London riots
London is under attack. Last night’s scenes of violence and destruction are worse than anything I remember in my lifetime. What I think was most scary was that the police were simply overwhelmed, and did not have the resources to deal with the rampant criminality.
I got to see some of this first hand. I happened to be in Colliers Wood yesterday evening. One shop had been set on fire, and other shops had had windows smashed and were being looted. The police were present, but were not able to intervene in the looting. I saw police in riot gear guarding a petrol station. They had presumably taken the (no doubt very wise) decision that preventing a petrol station being set on fire was the most important use of their limited resources.
As a scientist, I want to be able to explain things. Here, I have to accept that my tools as a statistician are largely useless for doing so. Medical statistics is mostly about trying to draw generalisable conclusions from individual events. I’m pretty sure there are no generalisable conclusions that can be drawn from last night’s events. To explain last night’s events, we need the tools of social sciences.
I am by no means an expert in social sciences, although it is a subject that interests me, and I am currently studying part-time towards a “social sciences with economics” degree with the Open University. One thing I have learned already is that theories in social sciences are usually context-specific. In trying to understand what happened last night, it’s likely to be unwise to try to generalise. Last night’s violence was a collection of different pockets of violence, and even trying to explain what happened in Croydon in the same terms as explaining what happened in Ealing may well be over-generalising.
I don’t pretend to understand why such horrific violence erupted in London last night. Anybody who claims to be able to explain it at this stage is probably massively over-simplifying. But here are the sort of questions I hope social scientists will be able to answer when they have had a chance to reflect properly and gather some data:
- Clearly much of the criminal activity was based purely on personal greed, but were there other reasons as well? How common were those other reasons, and what were they?
- How many of those looting were habitual criminals who saw an opportunity, and how many were previously law-abiding people, drawn into criminality by the psychology of the mob?
- How does mob psychology manage to exert such a powerful influence in such situations?
- What factors in the way society is organised contribute to so many people turning to criminality?
- Were the reasons for the riots broadly similar in all areas of London, or were there important differences between the different areas where violence occurred?
- And most importantly, what societal measures could be taken to reduce the risk of this happening in the future?
This is a worrying time for London. My thoughts are with all the police officers who will have to put themselves in harm’s way this evening. I hope they remain safe.
Adam, I greatly enjoyed your blog on the riots. I'm sure such a balanced, thoughtful and open-minded commentary would never have found its way into the mainstream media. I know it's the task of pundits to express a point of view but almost everything I have read, and there's a lot of it about, has left me asking "really, is that so, how do you know?"
eg Frequent references are made to "gang culture" etc. Never mind what is "gang culture" and what is a "gang", how many of the looters etc were actually members of something that might be called a gang? Answer: we don't know.
Or what about the pillagers being "marginalised" and "dispossessed"? Leaving aside what these terms might mean, how many rioters fitted that descripition? Answer: we don't know
Or what about poor parenting, poverty, lack of discipline, unemployment, lack of opportunities, no stake in society, greed, need for excitement etc etc. A case can be made for all of these and commentators will select examples to support their particular point of view/prejudices (or those of their proprietors).
I look forward to a well-researched empirical analysis of the looters, their backgrounds and motivations, but until then I'll take anyone's theories with a large pinch of that stuff that gives me high blood pressure.
Anyway, for what they may be worth, here are my thoughts. It might be useful to invert the usual question and ask not why people "riot" but why most people don't. What was it that stopped you from joining in the looting in Colliers Wood? I suspect your answers would be similar to the answers of most people who were appalled by the mayhem that took place.
Here's another question. How many people, if they were confident of getting away with, let's say, an acquisitive crime, would not so so? If you thought you could steal/embezzle/defraud etc and not be caught how many people would not do so? Hard to say I know, but we do know that a huge proportion of MPs fiddled their expenses, though there were some honourable exceptions. We know that tax fraud is rife, as is benefit fraud. So there is a context to the looting from shops (ie it was crime people thought they could get away with, albeit often with an identified victim, unlike tax and expenses fraud). This does not of cause help us to understand the violence and arson.
Finally, The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett has been a hugely influential work for many people. It brings together masses of international research to demonstrate pretty conclusively that all manner of negative social indicators: crime, mental health, life expectancy, obesity etc etc are affected by levels of inequality in society. And if there is one thing about which there is agreement in modern Britain it is that though we might well have become wealthier as a society over the past 25 years, we sure as hell have become far far less equal. Correcting this would not be a panacea because there are none, but it would be a good place to begin.