Tottenham riots

Of course it's not only Tottenham, now. Amid the usual welter of worry, concern, condemnation I think three points are worth reiterting.

First, the proximate cause of this was the shooting of Mark Duggan and the (alleged) way the police refused to talk to those protesting on Saturday afternoon. Whatever the intentions of those involved in the rioting on Saturday and Sunday, I don't think we should lose sight of the fact that another Black Londoner has been killed by police, and his family deserve the fullest possible account of what happened as soon as possible.

Second, while you can understand the anger - in this part of London, of all places - nothing justifies people smashing up their own streets and torching their own neighbour's houses (I'd be very surprised if, as David Lammy claimed on TV yesterday, many if not most of the rioters on Saturday came from well outside Tottenham). At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, this is not going to help. As pointed out here it takes a very peculiar mindset indeed to think that burning down the post office on Tottenham High Road is the first step toward righting some of the historic wrongs suffered by this and many other parts of Britain. And there can be little doubt that many of the people involved were in it for the loot, plain and simple.

But, third, even if most of the rioters were just in it for the loot, and even if Mark Duggan was guilty as hell (which would still not justify his death unless he really was shooting back), this still does not absolve the police, the criminal justice system and society more widely of all responsibility for what's going on here. People are not born rioters or looters, they are pushed into these roles by a whole range of external forces as well as internal motivations. Each individual makes a decision to break a window - but how they end up in that street, on that night, in those circumstances and with that state of mind involves economic and social factors far bigger than themselves.

Take two quick examples. On the one hand, the police have genuinely tried to improve their relationships with communities in places such as Tottenham. Things are certainly better, by an large, than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. But some police practices and policies continue to undermine such efforts. I'm thinking in particular of the disproportionaliy in stop and search activity experienced by young ethnic minority and working class men and their communities, and all the negative consequences this disproportionality has for trust and legitimacy. Stop and search is frequently experienced as unfair by those on the receiving end, and this undermines their trust in the police, their willingness to cooperate with officers, and their sense that police can and should work for and with them, rather than against them. This wouldn't matter so much if stop and search was more evenly spread across the population. But it's not, so what happens is a concentration of these experiences in very specific social groups. People increasingly see the police as an occupying power rather than a community resource, they cease to trust what police and other agencies tell them, and they increasingly turn toward ways of solving problems - including those that implicate the police - that put them on a collision course with the law. Naturally, stop and search is just one example: there are others, and all parts of the CJS are implicated.

On the other hand, police and the CJS should not take all or even most of the heat here. There are systemic problems in places like Tottenham that go far beyond the activities of police officers. Long term unemployment and attendent poverty undermines people's sense that they have a stake in society. Add to this a society that celebrates wealth and consumption above all else and you have, I think, a pretty explosive mixture. In particular, in areas that do not grant much legitimacy to the law and where people don't think that the 'system' represents and works for them, is it really surprising that some individuals start to think that the only way they have of obtaining what they want is taking it by force. This holds in the political arena as well - when people feel their legitimate complaints are ignored, they will move increasingly toward more expressive and ultimately violent ways of getting their point across.

These riots demonstrate (again) that we need to move beyond simple condemnation of the people involved from one side, and of the police from the other, to think a bit more deeply about how that boy on that street came to be there and throw a rock or steal a pair of trainers.