reaction
DESCRIPTION
Reaction - 2012TRANSCRIPT
RE AC T ION
typefaces: consolas, courier new, verdana and ffnewberlin
printed at Copies Plus, Vancouver, and Emily Carr’s Digital Output Center
bound at Emily Carr’s Digital Output Center
this publication was produced by Jean Chisholm for COMD 305, Emily Carr University of Art & Design, November 2012
edited and designed by Jean Chisholm
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reviewing cultureissue 1.0
RIOTSresponses to the Vancouver and London 2011 riots
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table of contents
6 editor’s letter
PART 1 VANCOUVER
10 Trouble in Vancouver’s StreetsJeff Z. Klein and Bob Mackin
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14 Of course the Vancouver rioters were hockey fansBruce Arthur
PART 2 LONDON
18 Big Brother isn’t watching youRussell Brand
+comments
24 Darcus Howe TranscriptionsBBC News
26 Reddit thread responses
PART 3 RIOT REACTIONS
48 Everyone’s gone madAndrew Coyne
52 Why people can’t help themselvesAndrew Potter
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6 REACTION
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When conceiving this publication the first and fore-most question that needed addressing was why?
Why produce yet another printed manuscript of cultural musings when we can access this information easily and cheaply online? What value can be gained from the physical experience of holding a book and turning its pages? How can we interpret the presented information differently?
Reaction is publication that reproduces online content in a phys-ical form. It is a publication that experiments with paper, layout, and visuals to invite a different interpretation of the material. What was once a fleeting scrolled-through experience is now a perma-nent tome of viewpoints and comments. The forgotten debates and conversations are presented in a way that allows us to re-think and re-evaluate the events that briefly defined our culture.
Issue 1 focuses on the riots that occurred in Vancouver and London during the summer of 2011. Occurring during a year of global rioting (the Arab spring in particular), these riots compara-tively seemed to lack the same purpose or motivation. Appearing to simply arise from a love and fever of looting and chaos, the Vancouver and London riots inspired numerous editorials and com-ments all hoping to place the blame, define the cause, or state that there was no cause at all. This issue curates those responses into a connected context. No conclusion is reached here, but hopefully an understanding of our own reaction can be met.
jean chisholm
november 2012
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1
wednesday june 15, 7:45pm-midnight, 2011
stanley cup game 7: Boston Bruins vs. Vancouver Canucksscore: 4–0155,000 attendees
riot breaks 7:45pmGeorgia street; Grandville street; Robson street 100,000,000 photos; 1,200-1,600 hours of video
117 arrests; 140 injuries; 4 stabbings
vancouverwednesday june 15, 7:45pm-midnight, 2011
stanley cup game 7: Boston Bruins vs. Vancouver Canucksscore: 4–0155,000 attendees
riot breaks 7:45pmGeorgia street; Grandville street; Robson street 100,000,000 photos; 1,200-1,600 hours of video
117 arrests; 140 injuries; 4 stabbings
reaction
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10 REACTION
The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority said that one person was in critical condition and that up to 139 others were treated at two downtown hospitals. Many had suffered tear gas exposure, the authority said, but there were at least eight stabbings, some cases of major trauma, and “head injuries, fractures and cuts.”
The riots stunned the police, the city and the nation, all of which had recalled rioting after the Vancouver Canucks’ defeat in the 1994 finals to the New York Rangers. The provincial government had ordered all liquor stores downtown closed in the afternoon before the last two games. The police had put a $1.3 million security plan in place, and issued repeated assurances that there would be no repeat.
Trouble in Vancouver’s Streets After Defeat
New York TimesBy JEFF Z. KLEIN and BOB MACKIN
June 16, 2011
BRITISH COLUMBIA — In one of the worst episodes of rioting Canada has seen in decades, hockey fans angry over losing the Stanley Cup clashed with police officers, set vehicles ablaze, smashed windows and looted and burned stores throughout the downtown area here on Wednesday night.
11vancouver 11
comments
TLNYCJune 16th, 201110:45 am
I don’t know what the city of Vancou-ver was thinking. The CBC said that close to 100,000 people were gathered in the downtown area to watch the game on big screens - lots of them drinking or soon to be. What did they expect? There would probably been mayhem if they’d won. If you happen to go out on game nights of the finals, the streets are deserted but you can practically follow the score by listening to the yells and screams coming out of windows. Anyway, hockey riots aren’t exclusive to Vancouver. People rioted in the streets of Montreal when Maurice Richard was banned from a few games.recommended by 15 readers
TinaCanadaJune 16th, 201110:46 am
This didn’t have much to do with hockey. Lots of young guys turn up specifically hoping there will be a chance for some mayhem and maybe an opportunity to steal something in the confusion. The American Apparel store had the idea -- they boarded up their win-dows in advance of the street party.Both tasing people and rub-ber bullets have turned out to be fatal, so all the police do is try to stop it from getting worse. The real change is the everyone on the scene is filming. Each act of violence is surrounded by a ring of guys holding up phones.recommended by 22 readers
FredmarshfieldJune 16th, 201110:47 am
With a national motto of “this is what we live for” coupled with in-vesting all of one’s emotional eggs into one basket, coupled again with a sport that promotes fighting, it’s no wonder there is such a fallout.recommended by 18 readers
But Thursday night, with the last game of the Stanley Cup finals drawing to a close and the home team trail-ing 4-0, some of the estimated 100,000 fans watching the game on giant televisions in free public viewing areas downtown began a four-hour rampage, leaving a trail of destruction, looting and violence that far outstripped the melees of 17 years ago.
Vancouver’s mayor, Gregor Robertson, blamed “a small group of people intent on breaking the law and smear-ing the reputation of the city,” but images from the riot show that many of the people looting, destroying property and fighting were wearing hockey jerseys and did not cover their faces to avoid identification.
The police and Mr. Robertson said that video images and photos would be used to track down and punish rioters.
“It’s absolutely disgraceful and shameful and by no means represents the city of Vancouver,” the mayor said. “We’ve had a great run in the playoffs here, great cele-brations, and what’s happened tonight is despicable.”
One amateur video sent to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed a man trying to stop rioters from breaking into a department store. He was swiftly thrown to the ground by a crowd and kicked and beaten. The extent of the man’s injuries are unknown.
