Abstract
This article examines 126 cases where people were charged with criminal offences in relation to the summer 2024 riots in England. Among other dynamics, it looks at examples where people were charged for their involvement in the riots, and also in reaction to them, including those who chose to protect asylum seekers, BME communities and their institutions. It reveals how dominant, politically established anti-asylum-seeker and anti-migrant narratives were echoed in the violence and how, in some cases, criminal justice agencies followed politicians’ lead by downplaying the racist context of the riots and framing them as ‘thuggery’, thereby decontextualising what took place. It asks whether what happened in the courts echoed a dominant thesis of cumulative extremism, and shows how the crackdown on the riots swept up many vulnerable people from across different backgrounds.
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References
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It should be noted that in seven of the forty-one cases, it was not possible to find the outcomes of the charges. In two cases, people were sentenced for online offences.
45.
The course of events is described more fully in the research paper, Dury et al., “Understanding the 2024 summer riots in the UK: Three case studies”. The authors also make the point that the disorders should not be characterised as resulting from protest as they consisted of racially motivated targeted attacks and collective violence aimed at targeted groups.
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In some cases, this may be linked to people already having served part of a sentence on remand.
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There is, of course, a long history of state strategies supressing, sabotaging and undermining community-led responses to racist violence. For discussion and analysis see for example L. Bridges and L. Fekete, “Victims, the ‘urban jungle’ and the new racism,” Race & Class 27, no. 1 (1985): 45‒62; J. Burnett, “Community, cohesion and the state,” Race & Class 45, no. 3 (2004): 1‒18; A. Elliott-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester University Press, 2021); J. Nijjar, “Baptised by fire: An interview with Suresh Grover,” Race & Class 62, no. 3 (2021): 88‒101; A. Sivanandan, “Race, class and the state: The Black experience in Britain,” Race & Class 17, no. 4 (1976): 347‒68.
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