Toxteth riots

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The Toxteth riots of July 1981 were a civil disturbance in inner-city Liverpool, which arose in part from long-standing tensions between the local police and the black community. They followed the Brixton riots earlier that year.

The Merseyside police force had at the time a poor reputation for stopping and searching young black men in the area, under the infamous "sus" laws, and the heavy-handed arrest of Leroy Alphonse Cooper on Friday 3 July, watched by an angry crowd, led to a disturbance in which three policemen were injured.

Over the weekend that followed, disturbance erupted into full-scale rioting, with pitched battles between police and youths in which petrol bombs and paving stones were thrown, and the police employed CS gas for the first time in mainland Britain. In all, the rioting lasted nine days, during which there were 468 police officers injured, 500 people arrested, and at least 70 buildings demolished [1].

The riots, like those around the same time in Brixton, Handsworth, and those in 1980 in Bristol, were generally seen as "race riots", but there are many reports of similarly frustrated white youths travelling in from other areas of Liverpool to fight alongside Toxteth residents against the police^{[citation needed]}. Blaming "race problems" allowed many people - including then Merseyside Chief Constable Kenneth Oxford - to ignore the possibility of broader social origins for the violence.

The subsequent Scarman Report (although primarily directed at the Brixton Riot of 1981) recognised that the riots did represent the result of social problems such as poverty and deprivation. The Government responded by sending Michael Heseltine, as "Minister for Merseyside" to set up the Merseyside Task Force and launch a series of initiatives, including the Liverpool international garden festival and the Mersey Basin Campaign.