Alyssa Polinsky, a spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health, said that St. Paul’s Hospital had treated five people with stab wounds and Vancouver General Hospital had treated three for similar wounds. St. Paul’s Hospital reported treating about 60 people in its emer-gency room in a two-hour span for pepper spray and tear gas exposure and other injuries. Dr. Eric Grafstein, head of emergency there, said that those requiring surgery included fractured ankles and legs, a broken jaw and a collapsed lung.
The police declared some of downtown a riot zone, giv-ing them sweeping powers of arrest, and officers used pepper spray, tear gas and flash bombs to move thou-sands of people who had ignored directives to leave immediately. Police units from surrounding municipal-ities — some from as far away as Abbotsford, some 40 miles to the southeast — were called in as well as members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
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oceanblue26Ottawa
June 16th, 201112:00 pm
I’m so ashamed to be Canadian right now!
We like to think we’ve come a long way as a species but we’re stuck in
this pathetic tribal mentality (the tribes being sports teams). Without
the outlet of war, men (or at least Canadian men) seem to unleash their
pent up aggression through sports victories and defeats. Maybe we should
send all these guys to Afghanistan. Pathetic and disgraceful. Evolve already!
And let’s stop being so obsessive about a stupid child’s game payed with
stick and a round rubber thingie.recommended by 34 readers
JasmineVictoria, BC Canada
June 16th, 201112:00 pm
As a Canuck fan and more importantly a Canadian this behaviour is disgusting. It needs to be known that these young thugs that started these riots were not
fans and were just looking for an excuse to start trouble. Obviously this does not excuse their behaviour, what they did is
just disgusting. But you cannot lump the majority of the Vancouver poplulation
with the few who want to start a riot. I hope that they are found and charged accordingly; game or no game, win or
no win this is completely unacceptable.recommended by 15 readers
Academia NutCanada
June 16th, 20111:04 pm
Well we HAD 100,000s of people watching tine Olympics downtown....
and it was all peaceful and lovely. Similarly the other games in the play-offs attracted tons to the downtown core to watch together. This is why
we actually thought we could do it in this final game. Sadly, some yahoos
have ruined it for the rest of us.This shameful chaos was a compo-sition of alcohol and youthful idiots
who should have stayed home. People had been drinking since 11am in the
restaurants and bars (I was there for a meeting, I saw the line ups to get into
the bars). Whether the Canucks won or lost, I think it would have happened.
recommended by 13 readers
Inside Rogers Arena, the mood briefly turned ugly during the postgame trophy presentations, although that anger was aimed mostly at the National Hockey League commis-sioner, Gary Bettman, a man widely disliked in Canada for his perceived indifference to the concerns of the league’s Canadian teams.
As Mr. Bettman walked onto the ice on a red carpet to present the Conn Smythe Trophy to the Bruins goalie Tim Thomas and the Stanley Cup to Boston’s captain, Zdeno Chara, the commissioner’s voice was drowned out by booing from many of the roughly 10,000 fans who remained. Several drinks were hurled onto the ice near where Mr. Bettman was standing, but none struck him.
The C.B.C.’s television coverage shifted quickly from the Bruins’ postgame celebrations at the arena to the dis-turbances outside. The C.B.C. showed images of young men leaping on police cruisers, trying to shatter their wind-shields, and hurling debris at police trucks. Some police cars were set on fire.
Bonfires were set on street corners as groups of people, many in Canucks jerseys, threw temporary fencing at offi-cers in riot gear. A mounted police squad tried to regain control among a cluster of federal buildings, while unrest spread to the Granville Mall nightclub zone and the Robson Street shopping district.
Not far from the Sutton Place Hotel, the N.H.L.’s head-quarters during the Stanley Cup finals, people were seen running with electronics and a reporter was offered a camera, with price tags still on it, for purchase.
Service on the SkyTrain, the city’s subway and elevated train service, was disrupted for hours, and buses and ferry service to downtown was also shut down. Bridges leading into downtown were closed; fires burned while fire crews waited for the police restore order. Some firefighters trying to fight blazes were attacked and forced to retreat.
Major sports-related violence is relatively rare in Canada. In Montreal in 1955, there were riots after the N.H.L. suspended Maurice Richard, Quebec’s greatest hockey hero, after he was involved in a violent confrontation with a member of the Boston Bruins. That city has seen other hockey riots, if on a smaller scale, since then including one in 2008.
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Catherine BarrollCanadaJune 16th, 20111:07 pm
Just as an update...check out the Clean Up Vancouver page on Facebook at least 13, 000 volunteers showed up early this morning to help the city clean up the mess,with more to come This is my city, and this is the Vancouver I know.recommended by 50 readers
MichaelVancouver, BCJune 16th, 201111:03 pm
Let’s just be perfectly clear what happened here. There is a small population of young men (mostly from outside of Downtown) who like to cause trouble and know that since Vancouver rioted after game 7 in 1994, it could easily happen again. So when we lost, they did just that. Vancouver is still a beautiful, progres-sive, world-class city. Hockey and politics are not to blame. Booze and testosterone, well sure... And I com-mend the police. They wisely chose to not escalate the $1m of property damage and 1 critical injury to some-thing that could have been much worse. Its a beautiful day here today and the actions of these idiots are already being cleaned up by those of us who love this city. We are putting this behind us quickly.recommended by 3 readers
In contrast, the mood in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics was peaceful, even though thousands of peo-ple were in the streets to celebrate each victory for Team Canada on its path to the men’s hockey gold medal. The city earned worldwide praise for its good-natured hockey fans and for the restraint of its police.
“We were just on the world stage during the Olympics, and people were speaking highly of Vancouver,” said Geoff Matthews, 34, who lives downtown. “It’s a great city and country to live in, and to see this, it’s heartbreaking.”
Gerald Narciso contributed reporting.
