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Why do people riot?

2011; Elsevier BV; Volume: 21; Issue: 18 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2011.09.015

1879-0445

Michael Groß,

Policing Practices and Perceptions

The rioting and looting that occurred in English cities at the beginning of August has provoked contradictory responses from politicians. Now academic research is looking into what happened and why. Michael Gross investigates. The rioting and looting that occurred in English cities at the beginning of August has provoked contradictory responses from politicians. Now academic research is looking into what happened and why. Michael Gross investigates. The ‘English riots’ of this summer started in the North London suburb of Tottenham on Saturday 6th of August, following a peaceful demonstration protesting against the death of Mark Duggan, who had been shot by special police forces two days earlier. Tottenham has a long and varied history of difficulties between the black community and the police, and there were riots at the Broadwater Farm estate in 1985. On most occasions, protesters take their grievance to the local police station, and the matter is resolved in discussion with a senior officer. On August 6th, however, the local police, who hadn't been involved with the shooting and technically couldn't comment on it because it was subject to an official investigation, failed to come up with a way of defusing the situation. By nightfall, there were reports of fires, lootings, and clashes with police. Over the next four days, the unrest spread to many other parts of London, including Enfield, Hackney, Southwark, Brixton, Bromley and Croydon, as rioters used Blackberry messenger system to agree on new targets. Riots also erupted in other English cities, including Manchester and Birmingham. By the time order was re-established after four days of unrest, there were five people dead and over 1,500 had been arrested. Many of those were fast-tracked through the courts and sentenced to prison within days. Political leaders and commentators were divided in their response from the very beginning. Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) dismissed all attempts to look for motives and called the events “criminality, pure and simple,” which should be addressed with severe punishments. His authority on the issue was somewhat undermined, however, by the fact that in his student days he had been a member of Oxford's Bullingdon Club, which was notorious for smashing up venues. Commentators with a less privileged upbringing linked the unrest to the problems of youth unemployment, inequality, and the total lack of opportunity for a large number of young people that are “Not in Education, Employment, or Training” (NEET). By cutting support for social services, the recent austerity measures of Cameron's government have worsened the situation for many of these young people. Many have also linked the surprising amount of looting that took place during the riots to recent evidence of greed displayed by the elites. A year ago, a large number of the members of parliament were shown to have claimed expenses inappropriately for private matters, a behaviour that one could also describe as looting. And then there is the ongoing financial crisis where inexplicably the banks' losses are saddled on the taxpayers, while their profits are handed out as bonuses to the top management, who could, again, be described as grabbing whatever they can get. Author Naomi Klein wrote about the activities of the bankers: “Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide.” Linking this to the August riots, she concluded: “Of course, London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery.” Yet, this general political backdrop doesn't explain why people don't riot and loot most of the time, and why they did riot in specific places at that specific time. In order to gain insights into the background and motives of the rioters, the Guardian newspaper compiled and analysed a comprehensive database of the defendants brought before Magistrates' courts in the first two weeks after the riots started. The detailed data from the first 1,000 cases show that the accused are typically young, male and unemployed. Half of them were aged between 18 and 24, while 17% were under 18, and the remaining third spread out over the older age groups. 91% were male. Only 8.6% were employed or students. These statistics contrast sharply with the media attention lavished on individual cases of unexpected figures caught with looted goods or swept along with the riots. An analysis by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) showed that youth unemployment and child poverty were exceeding national averages in the London boroughs affected by riots and looting. In London, the flashpoints were typically close to the areas where the defendants live, while in Manchester and Birmingham, the events were focused on the city centres. Alex Singleton from Liverpool University has analysed the data by mapping the addresses of those accused against England's Indices of Multiple Deprivation, a map linking poverty indicators to local neighbourhoods. Singleton found that the majority of the accused live in poor areas. Over 40% of them even come from the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods in England. Singleton also found that two-thirds of the areas where the defendants live became even more deprived within the last four years. Singleton told the Guardian: “Rioting is deplorable. However, if events such as this are to be mitigated in the future, the prevailing conditions and constraints affecting people living in [certain] areas must form part of the discussion.” Referring to one of Cameron's favourite soundbites, he added: “A ‘broken society’ happens somewhere, and geography matters.” Geography may explain why riots happen in specific places, but why do people who don't normally break the law go wild all of a sudden? Given a trigger, like the unresolved dispute over the death of Mark Duggan, and a background of simmering frustration, as produced by the austerity measures, which left an increasing number of people feeling cut off from society, what is still missing is a mechanism of infection, by which the violent response of some individuals can spread to involve large numbers and even jump to other cities. This is where psychology may have important clues to the understanding of the events. Many of the people sentenced for looting or handling stolen goods in the aftermath of the riots seem to have been swept along by the mood of the moment. Psychology studies such phenomena under the concept of ‘herding’, suggesting that instinctive mechanisms of group interaction may be involved. In a recent review on this subject, Ramsey Raafat and colleagues distinguish between two broad groups of scientific models used to describe herding, namely pattern-based approaches and transmission-based ones (Trends Cogn. Sci. (2009) 13, 420–428). Pattern-based models are suitable for the study of crowd management disasters