A review of the available evidence shows black hostility to be located in personal experience, adversarial encounters to provoke a hostile response to the police, and black hostility to relate to an adversarial balance of encounters between the police and black people. The findings also reveal that individual experience alone fails to explain the difference in views between Afro-Caribbean and white people. There are many indications that black hostility to the police is a group-level phenomenon; it emerges as a political force and part of the assertion of identity by a social and cultural group. 13 references