14 REACTION
not the guys in the Pavel Bure or Alex Burrows or Roberto Luongo jerseys who rampaged through Vancouver’s downtown core, smashing windows and looting and setting cars on fire. Surely they were all just dead-enders, anarchists, profes-sional felons. Makes sense.Except it doesn’t, and the attempt to
peddle the fallacy is not going to help Vancouver move past whatever sickness ails that city.Vancouver Chief of Police Jim Chu told
reporters Thursday, after the riot that marred the end of Vancouver’s chase for the Stanley Cup, that the rioters were “young men and women disguised as Canucks fans who were actually criminals and anarchists. These were people who came equipped with masks, goggles and gasoline, even fire extinguishers that they would use as weapons.”Pretty organized for anarchists, when
you think about it. And so many of them didn’t even hide their faces, which is probably another disguise. And they
Of course the Vancouver rioters were hockey fansNational PostBruce Arthur
Jun 16, 2011 8:16 PM ET | Last Updated: Jun 17, 2011 5:15 PM ET
never seem to pop up anywhere else. Damned organized anarchists. There oughta be a law.Ridiculous. Surely there was a crimi-
nal element in the crowd, but to say that there were no Canucks fans among the rioters is like saying there was nobody from Vancouver among the rioters. It’s convenient, and impossible.It’s terribly convenient to say that
the thousands of people who acted badly did not represent Vancouver, or were not even from Vancouver, or were not Canucks fans. Even if they were wearing Canucks merchandise, some said, they were not Canucks fans, or they were bandwagon jumpers. Real fans wouldn’t do that.People love to believe that only good
people are part of their group. But to say that being young and drunk and aggressively stupid does not make you a real fan is a fantasy, bent on self- protection; in an awful lot of cases, all those things make people more ardent fans, if anything.And that is sports. Most sports fans
are young men, and some of them are full of empty machismo or inchoate rage or
Surely, none of them were hockey fans. Not the guy in the vintage Trevor Linden jersey posing next to the burning truck in front of the Post Office;
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the desire to add meaning to lives that they deem insufficiently meaningful. This is true everywhere.But in some places that machismo
and rage and nihilism can find fuller throat, for whatever reason. Edmonton and Calgary’s hooliganism was limited to non-existent in 2006 and 2004, when they lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup; Montreal has made the reflexive burning of police cars a sort of tradition, win or lose.And Vancouver, for whatever reason,
appears to have placed itself in a dif-ferent category altogether, with a sad burgeoning tradition of its own.You can blame the outdoor viewing areas
that pulled 100,000 people downtown like a magnet, but those didn’t exist in 1994, and there was a riot. You can blame some sort of vague alienation regarding the soaring real estate prices in the city, which have deprived an entire generation of the opportunity to own property, but houses were relatively cheap in ‘94, and there was a riot.You can blame the Canucks for what-
ever sins of comportment they have committed — owner Francesco Aquilini reportedly cursed repeatedly at sev-eral members of the media after the game — but in 1994 the Canucks were a lovable underdog, a happy tugboat of a team, and there was a riot. You could blame the same stupid slice of the greater community, except the rioters of 1994 are middle-aged now, and the vast majority of the faces that made the news were young. This was another gen-eration. And there was a riot. Again.No, there is something else here. To
be clear, we are not just talking about Vancouver proper, but the entire Lower Mainland and beyond. But as someone who was born and raised there, I do not understand the virulent strain that infects the Canucks fan base, the vast
majority of which is in no way connected to these people. I don’t understand the seeming prevalence of keyboard bullies who unleashed a stomach-turning torrent of abuse towards former player Theoren Fleury after he rather innocuously pre-dicted that their team would lose in the first round.No, I don’t understand why this strain
of poison leaches from a city that, while it has a bright line between rich and poor that grows brighter every day, is generally a good place. You can correctly note that the Olympics were remarkably peaceful, but not only did Canada win the men’s hockey gold to cap a triumphant two weeks, but so much of that crowd was not just local — that was Canada on those streets as much as it was Vancouver.This was different. People said there
were rioters ready to cause trouble win or lose, but every gathering after Canucks games up until Game 7 was a peaceful affair, with tens of thousands streaming through downtown. This time, some of those same people propelled or followed the herd, looking for infamy and adrenaline and meaning. They wanted to smash something. They did. Only they really know why.So no, those rioters do not repre-
sent the majority of Canucks fans, or Vancouverites, many of whom responded by cleaning up their downtown Thursday, and reporting the thugs. But the vandals are a part of that group and that place. They are a part of the mosaic. It’s a terribly beautiful city, but a part of it, when it reveals itself, makes you sick.
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Londonaugust 6-10, 2011
august 4: Mark Duggan shot dead by policeaugust 7: protests in Tottenham breakriots spread across London:
HackneyBrixtonChingfordPeckhamEnfieldBatterseaCroydon EalingEast HamOxford Circus
august 8-10: riots break in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester3,100 arrests + 1000 charges
3443 crimes. 5 deaths. 16 injuries. £ 200,000,000 property damage.
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Londonaugust 6-10, 2011
august 4: Mark Duggan shot dead by policeaugust 7: protests in Tottenham breakriots spread across London:
HackneyBrixtonChingfordPeckhamEnfieldBatterseaCroydon EalingEast HamOxford Circus
august 8-10: riots break in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester3,100 arrests + 1000 charges
3443 crimes. 5 deaths. 16 injuries. £ 200,000,000 property damage.
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18 REACTION
Big Brother isn’t watching you
Dismissing rioters as mindless is futile rhetoric. However unacceptable the UK riots, we need to ask why they are happening
Russell Brand The Guardian
Thursday 11 August 2011 20.00 BST
I no longer live in London. I’ve been transplanted to
Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such
good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might
think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my
homeland. Even the results of Britain’s Got Ice-Factor
may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I
am self-banished.
london 19
To be honest when I lived in England I didn’t really care too much for the fabricated theat-rics of reality TV. Except when I worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interest-ing. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that’s the nature of the medium; as it whiz-zes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as if Nadia’s triumph took place during the sil-ver jubilee, we had a street party.Early in that series there was an incident
of excitement and high tension. The testos-teronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it’s all com-ing back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police were called, tapes were edited and the carni-val rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent of the violence, I quoted a British first world war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: “You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment’s notice.”“Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing we
want you to say the opposite of,” said the channel’s representative.This week’s riots are sad and fright-
ening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my coun-trymen, then this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succu-
Trulls
12 August 2011 9:08AM
There will be no attempt to find the causes of the problems or deal with them. Politicians have no inter-est. You are so right Russel.
naid12 August 2011 9:15AM
They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thingYet another mindless comment i see writ-ten all over the guardian by idiotic parrots.i’m no fan of thatcher, but it seems to me that every single trainer grabbing thieving looter wasn’t even a glint in the eye during the thatcher years. every single one is a child of labour. 13 years of labour.so although its convenient to blame Cameron (but ultimately completely wrong), the real fault lies with the last government.as Milliband said this morning, “New Labour were better at rebuilding the fabric of our country than the ethic of our country”and there you have it. the reason for our Riots. money lust, consumerism, celebrity emulation, mindlessness.all that is shit. take responsibility for your children and this wouldnt’ happen. look to the state or others to nurture your children and you only have yourself to blame.
