Whether it’s to do with anger against the police, a sense of general alienation or simply consumerist greed, this week’s rioters in Britain had a message, however incoherent, for their society
IN EAST LONDON’S Mare Street last Monday evening there was something hanging in the air. Flying alongside the shards of glass and metal bins that hurtled towards police windscreens was a strange sense of excitement. In the most destructive, violent and obtuse way, an underclass was rising up and getting its own back. Those who were taking part in the looting and fighting, or throwing fireworks at the police, were of many shades, ages and nationalities, but they all had something in common: they felt they had little to lose.
In a week that has seen David Cameron return from holiday to address the unrest, more than 1,500 people across England have been arrested. Magistrates have been working through the night to process cases, and have been taking an unprecedented hard line on petty criminals. But the government’s response has done little to advance understanding of what drove the rioters to initiate, or get involved in, such large-scale and violent disorder.
Two major factors drove the disturbances. The first was a complete breakdown in respect for the police; the second was the rioters’ alienation from the fabric of the community and those who represent it.
The events were triggered by a specific incident: the death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of four, who was shot by Metropolitan police on Thursday, August 4th. Duggan was riding in a minicab in Tottenham, north London, when he was stopped by armed officers from three specialist police units. Last Saturday, Duggan’s family gathered outside Tottenham police station demanding to know what had happened. Despite this peaceful demonstration, the evening saw events escalate into violence.
Deale Babb, a south Londoner and former offender turned youth worker, knew Duggan through a network of people he had met in prison. “He was the kind of guy who was positive. We chatted on Facebook and he wrote reasonable stuff,” he says.
When violence erupted in Tottenham, Babb was one of the first to know what was going on. “I was at home, staying away from it,” he says. “I don’t want to get arrested, but the phone was ringing and people were talking.”
He believes it was more than the Duggan case that fuelled the rioting. “I would say 95 per cent of it was kicked off by what has happened to Mark . . . The thing that is bringing people together is that the police are taking liberties, they have taken liberties for years and nothing has been done, and now they wanted to sweep it under that mat.”
Looking angry, he waves his mobile phone in the air. “I can phone people now, I can phone everyone and ask why this is happening, and they will say, ‘Because a brother got killed’.”
Others who weren’t involved in the rioting take a similar line. Pierre Neil is a youth mentor, a former member of the band So Solid Crew and a well-known figure in southeast London’s black community.
“It’s ludicrous to say that everyone was thinking of Mark when they were stealing out of shops like that, but I think that was the boiling point of a lot of backlog of situations that have happened between the police and the community,” he says.
The grievance that the Duggan family has against the police is a real one. On Wednesday, August 10th, a week after Mark Duggan’s death and some days after rioting began, a coroner’s report was released, stating that Duggan was killed by a single gunshot to the chest. A loaded handgun was found on the scene, but there is no evidence that Duggan fired at police.
An independent inquiry is under way, but the remaining questions about who shot Duggan and why may not be answered for many months. Insofar as the report has established that Duggan did have a gun in his possession, he was breaking the law and was on the police radar for a reason. The animosity that exists between criminals or former offenders and the police is not surprising, but what is shocking is the extent to which this attitude has spread to broader society, especially its young people.
IN MAYof this year I interviewed a group of youths in gang-affected, high-crime areas who were taking part in programmes to help them avoid criminality. At the time two young brothers, Shazan (14) and Nas (15), explained what it was to be a teenager in their community.
“It’s not safe there to walk by yourself or move by yourself,” Shazan explained. To avoid being mugged by other young people they hung out with a “batch of boys”, getting involved in petty criminality, stealing and selling drugs to protect their “turf”. For them, petty crime became the norm, and the police, who never protected them when they needed it, were seen as being there simply to impinge on their freedom.
In the course of these interviews I spoke to many young people from poor estates in London. Each of them, regardless of race, had a story to tell about being stopped and searched for no apparent reason. One baby-faced 14-year-old described being arrested and questioned for an attempted armed robbery that turned out to have been perpetrated by a 28-year-old.
“It’ll just get worse,” said Nas at the time, “and instead of gangs against gangs they’ll just all get together and start a riot.”
The prescience of this comment evaded me. What I did notice, however, was that for these young people, many of whom had never committed a crime, police were the enemy.
