‘The biggest gang’? Police and people in the 2011 England riots

ABSTRACT

Conflict with the police is a staple of civil disorder and the English riots of 2011 were no exception. The antagonism towards the police expressed by the rioters varied in intensity – from a low-level anger stemming from occasional negative experiences on the one hand to outright, visceral hostility on the other – but was visible everywhere riots took place. Leading politicians dismissed this hostility as nothing more than the typical wariness criminals have of the police. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that the police are an easy target for rioters seeking to explain away their conduct. Nevertheless, drawing on 270 interviews with people involved in the riots this paper shows that for some involved the police were a very deliberate and specific focus of anger and resentment. The basis of such feelings was complex and variable, but included historically poor relations between the police and particular communities, an inherited distrust of the police as an institution, to more particular and immediate experiences of mistreatment and prejudice – often coalescing around the perceived misuse of police powers such as stop and search.

KEYWORDS:

• Police
• policing
• riots
• disorder
• stop and search

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2074025/Theresa-May-tells-LSE-Stop-excusing-greedy-rioters-looking-instant-gratification.html#xzz2xAHpb6Cu (accessed 27 March 2014).

2 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070083/Police-fury-LSEs-bid-blame-summer-riots.html#ixzz2xAJtCahn (accessed 27 March 2014).

3 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070083/Police-fury-LSEs-bid-blame-summer-riots.html#ixzz2xAJtCahn (accessed 27 March 2014).

4 The suggestion was made in a speech to the House of Commons on 11 August 2011, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/riots-theresa-mays-speech-on-11-august-2011 (accessed 23 December 2014).

5 A small number of the 270 claimed only to have ‘observed’ the riots. In some cases this may have been the case; in others they were almost certainly involved but had decided, for whatever set of reasons, not to discuss their involvement when it came to the interview. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the 270 might reasonably be described as ‘rioters’.

6 In this connection covering anyone self-describing as Black/African/Caribbean/Black British.

7 Despite this the Daily Mail sought to challenge the credibility of the research by arguing that, to the contrary, the interviews conducted in Reading the riots had been entirely leading http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2072228/Apologists-mob.html. In the article the questions about policing noted by the Mail were all ‘closed’ questions asked of all respondents at the end of the otherwise open-ended interview.

8 In all cases it is respondents’ self-described ethnicity that is used.

9 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/riots-theresa-mays-speech-on-11-august-2011.

10 The attribution of the dictum to W.I. Thomas solely, despite the fact that the sentence appears in a book co-authored by Dorothy Swain Thomas, has been the subject of some controversy. The issue, and the rationale for the citation, is explained at its fullest in Merton (1995).