20 REACTION
lence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey ol’ Boris came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over.
In fact, it isn’t my absence from the ter-ritory of London that bothers me; it’s my absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I’ve lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I’m not there now.I feel proud to be English, proud to be a
Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities.I have spoken to mates in London and
Manchester and they sound genuinely fright-ened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any political idealism or rationalisa-tion. But I can’t, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the under-standable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people’s shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated.
The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan has spo-ken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant.The only question I can legitimately ask is: why
is this happening? Mark Duggan’s death has been badly handled but no one is contest-ing that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unac-ceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful
use of the planet’s fastdepleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more
ginghino12 August 2011 9:16AM
Our society is bankrupt and people need to wake up rather than refer to
the fascist reponse of ‘rats’ ‘cockroach-es’ ‘scum’ ‘animals’ that should be
cleansed from our streets. The back-lash is becoming more frightening than
the riots.
naid12 August 2011 9:21AM
@ginghinois it? it the backlash really that scary?
as scary as a poor 68 year old man be-ing murdered or a young student being robbed under the guise of being helped.
when will people like you wake up. look at the picture above - do you see
poverty? i mean real - one meal a day if you’re lucky - poverty? do you see
lack of clothing, food, shelter?material wealth is not the only form of
wealth and guidance, love and oppor-tunity are equally important. but let’s not pretend that any of these kids are doing it because of cuts or cameron or
the poor state of education.they’re doing it because they can get
away with it. did you listen to those involved being interviewed? they re-
sponded that they wanted to show that they can.
Beziers7212 August 2011 9:34AM
“These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one.”
The Asian and Turkish families who defended their shops and
streets weren’t given a commu-nity either. They made one.
2121 london
taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable”
it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.Unless on the news tomorrow it’s revealed
that there’s been a freaky “criminal creat-ing” chemical leak in London and Manchester andLiverpool and Birmingham that’s causing young people to spontaneously and simul-taneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol’ brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn’t – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.I should here admit that I have been
arrested for criminal damage for my part in anti-capitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hostile even. I was intrigued by the anarchist “Black bloc”, hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football “casuals” who’d turn up because the veneer of the protest’s idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill.That was never my cup of tea though. For
one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag mak-ing the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner.I found those protests exciting, yes, because I
was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I sup-pose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with.
MrOblong12 August 2011 9:35AM
i’m no fan of thatcher, can’t you just admit that you are. It would save a lot of time.From the late 70’s the hard right running the Conservative party wanted to destroy the post war consensus. They succeed-ed in the most radical way possible and completely shifted the agenda from the national interest to self interest. This also appealed to morally bankrupt peo-ple like Tony Blair and his acolytes who then shaped the Labour party in the same failed ideologies as Thatcher and Major.So here we are. 30 years on. Still wait-ing for the ‘trickle down’ and burbling on about ‘community’ after doing our best to pretend that society didn’t exist.
tipex12 August 2011 9:36AM
this article doesn’t make any sense
Bacchi12 August 2011 9:38AM
Shame, though, that Russell feels obliged to spend the first third of the piece disqual-ifying himself from talking with authority about this issue. Although in many ways refreshing, it’s no doubt a consequence of the poisonous sputum frothing from the berserk mouths of some of the right-wing sex-starved tosspots around here.
naid12 August 2011 9:43AM
@Mr Oblong,it wouldn’t save time, but it would make your life easier.don’t be so naive. the trickle down isnt’ happening? it’s happening in front of our eyes.ignorant, thoughtless f*ckers bring ignorant thoughtless f*ck-ing children into this world..you can blame the last 30 years as much as you want, but everyone has the chance to start afresh every day.
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I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex coun-
cil (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if I had been deprived of that long list of privileges.That state of deprivation though is, of
course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can’t afford what’s in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consum-erism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you
wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corpo-rate messages. No wonder they have their fucking
hoods up.I remember Cameron saying “hug a hoodie”
but I haven’t seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don’t vote, they’ve realised it’s pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the “we don’t give a toss about you” party.Politicians don’t represent the inter-
ests of people who don’t vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected. Cameron only spoke out against News International when it became evident to us, US, the people, not to him (like Rose West, “He must’ve known”) that the newspapers Murdoch controlled were happy to desecrate the dead in the pursuit of another exploitative, distracting story.Why am I surprised that these young peo-
ple behave destructively, “mindlessly”, motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bank-ers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then
hotfeet12 August 2011 9:45AM
Perhaps our kids need to go abroad for a little while and see how life really is for the disadvantaged. No need to go to Somalia. Go to Greece. I still think
the UK offers fantastic opportunities for those who want to take them. Unfortu-nately, there is a culture in the council
states of defeatism. They can’t see what many young asian women can: a career
in medicine, to give an example
1234Ramones12 August 2011 9:46AM
Money makes the world go round the world go round the world go round.
30 years ago I believed in the likes of Joe Strummer and their message, anyone ped-
dling similar nowadays is a bullshitter and a cynic.
You think it’s funny? Turning rebellion into money.
beerhoi7412 August 2011 9:49AM
@nald - appealing yet simplistic response- i presume you mean ‘lock em up’ @ 38k a
year which is 8k more than eton school fees- don’t really think that is solution.
i say give them bursaries to study at the private schools.- let the politicians children
come face to face with the ‘unacceptable’ underclass- at least we may end up with a
more representative parliament - in 20 years time.
