Demystifying the London Riots

F. Varese: London Riots Revisited

“I still to this day don’t class it as a riot. I think it was a protest.” -A young man from Tottenham

The riots in London during August 2011 have already been fed through the distorting filter of British TV. What emerged was a reassuring portrayal that ignored the point of view of those involved and confirmed the government’s reading of the events. Fortunately, several ongoing research projects will provide, upon completion, a full and undiluted overview of the riots and the condition of British society in the era of David Cameron.

A paradigmatic example of media distortion is the telefilm London’s Burning, directed by Justin Hardy and written by Mark Hayhurst, which aired December 22 on Channel Four. The film is presented as a docudrama “based on eye witness testimony.” This “story of a community that was abandoned” tells of the disturbances at Clapham Junction on the evening of Monday, August 8, two days after the beginning of the riots in the Tottenham area of London. The theory that the police were not ready to tackle the blind violence of a barbaric and uncontrollable mob is expressed several times by two police officers shut up in their office. Some characters have clear ideas of how to confront the imminent danger: on the morning before the riots a woman of color stops to have a quiet word with the area police officer and suggests the use of tear gas. The officer’s forlorn and ironic response is that such a weapon could cause lung damage to the demonstrators, who would have the right to sue the police. The woman then cuts to the chase: “Shoot them.” The fictitious Croydon residents offer two further operational suggestions, which reflect perfectly the stance of the conservative government: one wants to introduce road blocks, whereas for another the solution is “to use water cannons and plastic bullets, like in Northern Ireland.”

The spectator is then forced to follow the fortunes of the owners of three small businesses: a music shop keeper; a hairdresser; and the manager of a fancy dress shop, Party Superstore. Only the latter suffered heavy damages during the riots: a fire was not put out in time and highly flammable material went up in flames, destroying the shop. By way of conclusion the film presents us with two characters, Jan and Nick, white, middle-class, and left-leaning residents of Clapham Junction. The couple explains that the riots should not be defined as “a ‘rebellion,’ a word which evokes the spirit of Thomas Paine.” Rather, they assure us, these are nothing more than acts of petty criminality. The entire film devotes not a single second to those who took part in the disturbances. The young are vague shadows, a feral mass given neither a voice nor a face.

London’s Burning does not deserve critical review or reflection. And yet deconstructing this television film is instructive in revealing how the British media and mainstream press are archiving the riots. By concentrating on what is missing and what is distorted in this docudrama for the general public we may gain a better understanding of how the economic crisis and the collapse of public confidence in British institutions—banking, politics, and the police—were reflected in the events of last summer, and how those in power are reacting.

First of all, beginning the narrative with Clapham Junction is not an innocent choice. The riots began two days before in Tottenham, one of the poorest areas of the capital, sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan. On August 4 the police killed the twenty-nine-year-old who they believed was planning to avenge the death of his cousin. At first the authorities maintained that Duggan opened fire on officers, but they were later forced to admit that though a gun was recovered at the scene, Duggan wasn’t holding it when he was shot, and that the bullet that killed him came from a police weapon. In other words, a black man was killed in cold blood as he got out of a taxi. Two days later family members went to the police station seeking clarification about the incident, but they were kept waiting for three hours. Exasperated, they began to protest in the street. After the Duggans returned home, a girl who had taken part in the protest was attacked by riot police, as shown in a video that quickly circulated on the internet. Things got heated. At around 10 p.m. a group of youngsters marched along High Street intent on coming to blows. They set fire to the post office and a few police cars. Then a bus and a number of businesses were set alight. Residents living above the blazing shops risked their lives and jump from windows. It was urban guerrilla warfare, on a small scale. When the day came to an end, twenty-six police officers were left with minor injuries.

This was by no means the first time that men and women of color have been killed by police and thereby triggered a violent reaction in the English capital. The most recent case was that of the reggae singer David Emmanuel, better known by his stage name Smiley Culture, who died from a stab wound to the heart during a police raid on his house in Brixton in March 2011. The family was told that Emmanuel stabbed himself while making a cup of tea, an explanation that would bring a smile to anybody’s face were the event not so tragically serious. Suspicious deaths of this kind are at the heart of the Brixton Riots (1985 and 1995) and the Broadwater Farm Riots (1985). No uniformed man or woman has ever been convicted of these deaths.

WE NOW know a great deal about the motivations behind the riots thanks to a group of researchers from the London School of Economics and reporters from the Guardian, who have been working for months to collate the accounts of those who took part. The ongoing project, Reading the Riots, has so far produced an electronic book as well as several Guardian web articles. This “precision journalism” is inspired by the cooperation between psychologist Nathan Caplan and journalist Philip Meyer of the Detroit Free Press following riots in Michigan in 1967 (five days of violence resulting in forty-three deaths). On account of this sociological report, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize and Meyer wrote the classic Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods (1973). The LSE sociologists have adopted a qualitative approach in which salient themes emerge from unstructured conversations, but all interviewees have also completed a short questionnaire. Rather than testing out a theory already clear in the minds of the researchers, the project seeks to reveal explanations in an inductive, bottom-up approach. So far 270 people between the ages of thirteen and fifty-seven have been interviewed and 1.3 million words have been collated.

