When riots happen, they are typically explained as an expression of the madness or badness of crowds. Rioters are condemned for the violence and destruction that occurs, which has nothing at all to do with the actions of authority, or with society at large. Years later, what was blindingly obvious is belatedly acknowledged: the previous riots were actually connected with social issues. Rioters had genuine grievances. Government policies played an important part. Yet when the next riot happens, the pattern repeats itself. The media and politicians suggest that this time it’s really different, and the mad, bad crowd is entirely to blame.
When the 1981 and 1985 riots took place in Brixton, both were dismissed as an expression of the atavism of crowds. They were simply “mobs on the rampage”, according to one Daily Telegraph headline, and had nothing at all to do with racism, inequality or policing. As the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, put it, the riots weren’t a cry for help, but a “cry for loot”.
By 2011, it was widely accepted that both the 1981 and 1985 Brixton riots were rooted in the inequality and mistreatment experienced by the black community. But once again, in the minds of politicians, the riots taking place in front of them were different. The then prime minister, David Cameron, confidently asserted that the riots that had started in Tottenham in north London after the police shooting of Mark Duggan were “criminality pure and simple”. His justice secretary, Ken Clarke, claimed that 75% of those involved had a criminal record; that the riots were a matter of “criminals on the rampage”; and that the rioters were a “feral underclass”.
The claims surrounding the 2011 riots have since been comprehensively debunked. If most of those arrested during those riots had criminal records, it was because the police concentrated on people already known to them to make arrests. Few of the rioters had convictions for theft or violence; most were for trivial and statutory offences. As the BBC home affairs correspondent, Dominic Casciani, concluded, the figures cited by Clarke showed that the rioters, on the whole, were not serious criminals.
If close inspection of what happened rules out the official version of events, it also reveals the factors that sparked the riots. The closure of youth services and curtailing of employment opportunities as a result of austerity were an important part of this story. Indeed, deprivation was the strongest predictor of whether or not a London borough saw rioting. But it was the interactions between deprived communities and the police that stood out in multiple ways. Riots were more likely to happen in London boroughs with more police stops and searches, where there were more negative attitudes to the police.
The riots kicked off in these boroughs after an episode that exemplified the communities’ sense of unwarranted and brutal treatment by the police. Duggan was shot dead, the police claimed there had been an exchange of fire, and when the family demanded answers, the police failed to engage with them. It was a similar story in 1981, when the police’s treatment of Michael Bailey sparked the Brixton uprising, or when the police shot Cherry Groce four years later, leading to the 1985 Brixton riots.
In popular mythology, riots are mindless and indiscriminate eruptions. The evidence from historical and contemporary studies refutes this picture, and shows they typically have a pattern that reflects the collective understandings of the communities involved. As the historian William Reddy once remarked, the targets of crowds “glitter in the eye of history” as an indication of how crowd members see their world. And in 2011, the police, police property and those associated with the police were all prominent targets. Even when these weren’t clear targets and rioters incinerated or looted property, an important motivation was demonstrating the impotence of the police in preventing such attacks. For once in the rioters’ lives, power relations were reversed and the police were dancing to their tune.
Likewise the geographical spread of the riots from London to other towns and cities in England can’t be understood without grasping the role of policing. Often the spread of riots is framed as a process of “contagion”, as if once people see others doing something, they can’t help but do it themselves. But this can’t explain why riots spread to some places and not others.
After analysing police crime data, archive sources and conducting interviews with rioters, the Economic and Social Research Council’s interim report in 2019, of which I was one of the authors, identified three key processes that explain the spread of riots in 2011: one was where people in another location identified with those who had previously rioted, shared their anger at Duggan’s death and their hostility to the police, and rioted in solidarity with their peers. Another involved those who did not identify with previous rioters but still shared their antagonism at the police and, seeing the impotence of officers, felt empowered to challenge them. Finally, there were situations where the police feared the occurrence of riots and intervened forcefully in response to minor incidents, escalating pre-existing tensions into open conflict.
Even if we now understand the 2011 London riots as a response to the unequal policing of an unequal society, the danger is this understanding has arrived too late. Arguments that the rioters were simply criminals or a mindless mob did their job at the time, deflecting blame from the government and state for long enough to avoid addressing the nature of a society where many people feel that violence is one of the only ways they can have a voice.
The time to address the inequalities and racism that led to the 2011 riots was 10 years ago, when those riots happened. But the heat has now gone out of the situation, the demand to address such issues has abated, and ministers can blithely advocate for the very policies, such as increased stop and search, that created the conditions for the riots in the first place. And when the next riots roll around – as they undoubtedly will – the government will be able to repeat the same pattern: it will say that this time it is different; that the people involved really are just criminals; and that the rioters are entirely to blame.
This piece is based on joint research on the 2011 riots with John Drury and Clifford Stott. Stephen Reicher and Clifford Stott are authors of the 2011 book Mad Mobs and Englishmen
