Abstract

As the debate on how to improve the police-community relationship continues, frequent and often hostile policing remains an inescapable part of life for many Black Britons. This article analyses the historical and contemporary policing experiences of Black communities in a north London suburb. Using data from 58 ethnographic semi-structured and unstructured qualitative interviews with young people, adults/elders and community workers, it explores the lived experience of generations of Black British communities labelled “suspect communities”. Despite police efforts to improve trust and confidence in Black communities, frequent and often hostile policing remains an inescapable part of life for many Black Britons. Negative experiences of policing over time are found to have created deeply embedded cultural narratives about how the police treat Black people that are transmitted across generations. These narratives provide conceptual frameworks to interpret information about the police which may be more powerful than other sources. The data illustrates that negative community perceptions of the police are the inevitable result of decades of racialized policing in Britain. This has significant implications for the present and future relationship between the police and Black Britons, representative of the place of Black Britons in the British state.