Why did thousands of London’s youngsters set about destroying shops and fighting against the police for four days in August 2011? The official government interpretation, reflected perfectly in London’s Burning, is that we are dealing with well-organized thieves and “petty criminality.” This theory is belied by the Guardian study, which points to two “important” themes motivating the young people who rioted: anger toward the police, and a more general sense of injustice and powerlessness.

Let’s start with the first factor. Of those interviewed, 85 percent said that the daily conduct of Scotland Yard officers is an “important” or “very important” factor in explaining their involvement in the events of August. Many interviewees reported being beaten up at some point in their lives, and in some cases subjected to unjust accusations, by officers patrolling the neighborhood. The most frequently cited experience undermining trust in the police was the practice of “stop and search” (known in the United States as “stop and frisk”). A seventeen-year-old boy, who works full time in Tottenham and who took part in the riots, told of being searched for the first time when he was barely thirteen years old. As he was coming back from school, one police officer tells another in a loud voice, “Mate, why don’t you ask him where Saddam [Hussein] is. He might be able to help out.” “They’re supposed to be law enforcement,” said the seventeen-year-old. “I hate the police. I don’t hate the policing system, I hate the police on the street. I hate them from the bottom of my heart.” Another interviewee reported being manhandled by officers when he was only twelve years old. “The police is the biggest gang out there,” he concluded. 73 percent of those interviewed had been searched at least once in the last twelve months, a figure eight times higher than the average for the population of London. Unsurprisingly, only 7 percent said the police do a “good” or “excellent” job in their area, while the figure for the British population at large is 56 percent.

Two-thirds of those interviewed also cited the death of Mark Duggan as sparking participation in the riots. “The police act like a bunch of criminals, there’s no two ways about it. They can shoot whenever they want and they killed Mark Duggan.” Other suspicious deaths recur in the accounts of interviewees, such as those of Smiley Culture and Roger Sylvester, a mentally ill thirty-year-old beaten to death by the police in 1999 while under hospital restraint (he had been detained for apparently wanting to kick down his own front door). Mistrust of Scotland Yard cuts across generations and forms part of the identities of many youngsters. One twenty-five-year-old student from Tottenham who took part in the disturbances said:

I was born the year before Cynthia Jarrett was killed in Tottenham so I heard from my family, “You gotta be wary of the police.”* So when you got that memory back in there, from that time we heard stories about Roger Sylvester, that kind of kicked off a lot of friction, and then you had Mark Duggan. It’s like: “All right. Wow.” It’s like a slap in the face.

The second key theme is the violation of justice. For some it is financial injustice, such as the lack of employment opportunities and social inequality, for others a more general feeling of discrimination; the riots were a way of expressing their rage. One young man in Tottenham said, “I still to this day don’t class it as a riot. I think it was a protest.” One woman in her thirties sums up many of the opinions expressed by those interviewed: “I think some people were there for justice for that boy who got killed [Mark Duggan]. And the rest of them because of what’s happening: the cuts, the government not doing the right thing. No job, no money. And the young these days need to be heard. It’s got to be justice for them.” One twenty-two-year-old said, “You get these bankers that have put us in this recession that are still managing to reap massive bonuses, while we can’t get jobs. Literally, we can’t get jobs.” As a twenty-one-year-old from Salford (Manchester) reflects, “it’s not like your voice is heard; they don’t care about you because you’re poor. What opinion have you got? You know: ‘We’re the government, we’re the masters…we’re not going to listen to you peasants.’” From the millions of words collected by the Guardian a sense of profound alienation emerges, along with the impression that the bond of a shared national community has been broken. Four in five of those interviewed think that further disturbances are inevitable.

The LSE study has as yet a significant limit: it only interviews those who participated in the riots. Until the study includes those who did not participate we cannot be sure of what made one person join as opposed to not. In addition, explanations given by protagonists always have two sides to them: they may be an accurate description of their motivations or, rather, ex post facto rationalizations. It is impossible to distinguish between these two aspects in the interviews collated by the British researchers, though other data may help us to do so. For instance, only 51 percent of those interviewed claim to feel part of British society as opposed to 92 percent of the public at large. Other sources confirm these findings, as pointed out by criminologists Mike Hough, Jonathan Jackson and Ben Bradford. Data from the 2011 European Social Survey show that Brits have less trust in the police than the Germans, Scandinavians, and Swiss. Moreover, the UK ranked sixteenth out of the twenty European countries surveyed when it came to how satisfied they were in their contact with the police, ahead only of Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Russia. In other words, there is something rotten in one of the fundamental institutions of the state.

