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The Scarman report was commissioned by the UK Government following the 1981 Brixton riots. Lord Scarman was appointed by then Home Secretary William Whitelaw on 14 April 1981 (two days after the rioting ended) to hold the enquiry into the riots. The Scarman report was published on 25 November 1981.
The terms of reference for the enquiry were "to inquire urgently into the serious disorder in Brixton on 10–12 April 1981 and to report, with the power to make recommendations".
Scarman rejected the widespread public notion that the conduct of the police forces were inherently prejudicial. He traced racial prejudice back to single officers below the rank of senior officers and argued for the general integrity and respectability of the police forces. The report details the use of arbitrary roadblocks, stopping and searching of pedestrians and mass detention (943 stops, 118 arrests and 75 charges). Operation Swamp 81 was conducted by the police without any consultation with the community or the home-beat officers. Liaison arrangements between police, community and local authority had collapsed before the riots and according to the Scarman report, the local community mistrusted the police and their methods of policing. Scarman recommended changes in training and law enforcement, and the recruitment of more ethnic minorities into the police force. According to the report "institutional racism" did not exist, but positive discrimination to tackle racial disadvantage was "a price worth paying".
The Scarman Report pushed the issue of law and order, and specifically policing, onto the mainstream agenda. The debate in the House of Parliament to mark the publication of the Scarman Report on the 26 November 1981 had as its theme "law and order" and the then leader of the Liberal Party, David Steel, argued that "urgent action" to prevent a drift into lawlessness was necessary. A subsequent debate in March 1982 referenced the events of 1981 and focused on the impact of street violence, crime, urban decay, and the danger of "more violence to come" if changes in both police tactics and social policy were not swiftly introduced. While both the Conservative and Labour speakers in the parliamentary debate on the riots accepted the need to support the police, substantial disagreement centred on the issue of what role social deprivation and unemployment had in bringing young people to protest violently on the streets.
As a consequence of the Scarman Report a new code for police behaviour was put forward in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; and the act also created an independent Police Complaints Authority, established in 1985, to attempt to restore public confidence in the police.
The Scarman Report sought to locate the riots in the social, economic and political context of the acute deprivation in Brixton at the time. Lord Scarman identified the causes of the riots in the pathology of the Caribbean family, in the question of bilingualism amongst Asian children and in the undefined problem of policing a multi-racial society. In doing so Scarman highlighted what Robert Beckford has termed a "pathological image of Black youth". According to the report:
"Without close parental support, with no job to go to, and with few recreational facilities available the young Black person makes his life the streets and the seedy, commercially-run clubs of Brixton. There he meets criminals, who appear to have no difficulty obtaining the benefits of a materialist society."
The Scarman Report does not apportion blame to the police. While the report acknowledges that "ill considered, immature and racially prejudiced actions of some officers" contributed to the riots Lord Scarman only acknowledges "unwitting discrimination against Black people". The report concludes that "The allegation that the police are the oppressive arm of a racist state not only display a complete ignorance of the constitutional arrangements of controlling the police, it is an injustice to the senior officers of the force." In his recommendations Scarman accepts that "hard" policing, such as stop and search operations, would be necessary in the future in areas characterised by severe social problems. Hence the Scarman Report seeks to establish how policing could be enforced without provoking further outbreaks of disorder.
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