such as the deadly crush at last year's Love Parade, says Chris Frith from University College London, who is a co-author of that review. These might be amenable to mathematical modelling, Frith suggests. Riots, however, are difficult to analyse, and in this case the transmission of emotional states between the participants is a crucial element. Several transmission mechanisms identified in earlier herding research have also played a role in the August riots. Frith points out that emotional contagion was clearly involved. In the review, Raafat et al. define this as “an involuntary spread of feeling without any conscious awareness of where the feeling initially originated.” Interestingly, as the review explains, “emotional contagion does not require understanding another's emotion and is largely involuntary.” It is not yet clear how this contagious effect works, and whether it relies on cultural or on innate processes. If the contagion goes beyond the emotional state and large numbers of people display synchronized behaviours, researchers also speak of the broader phenomenon of social contagion. This concept is used in the analysis of phenomena including mass hysteria, hooliganism, and indeed riots. Frith also mentions information cascades, which the review defines as “a process by which people influence one another, such that participants ignore their private knowledge and follow instead the publicly stated judgements of others.” This means that, if a number of people give their opinion in sequence, the result may be different from that of a secret ballot, as each will be influenced by the statements of those who have spoken before, even without knowing what their judgment is based on. Such cascades can produce inappropriate responses by the group if the response that is amplified by the cascade effect is different from the response that each individual would have come to judging the situation independently and according to their best knowledge. In the case of the looting during the riots, it appears that many people who had no previous criminal record and just happened to be near shops that were broken into, just followed the information cascade model, basing their decisions on the decisions made by others before them. “They must have been thinking, ‘if so many others are taking things, it must be safe for me to do so too’,” Frith explains. In terms of the technology used to transmit information, these riots were a novelty insofar as the rapid transmission of target information between rioters via the Blackberry messaging system has enabled them to stay ahead of the police in moving to new locations. There has also been some debate over the role of social networks Twitter and Facebook in the riots. Two men were sentenced to prison for trying to incite riots via Facebook, even though nobody turned up. Networks researcher Katharina Zweig from the University of Heidelberg thinks these communication tools will facilitate individuals' decision of whether or not to join: “Networks enable us to make a faster and safer decision on how dangerous it will be for an individual to follow the crowd. If a potential participant gets the feeling that the crowd is going to be huge, she will go unnoticed. If it is too small, her risk of being caught is too high. Earlier, someone needed to be there physically, to estimate the size of the crowd and to assess her risk — which already put her at risk. Over the net this risk assessment can be done from afar and without any personal risk. For better or worse — revolution or riot — this parameter might be the most important for a decision whether she will take part or not.” Early calls for government powers to switch off such networks in similar situations were soon silenced as it emerged that these networks played an important role in reporting the disturbances, and thus also helped the police in catching up with them. Three weeks after the events, Home Secretary Theresa May met up with representatives of the companies and told them that the government had no intentions of restricting internet services in similar situations. It is clear, says Frith, “that too little is known about these mass phenomena. They are very difficult to study in the lab.” So, obviously, researchers have to make do with the evidence they can collect after events such as the August riots. Thus, the Guardian newspaper announced one month after the beginning of the riots that it was teaming up with researchers at the London School of Economics to conduct a detailed investigation into the events and their causes. The study, titled ‘Reading the Riots’ is modelled on a collaboration between the Detroit Free Press and the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research to study the Detroit riots in 1967, in which 43 people died and over 7,000 were arrested. Tim Newburn, head of social policy at the LSE, is leading the research. Phil Meyer, the journalist who conducted the 1967 study at Detroit is acting as an advisor. The Guardian will contribute two relevant databases it has already compiled, namely that of the defendants who appeared before Magistrates' courts, as mentioned above, and one including 2.5 million tweets relating to the riots. Newburn said: “There is an urgent need for some rigorous social research which will look, without prejudice, at the causes and the consequences of the recent riots. Crucially, it is vital that we speak with those involved in the disturbances and those affected by them to try to understand any lessons for public policy.” As the government has refused to launch an official inquiry into the riots, this will be the most comprehensive study of the event available. Writing in the Guardian, Newburn said that “by reporting in the next few months we hope to show how a national newspaper and a leading research university can contribute in a timely fashion to public and political debate.” In the immediate aftermath of the events, conservative politicians and commentators were all calling for tough punishments and pondering additional measures such as removing benefits of the offenders, or evicting them from social housing. This, as observers on the left of the spectrum pointed out, would make the feeling of exclusion from society, which obviously was one of the causes of the riots, only worse. As parliament went back to work after the summer holidays and a month after the event, some government figures had noticeably changed the tune. Justice secretary Ken Clarke reflected that prison sentences obviously weren't helping people to reintegrate into society, while London's Mayor Boris Johnson told the Home Affairs select committee on September 6th it was “a real difficulty we're having in finding adequate punishments and adequate ways of turning their lives around.” Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith also put the emphasis on giving people the chance to change their lives and thus stop them from offending again. If they keep moving in that direction, maybe they could even stop cutting services for the poor to feed the rich. Now that would be revolutionary.