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Keith Henry Blakelock, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was killed on 6 October 1985 during rioting on the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London. The trouble broke out after a local black woman died of heart failure during a police search of her home. It took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of relations between the police and black communities.〔Timothy Brain, "Handsworth, Brixton, and Broadwater Farm," ''A History of Policing in England and Wales from 1974: A Turbulent Journey'', Oxford University Press, 2010, p. (106ff ).〕 PC Blakelock had been assigned on the night of his death to Serial 502, a unit of 10 constables and one sergeant dispatched to protect firefighters. When the rioters forced the officers back, Blakelock stumbled and fell. Surrounded by a mob of 30 to 50 people, he received more than 40 injuries inflicted by machetes or similar, and was found with a six-inch-long knife in his neck, buried up to the hilt.〔 He was the first constable to be killed in a riot in Britain since 1833, when PC Robert Culley was stabbed to death in Clerkenwell, London.〔Kenneth Newman, ("Police-Public Relations: The Pace of Change" ), Police Foundation lecture, July 1986, p. 1; ("Broadside entitled 'Dreadful Riot in London'" ), ''The Word on the Street'', National Library of Scotland.〕 Detectives came under enormous pressure to find the killers, amid tabloid coverage that left-wing journalists claimed was sometimes openly racist.〔David Rose, ''Climate of Fear: The Murder of PC Blakelock and the Case of the Tottenham Three'', Bloomsbury, 1992, pp. 77–84.〕 Faced with a lack of forensic evidence, the police arrested 359 people, interviewed most of them without lawyers, and laid charges based on untaped confessions. Three adults and three youths were charged with the murder; the adults, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite (the "Tottenham Three"), were convicted in 1987. A widely supported campaign arose to overturn the convictions, which were quashed in 1991 when forensic tests cast doubt on the authenticity of detectives' notes from an interview in which Silcott appeared to incriminate himself.〔Rose 1992, pp. 186, 214–215.〕 Two detectives were charged in 1992 with perverting the course of justice, and were acquitted in 1994.〔David Rose, ''In the Name of the Law'', Jonathan Cape, 1996, pp. 298–304.〕 Police re-opened the murder inquiry in 1992 and again in 2003. Ten men were arrested in 2010 on suspicion of murder, and in 2013 one of them, Nicholas Jacobs, became the seventh person to be charged with Blakelock's murder, based largely on evidence gathered during the 1992 inquiry. He was found not guilty in April 2014.〔Vikram Dodd, ("PC Keith Blakelock: Nicky Jacobs found not guilty of Broadwater Farm murder" ), ''The Guardian'', 9 April 2014.
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