The racialisation, criminalisation, and policing of groups in hegemonic British structures have long shaped the racialised policing of Black communities. In the mid-twentieth century, the social, cultural, and political marginalisation of newly arriving ‘coloured immigrants’ fuelled anxieties about a changing Britain. As Ken Pryce’s 1970s ethnography of West Indian communities in Bristol shows, mass immigration laid the groundwork for policing Black communities as a racialised and criminalised ‘other’. Amidst a hegemonic crisis, constructions of Black criminality produced a moral panic around the ‘Black mugger’ and ‘Black folk devil’ (Hall et al., 1978), creating a race–crime nexus (Long, 2018). Though these constructions have shifted, they have reproduced racialised policing for generations, legitimising increasingly aggressive tactics through what Gilroy (1982, p. 47) called “a racist appeal to the British nation … integral to maintaining popular support for the government in crisis conditions”.