Who controls the city?

Abstract

In August 2011, over four days, rioting spread across several cities in England. Previous accounts of these riots have indicated the roles of police racism, class disadvantage, and spatial affordance. However, what remains unclear is how these structural factors interacted with crowd processes spatially over time to govern the precise patterns of spread. The present paper provides a micro-historical analysis of the patterns and sequences of collective behaviour as the 2011 riots spread across North London, drawing upon multiple data-sets (archive, interview, video, official report, news coverage). The analysis suggests that initial stages of escalation in the broader proliferation were the result of protagonists deliberately converging from areas of relative deprivation in order to create conflict, but that they did so as a meaningful social identity-based expression of power. We show how over time these motivations and patterns of collective action changed within the riot as a function of intergroup interactions and emergent affordances. On this basis, we provide support for the argument that political, social and economic geography were key determining factors involved in the pattern of spread of the 2011 riots. However, we also suggest that an adequate explanation must correspondingly take into account the interplay between social identity, the dynamics of intergroup interaction, and empowerment process that develop during riots themselves.

Key words:

• crowds
• contagion
• social identity
• riots
• rational choice

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professors Tim Newburn and Rob Procter for access to the Guardian/LSE ‘Reading the Riots’ interview and social media data sets, Trevor Adams of the Metropolitan Police Service for assistance with access to arrestee figures and Richard Grove for graphic design of the figures. All base maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Roger Ball http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3684-2213

Clifford Stott http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5399-3294

John Drury http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7748-5128

Fergus Neville http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7377-4507

Stephen Reicher http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3449-0082

Sanjeedah Choudhury http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9877-1521

Notes

1 Tottenham is located in the London Borough of Haringey where, according to the 2011 National Census, 39.5% of the population are non-white Ethnic Groups. This is similar to London (40.1%) as a whole but higher than England and Wales (14.1%). The two largest non-white ethnic groups in Haringey are: Black African (9.0%) and Black Caribbean (7.1%).

2 The IMD is a UK government qualitative analysis of deprived areas in English local councils considering income, employment, health deprivation and disability, education skills and training, barriers to housing and services, crime and living environment. Low ranks mean high levels of relative deprivation.

3 A database of 2.6 million ‘riot-related’ tweets collected during the August 2011 disturbances by the Guardian/LSE ‘Reading the Riots’ project was filtered for all instances where the word ‘Enfield’ was present producing a subset of approximately 72,000 relevant tweets.

4 https://doi.org/10.25377/sussex.6263816.

5 Arrestee here refers to the term ‘accused person’. These are people who were ‘proceeded against’ by the MPS. This is defined by the Home Office as being charged and summoned to court, cautioned or some other action taken which is considered to allow police to show a crime as being ‘cleared up’ but does not necessarily mean that an individual was tried and convicted in a court for the offence.

6 Visual representation of IMD data at LSOA level was not available for 2010.

7 Blackberry Messenger (BBM) was a mobile phone-based messaging system that operates across a ‘closed’ network only available to people who have been invited to join that specific network, making it difficult for police to monitor.

8 A PSU is a unit of police officers trained to deal with public disorder. Each PSU consists of three police carriers, 21 police constables, three sergeants, and an Inspector. These officers have protective or ‘riot’ equipment and are trained to deal with violent crowd events. 

9 We assume it to mean that a Bronze Commander was appointed, which is an indication that this is when the MPS first defined the situation as a ‘public order incident’, some three and a half hours after the initial convergence.

10 The Tottenham riot was chosen as it was the first to have taken place at that time and is defined here as disorder related crimes occurring in the London postcode area N17 over the evening of 6 and morning of 7 August 2011. The Enfield riot is defined by disorder related crimes occurring in the postcode areas EN1, EN2, EN3 and N9 over the evening of 7 and morning of 8 August 2011.

11 It should be noted that the markers in Figure 6 are not exact locations, instead they represent the centroids of postcode areas where crimes were committed or arrestees lived.

12 Reference denotes number of the transcript in the Reading the Riots archive, plus line numbers.

13 [ ] indicates material removed for brevity.

14 Oakwood lies approximately three miles to the west of Enfield Town.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a grant to John Drury, Clifford Stott and Steve Reicher from the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/N01068X/1].

Notes on contributors

Roger Ball

Roger Ball is Research Fellow in the School of Sociology/Psychology at the University of Sussex. Email: [email protected]

Clifford Stott

Clifford Stott is Professor of Social Psychology in the School of Psychology at Keele University. Email: [email protected]

John Drury

John Drury is Professor of Social Psychology in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. Email: [email protected]

Fergus Neville

Fergus Neville is Lecturer in Organisation Studies in the School of Management at the University of St Andrews. Email: [email protected]

Stephen Reicher

Stephen Reicher is Bishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. Email: [email protected]

Sanjeedah Choudhury

Sanjeedah Choudhury is Research Assistant in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. Email: [email protected]