The first was that of Cynthia Jarrett, an Afro-Caribbean woman who died the previous day due to heart failure during a police search at her home.

[5][6][7] At 13:00 hrs on 5 October 1985, a young black man, Floyd Jarrett, who lived about a mile from the Farm, was falsely arrested by police, having been stopped in a vehicle with an allegedly suspicious car tax disc.

[9] During the coroner's inquest into Mrs Jarrett's death, her daughter, Patricia claimed to have seen D.C. Randle push her mother whilst conducting the search inside their house, causing her to fall.

Three journalists (Press Association reporter Peter Woodman, BBC sound recordist Robin Green, and cameraman Keith Skinner) were also claimed to have been hit.

[citation needed] The riot prompted the Metropolitan Police to devise the Gold-silver-bronze command structure for responding to sudden major incidents.

[13] In March 1987, three local men, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, despite no witnesses and no forensic evidence.

On 25 November 1991, all three defendants were cleared by the Court of Appeal when an ESDA test demonstrated police notes of interrogations (the only evidence) had been tampered with.

Silcott remained in prison for the separate murder of another man, Tony Smith, which occurred in December 1984 in the Tottenham area, and for which he was convicted in February 1986.

[15] At the inquest into the death of Cynthia Jarrett her daughter, Patricia, told the court that her mother had been pushed over by Detective Constable Michael Randle, which he denied.

Letwin claimed it would not ameliorate the situation but would do little more than "subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops", stating that black "entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade".

[17] When the 1985 paper was released under the 30 years rule into the public record through the National Archives on 30 December 2015, a chastened Letwin apologised on the same day for "the offence caused".

[16][17] The memo argued that the riots were caused by bad behaviour, rather than social conditions: "Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale; in the midst of the depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door, and expecting to see groceries there when they got back...Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes.