Why Were They Rioting?

Hello friends,

*Let me first clarify that I personally hold no grudge against the police. In my dealings with them they have always been fair, honest and perfectly reasonable human beings. I can understand why other people might see them in a different light, though, and I urge you to do the same.*

It's a question many have asked, myself included. I thought I would run through a couple of the more plausible reasons I have come across or thought of. I have dismissed the scapegoat of moral laxity because it is unhelpful. We are looking for something else.

1) Opportunism. This is the first one that semms to spring to most people's minds. Knowing other people are going to be out in force reduces the apparent threat of police attention to an individual person. This is particularly the case in places which are having their first night of rioting: the police are likely to be unprepared. Thus people can steal hundreds, or thousands, of pounds worth of goods from shops. This could either be because of their own rampant consumerism or, more likely, so they can order to sell the goods on for cold hard cash.

2) Anger. The second family of reasons has various permutations. Some people are attributing this to anger at politics and government cuts and the closing down of youth centres and things like that. This seems unlikely, you would have heard about it from some rioters or seen some graffitti or something, people would have taken some measure to let people know what they were up to. I don't doubt that people were angry at the society which created the conditions with clearly have caused so much resentment. However, I think people are looking too far, making this more complicated than it has to be. The people who the rioters were confronting were the police. Though the police are a coercive wing of the state, from the perspective of the poor, of criminals petty and career alike, of people of ethnic minorities, of young people, and any combination therein the police are antagonists. They are oppressive, discriminatory, violent, harrassing and on occassion murderous.

Of the rioters, how many do you think were actually looting? Not all of them, far from it. Every rioter was out there for their own reasons. I know of one misguided youth in York who wanted to start some trouble here for purely political reasons. No I don't think many rioters were there for ideological anarchist reasons, at least not consiously, but my point is that people were rioting for all sorts of reasons. The reason for most people out there, I suspect, was that they wanted to fight the police. In particularly they wanted to fight the police with a distinct numerical advantage over them. It was an expression of anger and hostility at the people who had been something of a plague in their lives.

The underlying social conditions matter. I don't doubt that relative poverty and inequality created the conditions under which these riots were possible. There are policy solutions to prevent this from happening, or at least to make it very unlikely, and increased equality (particularly intergenerational equality and racial equality) will go a long way to fixing matters. If I am right though, and the main reason people were rioting was antipathy to the police, then authoritatian measures curtailing civil liberties, increasing police powers to arbitrarily interfere with people and more violence directed by the police against citizens will do the opposite of help. They might make future rioting more likely, not less.

Caleb