MrOblong12 August 2011 9:50AM
naid12 August 2011 9:43AM
@Mr Oblong, it wouldn’t save time, but it would make your life easier.
don’t be so naive. the trickle down isnt’ hap-pening? it’s happening in front of our eyes.
Is it indeed. I suspect your ‘trickle down’ is provided by your parents.
This neo-liberal experiment, Is a failure. The problem stems people (like yourself) des-
perately hoping that we can return to 1981.
23london
again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that’s why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a pairs of trainers.These young people have no sense of community
because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s men-tor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.If we don’t want our young people to tear
apart our communities then don’t let peo-ple in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.As you have by now surely noticed, I
don’t know enough about politics to pon-der a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing cor-porate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alien-ation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know, the solu-tion is all around us and it isn’t political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we
can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posses. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.As we sweep away the mistakes made in the selfish,
nocturnal darkness we must ensure that, amidst the broken glass and sadness, we don’t sweep away the youth lost amongst the shards in the shadows cast by the new dawn.
Russell Brand is donating his fee for this article to a clean-up project.
chelseaexile12 August 2011 9:52AM
Thank fuck the football starts tomorrow....
Plogster12 August 2011 9:58AM
@Naid“does it strike you as odd that the young people have headed straight for shopping centres, stealing jeans, trainers and flat screens?i’m surprised, i thought i’d see protests outside schools or libraries set for closure, but no - just a chance to grab some gear”Nicely put and absolutely on the money!
teigngreen12 August 2011 10:03AM
A very well crafted and articulate piece - now go on Russel, be brave and learn how to use a razor/shaver.
24 REACTION
[Fiona Armstrong]Riots have raised question on how best to deal with rioting and disorder on our streets and now from _ _ _ _ _ and no, I’ve just spoken to Patrick _ _ _ _ _ , I’m now joined with Darcus Howe, who is a Writer and Broadcaster and we can speak with him now, Darcus Howe is right now in Croydon. Darcus Howe are you shocked by what you seen last night?
[Darcus Howe] No. Not at all. I have been liv-ing in London for 50 years. There are so many different moods and moments. But what I was certain about, listening to my grandson, and my son, is that something very very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you look at young Blacks, and young whites, with a discern-ing eye, and a careful hearing, they have been telling us and we would not listen, that what is happening in this coun-try, to them, this what is.
[Fiona Armstrong]Mr. Howe if I can just – If I can just stop you Mr. Howe for a moment, your not – you say you’re not shocked, does this mean that you condone what happened in your community, last night?[Darcus Howe] Source: LYBIO.netI condone – if I – Of Course Not! What am I going to condone it for? What I am not – what I’m concerned about more than anything else,
there’s a young man called Mark Duggan. He has parents, he has brothers, he has sisters, and two yards away from where he lives, a police officer blew his head off.
[Fiona Armstrong]Well Mr Howe – we have to
[Darcus Howe]Blew his face off with a – let me finish
[Fiona Armstrong]Mr Howe – we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that. We don’t know what happened to Mr Duggan. We have to wait for the police report on it.
[Darcus Howe] I – I understand – Mr. Duggan is dead. You don’t have to wait for an inquiry!
[Fiona Armstrong]If I can take you on a lit-tle bit, you were talking about your grandson, you were talking about young people
[Darcus Howe]Young people
[Fiona Armstrong] (silent)
[Darcus Howe]They have been stopping and searching young Blacks for no rea-son at all. I have a grandson, he’s an angel, and he began to think when he was coming of age, when
Darcus Howe TranscriptionDarcus Howe – London Riots – The BBC Will Never Replay This – Send It Out
25london
the police slapped him up against the wall, and searched him. And he had thought he now had a gun star.
[Darcus Howe] I asked him the other day, I pro-pose of a sense that something was going seriously wrong in this country. I asked him how many times have the police searched you. He said: “Papa, I can’t count there’s so many times”. (inaudible)
[Fiona Armstrong]Mr Howe, that may well have hap-pened and if you say it did – I – I am not going to again say you. But that is not an excuse to go out rioting and cause the sort of damage that we’ve been see-ing over the past few days.
[Darcus Howe]Where were you in 1991 in Brixton?
[Fiona Armstrong](silent) Mr. Howe.
[Darcus Howe] I don’t call it rioting, I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapton, it’s happening in Liverpool. It’s happening in Port of Spain, Trinidad. And that is the nature of the hysterical moment.
[Fiona Armstrong]Mr. Howe. If I can just ask you, you are not a stranger to riots yourself, I under-stand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself?
[Darcus Howe] I’m not a – I have never taken part in a single riot. I have been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict. And have some respect for an old West Indian negro, instead of accusing me of being a rioter. Because I – you don’t want me to get abusive – you just sound idiotic. Have some respect! Have – have grandchildren
[Fiona Armstrong]Darcus Howe, thank you very much for joining us from Croydon, Darcus Howe, the writer and broadcaster.
[Reporter]Ok, there has been a huge knock on …
[Camera Person] He doesn’t know what to do, cause she sounds like an idiot!
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submitted 1 year ago by Apaz
[–]retardKiwi 1490 points 1 year ago*
This interview seems to make it painfully obvious the narrative the media is trying to create. That
these rioters are scum who stand for nothing, and that by even considering their motivation, you are
no better than they. She even suggests that he condones the crime simply because he isn’t surprised
that there would be a breaking point. This doesn’t surprise me at all.
What does surprise me is the amount of people here on reddit that buy that without giving an ounce
of critical thought. Any rational person can understand cause and effect. It isn’t hard to imagine
that something, even as unforgivable as these riots, has a cause at its root. To turn a blind eye to
what that might be, and not even consider WHY these things have happened is irresponsible
and stupid.
The top comments in this very thread are ones condemning this man as a loon and trivializing the
valid points he made. Where is your sense of reason reddit? You really can’t even consider that
things may be bleak for these people? That they feel helpless in the “system” and that motivates
this behavior?
Stop acting like any attempt to look past the crimes and into the cause of this issue means we con-
done it. No rational person condones their actions. That doesn’t mean you cannot examine why they
are committing them.
