As this book has examined the links between race, racism, policy and policing – and academic scholarship on those – it has raised issues and questions about change and sameness in them as interconnected fields of study. A degree of ‘stop-start’ and circularity in academic research and writing is evident concerning what race is, on institutional racism, and in policy. The underlying argument is not that the past is simply being repeated, not least because, as mentioned in the Introduction to this book, contexts change and there is a drastically altered environment for academic work – including engagement and impact. This means that there are some recognisable elements of continuity with the 1980s, as well as some discontinuities.

This final chapter confirms that, by bringing the argument full circle through an examination of a topic that was prominent then and in recent times – riots, protests and violent disorder. It focuses on scholarly commentary and research on riots that occurred in August 2011 in England. As incidents of violent disorder occurring in urban settings, they were commonly linked to recent historical and contemporary concerns about policing operations, in which race occupies a significant place, particularly through the over-policing of black people. This association serves to make the 2011 riots seem familiar and explainable in relation to events in the 1980s. It can be observed in a range of sources, although there are differences of emphasis between them in how strongly (or not) the 1980s is invoked as a comparative frame (Riots Communities and Victims Panel 2012, Home Affairs Committee 2011, Solomos 2011, Smith 2013, Newburn et al 2016). Taking the cause of the 2011 riots as primarily connected to race and policing flowed from tracing them in a particular line back to disorders at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival, and then in various inner cities, most notably Brixton in 1981 (Scarman 1981) and in Brixton and Broadwater Farm in 1985 (Gifford 1986). The race connection was reinforced through discussions of the 1980s riots as British developments akin to the 1960s US civil rights protests and demonstrations (Benyon and Solomos 1987, Peplow 2015).

As in 2011, the most direct moment that led to the riots in 1985 resulted from police encounters with black people, one of which resulted in a fatality.