THERE IS a distinction to be drawn between the initial motivations of those involved and the rapid spread of disorder to other parts of London, such as Clapham Junction, and subsequently to other cities. It is likely that the spread was due to the inability of the police to stop the acts of vandalism and theft. Once the rioters realized that officers were not intervening to prevent thefts, their numbers grew and they attacked big High Street stores like Debenhams and chains such as Currys, PC World, Foot Locker, and JDSports, causing damages of around £300 million in insurance claims. (Despite what the mainstream press and films such as London’s Burning would have us believe, only 9 percent of the shops affected are classed by the UK Home Office as “small independent businesses.”) It is this dynamic that led many to reduce the disturbances to acts of common criminality due to parents incapable of controlling their own children.

In response, the institutions proposed punishing the parents, increasing police powers, and handing down exemplary punishments to those involved. For instance, the government immediately encouraged local authorities to remove the right to public council housing from people whose relatives took part in the riots, throwing entire families out onto the street. The police were given more powers, such as the ability to use water cannons, which cost £1.3 million each, and to use plastic bullets. In the meantime, courts have been working night and day to mete out much harsher punishments than those suggested by the Sentencing Commission guidelines. Approximately 60 percent were given a custodial sentence, compared to an average for the year 2011 of 3.5 percent. Two men in their twenties from northern England were sentenced to four years in prison for posting messages inciting others to riot on Facebook (one created and removed a web page within the space of a day). No incidents came about because of their actions. The message is clear: whoever took part in the riots should go to prison, even if all they are guilty of is picking up diapers and bottles of water left behind in the street by rioters.

The manner in which Her Majesty’s Government has responded to the events of August shows the real face of power and is paving the way for other countries. The plan is to criminalize those who rebel, instead of listening to their reasons. The economic crisis is having a devastating effect on the most vulnerable sectors of the population: educational initiatives are being cut, university fees are increasing exponentially, public health is gradually being privatized, and the elderly and disabled will no longer have access to essential care. Those who could help to reduce the worst effects of the crisis, social workers, are the first to be laid off. In the meantime unbridled consumerism and unwarranted success are promoted by the media. Those who refuse to accept their position at the bottom of the social ladder and choose to rebel soon feel the force of the law against their skin, and there’s nothing liquid or postmodern about it. But the rebellion is bereft of any plan and fizzles out in a few days of widespread vandalism for which the residents of those selfsame suburbs are made to pay.

There is no opposition capable of stemming the growing anger and building a broad movement involving both the lower and middle classes. In Parliament, Labour politicians have restricted themselves to criticizing the proposed cuts to the police budget: without the cuts, the police would be able to afford more efficient bullets, more powerful water cannons. It is difficult to harbor any hope of police and state education reform, along with a rediscovery of non-consumerist values, being taken up by Labour—the party responsible for deregulating the banking system, which contributed to the collapse of the country’s main banks and their eventual bail-out using public money. The party adopted the motto of “get rich quick” and followed the American model of retributive justice.

The first lesson of the riots, and most urgent, is the need to democratize the police and to change the way it operates. Instead of using “stop and search” across the board, the practice must be used sparingly. This is the first step toward rebuilding the relationship of trust between the police and the local community. The second key point, crucial for the future of social relations in this country, is education. Ghettoization begins at school: at the age of five the children of the upper-middle classes enter private independent schools before remerging at eighteen and going to the country’s most prestigious universities, and later to jobs in banking, the upper echelons of the civil service, journalism, and television. David Cameron and mayor of London, Boris Johnson, both students at Eton and Oxford, are a case in point. The result is a physical inability to relate to a world beyond their ken, such as that inhabited by the residents of Tottenham. The images of Johnson walking through the areas devastated by the riots show a man in the grip of embarrassment, unable to talk to the citizens of his very own city. What that uneasiness reveals is not so much the distance between the world of politics and society, but persistent and strong class differences that only became more evident during the economic crisis. To reconstruct any sort of collective alliance among citizens, a long-term plan is needed to provide real opportunities for social mobility. Such a project should include reinforcing state schools, left humiliated and impoverished by government policies. The country’s elite universities should maintain a presence in areas such as Tottenham, encouraging young people to study and providing additional courses.

It is difficult to imagine a political and social climate more hostile to these proposals. For instance, universities in the UK and my subject (sociology) are under enormous pressure to secure private funds, whatever the cost. But for once we must give credit to sociology. A subject that has turned more and more inward since the 1980s and become postmodern and irrelevant, obsessed by self-referencing theoretical debate—a subject that has too long been the preserve of hermits pronouncing on the world without ever setting foot outside the office—has finally gone back to dealing with reality. The joint venture between LSE and the Guardian is yielding eye-opening results. It would be a silver lining were it to become a model for other countries, and other newspapers. Collaboration of this sort assumes a desire to understand, to interrogate the world as it is, rather than accepting the mystifications produced by those who, despite their myriad disguises, are still the High and Mighty.

Federico Varese teaches at Oxford University.

*The death of Cynthia Jarrett triggered the Broadwater Farm Riots.

Photo taken in Peckham Rye by Amanda Vincent-Rous, 8/8/11, Flickr creative commons