Background.
Between 6 and 10 August 2011, thousands of people took to the streets in several London boroughs and in cities and towns across England. Disturbances began on 6 August 2011 after a protest in Tottenham, following the death of Mark Duggan, a local who was shot dead by police on 4 August 2011. Protestors became angry after police attacked a sixteen-year old who provoked them.
Several violent clashes with police, along with the destruction of police vehicles, magistrates' court, a double-decker bus, many civilian homes and businesses, began gaining attention from the media. Overnight, looting took place in Tottenham Hale Retail Park and nearby Wood Green. The following days saw similar scenes in other parts of London. From 8 until 10 August, other cities in England including Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester, along with several towns, saw what was described by the media as "copycat violence".
Several violent clashes with police, along with the destruction of police vehicles, magistrates' court, a double-decker bus, many civilian homes and businesses, began gaining attention from the media. Overnight, looting took place in Tottenham Hale Retail Park and nearby Wood Green. The following days saw similar scenes in other parts of London. From 8 until 10 August, other cities in England including Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Manchester, along with several towns, saw what was described by the media as "copycat violence".
First publised @ guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 August 2011, original here.
Classing rioters' actions as 'mindless mayhem'
– or relying on discredited notions about crowds – won't aid understanding
The Daily Mirror called last week's spate of riots mindless; the Croydon Green party called them mindless vandalism; David Cameron described them as mindless selfishness and the leader of Liverpool council talked of mindless thugs. Across the board, the implication is that people were acting without thought and that their acts lacked sense or meaning.
Sometimes this notion of irrationality was more subtly implied in the use of words such as "mob" and "copycat riots". In each case the message is that people simply imitate what they see without thinking. But sometimes, the message was underpinned and given credibility by invoking psychological theory. The Guardian, for one, invoked the concept of "deindividuation" in one article: the idea that in crowds people become anonymous, lose their sense of self and hence the "civilised" standards against which they normally judge what to do. As a consequence, they are doomed to be drawn into the mob and to follow whatever destructive idea or emotion ringleaders transmit to them.
The problem is that this idea is outdated and discredited. Historical and psychological research tells us that in groups and crowds people are generally not anonymous to each other, that they don't lose identity or lose control of their behaviour. Rather they act in terms of a group or social identity. Correspondingly, their actions are determined by collective understandings, norms and values. As a consequence, crowd events always have a pattern that reveals how people see their position in society and their sense of right and wrong. In the words of Martin Luther King, riots are the voice of the powerless.
Riots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation. Indeed, by coming together in the crowd, people become empowered and can invert normal social relations. EP Thompson, the pre-eminent historian of crowds, argued that in a world where the powerless are generally invisible, the riot is a form of "collective bargaining". At the very least the rioters' problems have become a problem for the powerful and hence the powerful have been forced to take note of issues they had previously ignored.
Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. Because our understanding of the nature of crowd action has fundamental implications for how we respond to them.
If, like Cameron, you see riots as an irrational and pathological phenomenon, then the response is first to repress (why reason with those who have no reason?) and second to look for problems inherent within the communities from which the rioters are drawn. Thus we see the government pledging a series of new repressive police powers such as curfews (which the police themselves don't want) and looking to uncover the source of moral sickness among disaffected youth.
If, however, you see the actions as a meaningful response to a shared sense of illegitimacy and lack of alternatives then you need to address the way in which this has arisen. That is, you need to look at the experience of relations between rioting communities and those with power, authority and influence in our society. The danger is that the repression agenda not only ignores this but that it actually creates experiences that both increase the sense of illegitimacy and decrease the sense of alternatives.
So the accusation of mindlessness, the lazy language of the "mob", and the use of discredited deindividuation theories, is not just wrong. It is positively dangerous. It stops us paying attention to what crowd actions tells us about how rioters understand their society. It stops us from addressing how these understandings come about. It dooms us to more disaffection, more division and more violence.
Sometimes this notion of irrationality was more subtly implied in the use of words such as "mob" and "copycat riots". In each case the message is that people simply imitate what they see without thinking. But sometimes, the message was underpinned and given credibility by invoking psychological theory. The Guardian, for one, invoked the concept of "deindividuation" in one article: the idea that in crowds people become anonymous, lose their sense of self and hence the "civilised" standards against which they normally judge what to do. As a consequence, they are doomed to be drawn into the mob and to follow whatever destructive idea or emotion ringleaders transmit to them.
The problem is that this idea is outdated and discredited. Historical and psychological research tells us that in groups and crowds people are generally not anonymous to each other, that they don't lose identity or lose control of their behaviour. Rather they act in terms of a group or social identity. Correspondingly, their actions are determined by collective understandings, norms and values. As a consequence, crowd events always have a pattern that reveals how people see their position in society and their sense of right and wrong. In the words of Martin Luther King, riots are the voice of the powerless.
Riots generally occur when groups have a sense of illegitimacy about how they are treated by others and where they see collective confrontation as the only means of redressing the situation. Indeed, by coming together in the crowd, people become empowered and can invert normal social relations. EP Thompson, the pre-eminent historian of crowds, argued that in a world where the powerless are generally invisible, the riot is a form of "collective bargaining". At the very least the rioters' problems have become a problem for the powerful and hence the powerful have been forced to take note of issues they had previously ignored.
Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. Because our understanding of the nature of crowd action has fundamental implications for how we respond to them.
If, like Cameron, you see riots as an irrational and pathological phenomenon, then the response is first to repress (why reason with those who have no reason?) and second to look for problems inherent within the communities from which the rioters are drawn. Thus we see the government pledging a series of new repressive police powers such as curfews (which the police themselves don't want) and looking to uncover the source of moral sickness among disaffected youth.
If, however, you see the actions as a meaningful response to a shared sense of illegitimacy and lack of alternatives then you need to address the way in which this has arisen. That is, you need to look at the experience of relations between rioting communities and those with power, authority and influence in our society. The danger is that the repression agenda not only ignores this but that it actually creates experiences that both increase the sense of illegitimacy and decrease the sense of alternatives.
So the accusation of mindlessness, the lazy language of the "mob", and the use of discredited deindividuation theories, is not just wrong. It is positively dangerous. It stops us paying attention to what crowd actions tells us about how rioters understand their society. It stops us from addressing how these understandings come about. It dooms us to more disaffection, more division and more violence.