Four days in August: the UK riots

Abstract

In August 2011, England experienced widespread public disorders in sixty-six locations following a protest at the shooting dead of a black man in north London by the police. The author examines, inter alia, reports from the Metropolitan Police Service, academics Steve Reicher and Cliff Stott, Tottenham MP David Lammy, the Guardian/London School of Economics, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and the Ministry of Justice to analyse the riots in London and other cities. He looks at the shooting of Mark Duggan, the immediate trigger, the riots’ deeper causes and the arrests that followed. Instead of a formal inquiry, the government set up the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, which has now reported, blaming the breakdown of families and lack of character in the young, rather than structural issues. While it asks for the community to work out, with the police, ways to reduce the impact of stop and search, the Metropolitan Police Service asks that stops be linked to its intelligence gathering; a sure way, argues the author, not to deal with the alienation of the young.