Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

In August 2011, England experienced widespread public disorders in sixty-six locations following a protest at the shooting dead of a black man in north London by the police. The author examines, inter alia, reports from the Metropolitan Police Service, academics Steve Reicher and Cliff Stott, Tottenham MP David Lammy, the Guardian/London School of Economics, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Ministry of Justice to analyse the riots in London and other cities. He looks at the shooting of Mark Duggan, the immediate trigger, the riots’ deeper causes and the arrests that followed. Instead of a formal inquiry, the government set up the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, which has now reported, blaming the breakdown of families and lack of character in the young, rather than structural issues. While it asks for the community to work out, with the police, ways to reduce the impact of stop and search, the Metropolitan Police Service asks that stops be linked to its intelligence gathering; a sure way, argues the author, not to deal with the alienation of the young.

Keywords

David Lammy Gary Younge Independent Police Complaints Commission Mark Duggan Metropolitan Police riots stop and search Tottenham

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Metropolitan Police Service, Strategic Review into the Disorders of August 2011 – Final Report (London, 2012), p. 14.

Roger Sylvester from Tottenham died in 1999 following his restraint by the police. Joy Gardner died in Haringey in 1993 in a struggle with police, who used thirteen feet of tape to restrain her during an attempted deportation.

As noted from the London Evening Standard in Metropolitan Police Service, op. cit., p. 24.

Ibid., pp. 24–5.

Ibid., pp. 26–30.

Ibid., p. 28.

Ibid., p. 32.

David Lammy, Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots (London, Guardian Books, 2011).

10.

Although Lammy had returned to Tottenham from holiday on Friday 5 August and reported finding that the ‘intrigue, the anger, the suspicion – call it what you want – was spreading through Tottenham like wildfire’, there is no indication in the Metropolitan Police’s strategic review that they received any representations from him about the situation, and it does not appear that he was present during the protest march to Tottenham police station the following afternoon.

11.

Metropolitan Police Service, op. cit., pp. 42–5.

12.

Lammy, op. cit., ‘Introduction’.

13.

As quoted in Reicher and Scott, op. cit., Chapter 4.

14.

Reading the Riots: investigating England’s summer of disorder (London, Guardian/LSE, 2011), Chapter 5.

15.

Lammy, op. cit., Chapter 5.

16.

Reading the Riots, op. cit., Chapter 3.

17.

Metropolitan Police Service, op. cit., pp. 41–2, 119.

18.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, The Rules of Engagement: a review of the August 2011 disorders (London, HMIC, 2011), p. 7.

19.

After the Riots: the final report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel (London, Riots Communities and Victims Panel, 2012), p. 17.

20.

Ibid., p. 22.

21.

Reicher and Scott, op. cit., ‘Conclusion’.

22.

Bob Jeffery and Will Jackson, ‘The Pendleton riot: a political sociology’, Criminal Justice Matters (Vol. 87, no. 1, 2012), pp. 18–20 (p. 19).

23.

Gary Younge, ‘These riots were political: they were looting, not shoplifting’, in Reading the Riots, op. cit., Comment 2.

24.

These and subsequent data on the post-riot arrests in London are taken from Metropolitan Police Service, op. cit., Sections 7.7 and 7.8.

25.

See summary of the Panel’s interim recommendations in their final report, After the Riots, op. cit., p. 134.

26.

Ministry of Justice, Statistical Bulletin on the Public Disorders of 6th to 9th August 2011–February 2012 Update (London, Ministry of Justice, 2012).

27.

For a list of these, see After the Riots, op. cit., Appendix 4.

28.

After the Riots, op. cit.

29.

The Negro Family: the case for national action (Washington, DC, US Department of Labor Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965).

30.

Younge, op. cit.

31.

Reicher and Scott, op. cit., Chapter 4.

32.

After the Riots, op. cit., p. 103.

33.

Ibid., p. 105.

34.

Metropolitan Police Service, op. cit., p. 8.

35.

After the Riots, op. cit., p. 106.

36.