Steve Reicher - Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and realities of the 2011 riots

Mad Mobs and Englishmen?

Constable & Robinson Ltd
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London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011

Copyright Steve Reicher and Cliff Stott, 2011

The right of Steve Reicher and Cliff Stott to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78033-532-2 (ebook)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

We owe many thanks to Aisling ODonnell and Tammy Thiele for their invaluable help in digging out and documenting the extensive coverage of the riots. Thanks to Bill Knox for allowing us to use his, as yet, unpublished work on the Tron riots. We would like to thank John Drury in particular and also members of the social psychology group at St Andrews University for incisive and helpful comments on early drafts of the chapters. Jamie Joseph, our editor at Constable & Robinson deserves considerable credit for his careful scrutiny of the book and helping us to write in what we hope is a clear and accessible way, but without losing academic rigour. Finally, we would like to thank our families for putting up with our absence as, over three weeks, we worked day and night to complete this book in time (we hope) to be of use.

Dedication

We dedicate this book to John Turner, who died recently. Without Johns ideas we would never have been able to develop our understanding of crowd psychology. Without Johns personal support, we would never have been able to develop our academic careers. Without Johns warmth and kindness our lives would have been much the poorer.

Preface

For four nights in August, England burned. Or rather and the distinction is important for four nights in August the media was full of images of England burning.

The media is always hungry for drama. A thousand buildings left untouched is not news. A hundred shops left unlooted will not attract attention. But a building engulfed in flames? A woman leaping from a blazing house? These are different things. These will become the images of the riot. They will stand for everything that went on. They will guide our understanding and our discussion of events.

But the media is also hungry for explanation. Unlike the previous wave of English riots in the 1980s, now we have 24-hour rolling news. The time needs to be filled, and so pundits and politicians are urged to give instant accounts of what went on and why. There were all manner of explanations. The riots were due to spending cuts, they were due to educational policies, they were due to rap music, black culture, single-parent families, lack of respect, liberal education and the list goes on. Mostly, as we shall see, the riots were attributed to criminals without conscience feral youth who, incapable of knowing right from wrong, were allowed to go on the rampage because our police force had become crippled by a respect for Human Rights.

As we sat listening to these endless explanations, our over-riding reaction was how do they know?. Each of these factors might be relevant or it might not. But how can we decide without having a detailed understanding of what actually happened? How can one explain an event before we really know what that event was? One might as well suggest that the riots happened because of the place of Mars in relation to Venus or because a five-footed calf was born in June. Without evidence, any opinion is equally good or equally bad.

As students of crowds and of riot behaviour over some thirty years, we also wondered why dont they learn from the lessons of the past? Back in the riots of the 1980s we heard almost identical explanations and responses to the riots all of which are now accepted to be completely inadequate. Worse still, any advances in understanding crowd and riots that we have gained since then are being either ignored or actively rubbished. What chance do we have of getting things right if we go against the weight of experience?

Perhaps this is a little harsh. After all, those who argued that the riots were about criminal behaviour could provide a selection of particularly dramatic images as well as accounts from innocent victims to support their case. We all recall the pictures of Asyraf Rossli, the young Malaysian student whose jaw was broken after he was assaulted during one of the riots. A group of youths came up to him, apparently to offer help, but then casually went through his backpack, helping themselves to whatever took their fancy.

These, along with others were undoubtedly cruel and appalling acts. They deserve the harshest condemnation. That is not in doubt. What is in doubt, however, is whether they are representative of the riots as a whole or acts of exception. Do they illuminate events or do they blind us to the variety and complexity of what went on?

Once again we return to the need for more information and more understanding. We need a systematic account of what went on rather than a selection of eye-catching events. We need a more thorough understanding of behaviour in riots in order to know what questions to ask. Only then can we begin to work toward a definitive conclusion as to what happened and why. Only then can we devise effective responses. To do so beforehand is to run the risk of advancing solutions that are both irrelevant to the real problems that we face and which repeat the mistakes of the past.

Sadly that is the situation we now find ourselves in. We are like a people without memory trying to find their way through a maze. Our policy makers are rushing forward with proposals based on the assumption that the riots were purely criminal. Their solutions are as much about political opportunism as they are about prevention.

The purpose of this book is to provide a more measured view of what went on during those days in August. First we take a critical look at how the riots were understood in the English news media and by leading politicians. Next, we strike a cautionary note by showing how these portrayals reflect the stories that have, throughout history, been used to explain riots; explanations that have always been shown to be inadequate and deficient. We then examine what science and history can tell us about why people riot and how we can indeed must use this accumulated knowledge if we are serious about understanding what happened in 2011. We then sift through the evidence we have compiled to build perhaps the first systematic account of the riots. We demonstrate the complexity of events, examine the origins and expose how the media and political discourses simply do not reflect what went on. Finally, we set out what should actually be learned from the riots and whether, in light of the evidence, the explanations and responses that dominated in the weeks after the riot actually pass muster.

Before we start, two cautionary notes are necessary. The first concerns language. When one is dealing with events as fraught and as contested as the riots, nothing is neutral. Just as one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, one persons riot is another persons uprising and one persons rioter is another persons protestor. To make life easier for the reader, we use the terms that have been in common usage throughout this book. We therefore refer to riots and rioters, to loot and also to looters. But this should not be read as a political stance. It is meant neither to affirm nor deny that people were protesting, nor that they were acting to challenge society.