encounter had been the apparent starting point for mainland Britain's worst civil unrest of the 20th century, in which 350 fellow officers were injured.
"I was really worried when I heard I was being called the catalyst," he said. "I became very concerned that I'd done something wrong. I just wasn't sure – I was still a new policeman. My superiors said I'd done the right thing but I couldn't stop worrying. I didn't want to lose my job."
The six months leading to his testimony to the inquiry led by Lord Scarman into the riots were "very difficult", Margiotta said, though in the end, to his relief, Scarman ruled he had "acted properly".
"Since then I never blamed myself for causing the Brixton riots, I never branded myself with that. In hindsight I don't think I could have done anything different."
After a brief unsatisfactory spell in the hated Special Patrol Group riot squad, Margiotta transferred to be a community policeman in Brixton, helping to pioneer a new model of relations with local people for the remainder of his 11-year stint there.
"I got to know everyone. I had my own small patch, mainly centred round this one estate," he said. "I was on the committee to do up the community hall, all that sort of thing. It was a big difference from before when we'd spend weekends breaking up parties or setting up a roadblock on the main road.
"The emphasis wasn't on arresting people, it was on building links, getting to know them. It seemed to work – I enjoyed it.
"It seems my strength was getting on with people, not arresting them – unlike some of my colleagues."