/rant
[–]Rahms 705 points 1 year ago
the fact that there is a growing sub-culture in English society has been well known for years, and
there has been millions spent on trying to prevent it from doing so. Academies, youth schemes, all
kinds of sports facilities.... and it simply doesn’t work. You can’t help people who don’t want to be
helped, and the problem is they then go and have 3+ kids by the age of 25 anyways and those kids
are even more fucked up and harder to help. Of course there’s a reason behind it, it doesn’t mean
it’s a good one.
[–]rockstarfr
uitpunch 958 points 1 year ago*
This guy is right, I went to one of the worst schools in the country, in London, and I recognize the
mindless, violent yob-type in these riots as a lot of the people I went to school with.
They were raised in vicious, moral-less homes with a self-entitlement “give it to me now” mentality.
University is for pussies, 9-5 jobs are for pussies, it’s all about getting the cash and the bling
NOW. There were 10 of us, out of 120, who ended up going to Uni. The rest are out on those street,
dead, in prison, or fucking estate agents.
Don’t you fucking people talk like you know what’s going on, intellectualizing and looking for some
‘deeper’ meaning to all of this. It’s as simple as Greed. Take it from someone who was bought up
with these scum but managed to get away.
[–]rockstarfr
uitpunch 958 points 1 year ago*
This guy is right, I went to one of the worst schools in the country, in London, and I recognize the
mindless, violent yob-type in these riots as a lot of the people I went to school with.
They were raised in vicious, moral-less homes with a self-entitlement “give it to me now” mentality.
University is for pussies, 9-5 jobs are for pussies, it’s all about getting the cash and the bling
NOW. There were 10 of us, out of 120, who ended up going to Uni. The rest are out on those street,
dead, in prison, or fucking estate agents.
Don’t you fucking people talk like you know what’s going on, intellectualizing and looking for some
‘deeper’ meaning to all of this. It’s as simple as Greed. Take it from someone who was bought up
with these scum but managed to get away.
[–]onlyAA 423 points 1 year ago
“They were raised in vicious, moral-less homes with a self-entitlement ‘give it tome now’ mentality.”
Uh, that is one of the “deeper meanings”, I do believe...
[–]rockstarfr
uitpunch 215 points 1 year ago
Nah man, you got people like Darcas Howe running their own agenda about Stop & Search, the
marginalisation and victimisation of the black youth, the ‘socieconomic’ decay, the two-tier
society and all that bullshit flying about.
When it is simply just shit parent(s) who are too lazy to raise their kids as human beings,
with morals and the ability to delay gratification resulting in feral scum who only know how
to follow their immediate instincts.
Why are they shit parent(s)? Fuck knows - that’s a question that can’t be answered by the
likes of Darcus Howe or Random J. Redditor who just want to intellectualise or give a shit
about respect or how they come off.
[–]DrunkenPrayer 262 points 1 year ago
My 55 year old white father has been stopped and searched before as have I and has as
my younger brother (all white). It’s very little to do with colour and a lot to do with
class or even just being in a certain area where crime is higher. I live in a fairly
middle class area and have never been bothered but if I go to visit my mates up on the
council estate 9/10 times when I’m walking home I get stopped and searched. Of course
if you live in one of these areas it builds resentment.
[–]dia
bloblanco 57 points 1 year ago
Why are they shit parent(s)?
You answered your own question:
the marginalisation and victimisation of the black youth, the ‘socieconomic’ decay,
the two-tier society
[–]Lespaul42 355 points 1 year ago
I think the problem people are having with this debate is that the two sides of it aren’t
really against each other. The one side is saying “These rioters are criminals” and the other
side says “These riots are happening for a reason!” both of these are obviously true and not
at all at odds with each other. The rioters are by a very higher percentage thugs who are
stealing simply because they want things... there may be a few who feel that they are doing
has a message but I would be surprised if that is even a single percentage.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason the riots happened it isn’t really about the rea-
soning they have behind their actions as much as why they feel their actions are justified by
those reasons.
It isn’t (or at least shouldn’t) be about questioning if they are thug criminals or not... but
why they are thug criminals and if there is something that could be done to if not change
their worldview... but to help guide a better worldview for future generations.
[–]gomphus 119 points 1 year ago
Totally agree with this.
Many times reading through these threads I find myself upvoting someone, then upvot-
ing a reply which gives a supposedly totally contradictory opinion. And I sit back and
think, these two people share a common ground, they’re just too swept up in argumenta-
tion to see it.
It’s even worse on the TV at the moment. It’s got to be about pundit A “destroying”
advocate B, expert X “demolishing” spokesperson Y. The quality of debate from some of
the guests on News night just now was appalling.
It’s like they think having an open dialog instead of a closed argument would be a
sig
n of weakness - it’s got to be black and white.
It’s the old maxim, conflict is drama, drama is entertainment and entertainment
sells. In particular it sells personalities, it sells products, it sells
political ideologies.
There just doesn’t seem to be room in public debates any more for broader viewpoints
that acknowledge the intrinsic messiness and ambig
uity of the social dilemmas we face.
I keep having to add this stupid clarification whenever I talk to anyone about this:
yes, I condemn the looting and the violence. Duh.
[–]Jahcurs
45 points 1 year ago
there was a soundbite of a looter today on the radio, he said simply that he doesn’t
earn enough money and he wanted some cool stuff. it really is that simple.
[–]Vermilion 72 points 1 year ago
Dont you fucking people talk like you know what’s going on, intellectualising and looking for
some ‘deeper’ meaning to all of this. It’s as simple as Greed.”
Do you THINK, just MAYBE, that societies that nonstop brainwash people with advertising, mar-
keting, lies from politicians, lies from employers, and lies from family just MIGHT impact
some individuals more than others? That not everyone is as immune to the advertising impulse
and marketing?
We have largely reduced the ideals of a “greater good” or even “all are your neighbors” at a
time of prosperity!
We put our most talented and brightest people to go around singing, making movies, making
commercials -- almost all hawking products or doing art for profit. Huge technology investment
in bright colors, cosmetics on women, etc.
The money wouldn’t be spent on advertising, public relations and marketing if
it wasn’t working!