Leon (20), from Clapham, was in Clapham High Street on Monday night when it was ransacked and looted. “It wasn’t just young people,” he says emphatically. “It was people from 20 to 30 upwards out there, people 10 years older than me. That’s what they would say: it’s just young people, we’re young stupid, dumb and don’t know what we’re doing.”
Though Leon didn’t know Duggan, he believes the looters’ motivation to steal and destroy is intrinsically linked to their relationship with police. “This was an uprising against the police, 100 per cent,” he says, emphatically, before telling a story about being strip-searched for refusing to give a police officer his personal details. “They don’t treat us like human beings, they treat us like beings with no rights.”
When people are breaking the law, the police have a job to do. They are the foot soldiers in a society that appears to be suffering from a deep malaise. Writing in the London Independent newspaper this week, Camilla Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, a charity engaging with vulnerable young people in London, commented on how a large section of desperately poor Britons felt entirely cut off from the rest of society. “Working at street level in London, over a number of years,” she wrote, “many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules.”
These are young people who no longer feel that the institutions of normal society, such as school and the police, are working for them. Instead they turn to their own economy, fuelled by drugs and criminality, one in which stealing is part of everyday life.
Youth worker Nathan John grew up on one of south London’s most notorious estates and agrees that last week’s rioting was a symptom of this alienation. “There is a lot of uncertainty among young people,” he says. “Everything they rely on has been taken away.”
With funding for youth services being cut by the coalition government, more and more young people are likely to be driven towards criminality. “The youth employment centre where I got my first job has been closed down, boarded up,” says John.
Youth unemployment in the UK reached 18 per cent earlier this year, the highest figure since 1992. At the same time, funding for educational grants has been cut and tuition fees for universities tripled. Although these measures haven’t had time yet to take any real effect, John argues that they have symbolic significance. “It leads young people to ask, ‘Do they want me to fail?’.”
This is a point that Leon can identify with. “I know a lot of people who feel like there is nothing to live for,” he says. “They were brought up in a school where they tell you if you haven’t got good grades you’re going to work in McDonald’s or you’re not going to have a job. I’ve been in this situation personally; they tell you you’re going to go nowhere in life.”
For the past week British society has been trying to come to terms with the riots. The corrupting influence of everything from social media to bad parenting, BlackBerrys to gangsta rap, has been blamed. The pervasiveness of consumerism and greed is one explanation for the trouble that has gained a lot of currency. It has been widely reported that rioters were more interested in finding the right trainers than in doing anything more politically profound. But for Babb, who watched the looting in Clapham on Monday night, the politics of want cannot be separated from the politics of poverty. “If you’re signing on and not doing wrong, if you’re not hustling, you can’t buy clothes, you have money just for food,” he says. “Some people think this is the best thing that has ever happened to them; this is an opportunity.”
What has shocked people in England most is the level of violence that the looting mobs have directed at their own communities. Yesterday a 68-year-old man died from head injuries after he was attacked in Ealing, west London. On Tuesday three men, the youngest aged 21, were killed in Birmingham in a hit-and-run incident while defending their property.
These riots showed a Britain that was more polarised, angry and reckless than people could ever have imagined. The question now is what lasting effect this outburst will have.
The writer and broadcaster Darcus Howe, a vocal commentator on the negative treatment of black people by police, believes the riots were primarily motivated by anger about racism and are a harbinger of much worse to come. “It’s a stand-off,” he says. “They [parliament] are talking about water cannons, and they have started it, this chapter, here. It would take an atomic bomb to change the minds of young black people.”
Nathan John worries that “yob culture” witnessed on such a scale has damaged the way young black men are viewed. “I definitely feel that people who were on the sideline before about young black people will be pushed to the edge. They may start saying they don’t deserve benefits, they don’t deserve support.”
And what about the UK government’s zero-tolerance strategy for dealing with rioters? In the next few weeks hundreds more young people are likely to enter the prison system as a result of the unrest. “There is a danger that this could alienate young people more,” says John. “We need to get more support for them, not less.”
Although their message was incoherent, indiscriminate and violent, the people who started this riot had something to say. As Britain works to stop something similar happening again, some feel it is crucial that it tries to understand that message.
“This is the time to get our respect,” says Leon. “Because no one notices us until we do something wrong.”
Stephanie Hegarty is an Irish journalist working at the BBC. Some names have been changed
