Community leaders: A device for warranting versions of crowd events

Abstract

This paper examines the use of the category ‘community leaders’ in media accounts of the ‘uprising’ or ‘riot’ which occured in Handsworth, England in September, 1985. The analysis concentrates on three features. First, it identifies a category-based attribute of ‘knowledgeability about the community’, which can be exploited in media accounts for warranting factual claims. Second, it shows ‘community leaders’ are taken to possess category-constitutive features entailing potency and the ability to initiate change in the community, which can be exploited in calls for remedial action by politicians. Furthermore, this change is characterised through a limited set of adjectives and metaphors from the ‘community repertoire’ (Potter and Reicher (1987)). Third, it examines the role of ‘community leaders’ in legitimating causal versions, which, in turn, form a basis for blamings. It is argued that the recurrent use of the category ‘community leaders’ in media and political discourse concerning crowd violence is partly a consequence of its provision of a powerful combination of a strongly inferential categorization and weak incumbency criteria - these make claims warranted by the category particularly resistant to criticism.