Edward Bernays desig
ned all this psychological nonsense! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPz-
GUsYyKM
[–]yamyamyamyam 23 points 1 year ago
Greed from what though? A lot of these people have nothing, have always had nothing and see
this as an opportunity, not only to have something, but to get revenge at a world and system
that has done nothing for them. Of course some people get past such a shitty upbringing and
more for them, but many more don’t.
It blows my mind and disheartens me, the lack of empathy we as a nation show sometimes.
[–]rockstarfr
uitpunch 59 points 1 year ago
No - you’ve seen the footage the very least, if not seen it first hand. These kids and
looters were wearing desig
ned brand goods, on their blackberrys and iPhones, and knew
their brands. They’re posting on twitter and facebook, trying flog shit on ebay. These
are not people who have nothing.
The people who now have nothing are those that were burned out of their homes and
businesses, with only the clothes on their backs. If THEY chose to riot, to loot, I
would gladly kick open the doors and windows for them.
Fuck that.
[–]Rahms 273 points 1 year ago
You know what really grinds my gears? People getting the wrong end of the stick.
Stop treating the rioters like they’re the young 20-somethings finding it hard to get a job in this
economic downturn, and start treating them like what they are: a bunch of clueless little cunts
stealing shit because they can get away with it. Half of them don’t even know anything about pol-
itics; in that interview with those two girls who had been rioting they weren’t even sure why they
were doing it, other than “showing them we can do what we want.” Oh, good one. As long as that in-
cludes dying a horrible death without the benefits or medical care that you rely on to
survive, carry on.
[–]perspectiveiskey 102 points 1 year ago*
Riot ≠ looting.
Riots induce looting. People don’t riot so they can loot.
You know what grinds my gears? The titanic is sinking and people like you are complaining that
someone’s stealing shit from the cantina. You think it’s acceptable that shit was left to fester for
so long that riots broke out, but you think it’s unacceptable that there was looting after the riots
broke out?
You think people are rioting because they wanted to loot?
Edit: I’m getting many times the same response so here’s what I wrote:
once a riot breaks, it’s all downhill. The Milgram experiment established it for science: 65% of
otherwise normal people will administer a 450V shock to a fellow human because a peer or authority
said it was ok.
What’s happening now in London is on the “other side” of the tipping point. But stating that these
riots only started because of yobs that wanted to loot is part of the problem and reason why there
were riots in the first place, wouldn’t you agree?
Also, stating that the behaviour we see right now is their normal behaviour is just as erroneous.
[–][deleted]
101 points 1 year ago
“People don’t riot so they can loot.”
Evidently a sig
nificant number of people actually do.
[–]seclifered 27 points 1 year ago
His previous statement, “Riots induce looting,” implies that riots don’t start because people
want to loot.
But if it did, then why aren’t there constant riots across the world? I mean, the police can’t be
everywhere and there are tons of loot everywhere. Of course, it’s because looting is just a minor
issue in the grand scheme of things, but everyone seems to be so concerned about it instead of fo-
cusing on the cause of riots.
[–]rockstarfr
uitpunch 59 points 1 year ago
No - you’ve seen the footage the very least, if not seen it first hand. These kids and
looters were wearing desig
ned brand goods, on their blackberrys and iPhones, and knew
their brands. They’re posting on twitter and facebook, trying flog shit on ebay. These
are not people who have nothing.
The people who now have nothing are those that were burned out of their homes and
businesses, with only the clothes on their backs. If THEY chose to riot, to loot, I
would gladly kick open the doors and windows for them.
Fuck that.
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aftermath commentary
3
Riot Reactions
aftermath commentary
3reaction
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In searching for the root cause of the recent riots, pudits have offered little more than facile explanations.
What can explain it? How to account for such a fit of collective madness? Do we blame the schools? The parents? Perhaps it was a cry for help, the bitter fruit of lives without meaning or hope? Whatever may be the cause, we can see the results, the single larg-est outburst of journalistic nonsense in a generation: swarms of unhinged pundits running wild through the op-ed pages, leaving a trail of broken syllogisms in their wake. Such mindless mind-lessness can only be condemned in the strongest terms...
But of course the same thing happens every time, doesn’t it? Wherever and whenever some outrage or atrocity occurs, there is always an army of “root-cause” rationalizers close behind, ready to supply the deeper meaning of it all. And though the explanations vary, the one constant is to shift the blame from those who commit the crime to other, more politically useful villains. Marc Lépine was no mere nutter with a grudge: he was a product, or at least an extreme example, or at any rate a symbol, of a generalized male hatred of women. Jared Loughner was not, as he claimed, chiefly concerned with the power of grammar to control the mind, but rather was the inevitable outgrowth of hot-headed Republican rhetoric. And so on.
With something as widespread as a riot, let alone the cascade of riots that spread across Britain, we are more obviously dealing with a genuinely social phenomenon.Though every individual is ultimately responsible for the choice to do good or to do ill, when so many peo-
Abstract: The article discusses the author’s view that the root cause of 2011 riots in London, England and Vancouver, Canada is largely a lack of consci- ence.He notes it is wrong to think either that anyone could end up rioting or that there exists a fixed number of criminals. He puts people on a continuum where one end is people who would never riot and the other is hardened crimi-nals, and in between are people with weak consciences who would commit crimes under certain circumstances.
Everyone’s gone madAndrew Coyne
Maclean’s; 9/5/2011, Vol. 124 Issue 33/34
48
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ple make the wrong choices at the same time, there is clearly a wider context to be considered: they can’t all be mad. But there’s a key word in there. Maybe you’ve spotted it: considered. Many of the instant analyses I read expressed a certain peevishness toward dis-senters, as if the failure to adopt their own pet theory was a rejection of thinking itself. Well, no. It’s a rejection of simplistic, reduction-ist thinking. It is one thing to attempt to understand why people do what they do. It is another just to draw up a list of everything that’s been bugging you about society for years, then scrawl QED under it. Thus, if you are on the left: consumerism, individualism, poverty, Thatcher, unemployment, Thatcher. And if you are on the right: gangsta rap, Jamaican patois, multiculturalism, liberal elites.
All of these pat explanations get us only so far, to the point where each person involved decides to do something despicable: to burn a building, attack a pensioner, loot a store. And without a convincing explanation for that private failure of conscience, none of them are a lick of use. It isn’t just that there is no empirical evidence to support the notion that poverty equals riots. There isn’t even a rational rea-son to connect the two. Poverty might indeed explain why someone might feel a sense of personal despair, or alienation toward society. It does not begin to say why he should make the altogether separate, qualitatively different decision to carve up somebody with a knife.
So if we are serious about looking for root causes, we should be considering why so many of our citizens seem to have failed to develop a conscience--or if they have one, seem able to quell it easily enough. I say “our” advisedly: for although the riots in Britain were clearly far more severe, they nevertheless had more in common with the Vancouver Stanley Cup riot than might be apparent: the same bloodless opportunism, the same blank smiles of “isn’t this fun,” the same stench of suburban anomie.
There are two traps to be avoided in this regard. One is to think that anyone could have done the same, given the right circum-stances--explicit in the writings of my colleague Andrew Potter (“look in the mirror”), but implicit in much root-cause thinking (in Vancouver, drink and disappointment took the place of pov-erty and despair).This is obviously untrue. You could fill my mother with rye whiskey, dangle a free plasma TV in front of her, and she still wouldn’t go on the riot--even if her favourite team had lost.
49
The other mistake is to assume that there is but a fixed number of criminals, a class of thugs and loners uniquely capable of commit-ting a crime. As we learned, in both London and Vancouver, the rioters came from every race, both sexes, and all sorts of back-grounds. Many had jobs, families, prospects, all the sorts of things that are supposed to preclude this sort of anti-social behaviour.
Better, rather, to think of the population as being distributed along a continuum, according to their propensity to commit a crime. At one end are people like my mother, with well-developed consciences, who would be unlikely to commit a crime under any circumstances. If there seem rather fewer members of this group than in the past, then it would seem worth thinking about how society has traditionally instilled moral values, and where this process of socialization might have broken down. It is plausible to think, for example, that the tre-mendous rise in single-parent households might have something to do with it, with particular regard to the absence of male role models.
At the other end of the spectrum would be habitual criminals, hard-ened gang members and the like. (Indeed, evidence is emerging that the U.K. riots, far from spreading spontaneously, were orchestrated to a high degree by Britain’s network of gangs.) The tactics employed by Bill Bratton, the former police commissioner of Boston, New York and Los Angeles, have been greatly successful at reducing gang violence-
-one reason why David Cameron wants to bring him in as an adviser.
But it is the third and, I suspect, largest group that are of most inter-est: the ones who might or might not be persuaded to commit a given crime, depending on the circumstances. Crime rates rise or fall amongst this group much in the manner of diseases: crime might be thought of as a species of “social epidemic.” As with disease, the urge to commit a crime is passed along among the population. And, as with disease, there are circumstances that prove especially fertile for spreading the crime virus. This is the theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point: the so-called “broken window” theory of crime, wherein the presence of such signals of disorder encourages people to believe they can commit a crime with impunity. It also hap-pens to have been the theory applied by Bratton in his work, first as head of police for the New York Transit Authority, then more broadly as New York’s police commissioner. Famously, Bratton focused first on seemingly minor problems like the graffiti on the subways, or turn-
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stile jumpers, to the dismay of those who felt he should have been focused on larger crimes. But it turned out that by changing the envi-ronment in this way, the larger crimes took care of themselves. The signal was sent: order has been restored. Bear yourself accordingly.
What are the broken windows in our own society? Put another way: what signals does the average yob receive in his daily existence? Does he face any constraints on his appetites? Is he required to make any sacri-fices to decorum, to take any account of the needs of others? And if the answer is little to none, should we be entirely surprised at the results?
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Anyone who has ever taken part in a riot, or even just hovered on the periphery of one, knows how exhilarating it can be. Windows smashed, cars torched, stores looted--it’s like being in the middle of a video game. Yet there is a tendency to try to psycho-analyze society and interpret the mob’s behaviour as a symptom of some great underlying malaise: hockey’s culture of macho violence in the case of June’s riot in Vancouver, racism or poverty or the wel-fare state in the case of the looting that hopscotched across England last week.
People are over-thinking things way too much. Any proper discussion of a riot and why it happens has to start with the recognition that rioting, especially for young men, is a huge amount of fun. At any given moment, there are far more people willing to riot and loot than we like to admit, and the only reason there isn’t more of it is that if you do it by yourself or in a small group, you’ll almost cer-tainly get caught. But if you can get enough people to riot, you can all get away with it, which is why when it comes to getting one
started, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem.
The trick is getting a critical mass of people willing to do it, in the same place and
at the same time.
Certain events, like game seven of the Stanley Cup final, have become reliable
opportunities to riot ─ a bunch of people show up precisely because they know that a lot of other people will also be showing up to riot. Another reliable opportunity is any sort of anti-authority protest,such as a meeting
of the G20 ─ or what sparked the events in Tottenham ─ a demonstration against
police violence. No matter how peaceful the initial gathering is meant to be, it is easily overwhelmed by those who are there just
to smash stuff. All that has happened in the past year or so is that delinquents have discovered the flash mob, using social net-working tools like Twitter and BlackBerry
messenger to organize riots with unprece-dented speedand efficiency. Hipsters have been organizing flash mobs for years now,
flooding into subways and financial districts
Abstract: The author notes that following riots in Vancouver, British Columbia in June 2011 and in London, England in August 2011, many people are trying to figure out why people riot, and he claims it is because people enjoy antisocial behavior. He remarks on people using social networking tools like Twitter and BlackBerry messenger to organize riots, which allows rioters to act quickly while also making stopping or preventing the riot difficult for law enforcement.
WHY PEOPLE CAN’T HELP THEMSELVESAndrew Potter
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to have impromptu dance parties or pillow fights. In China, consumers have been using social networking to organize group shop-ping expeditions, where they descend upon a retailer and use the pressure of 50 or 60 people to extract deep discounts from the shop owners. It is not a big step from that to arranging for a few hundred people to show up to loot the electronics shop or the shoe store, or having a few thousand people get together to torch a department store.
This is a genuine challenge to law enforce-ment. Organized crime has always been structured along the lines of the family or the state, because for much of human existence, the family and the state have been the most effective mechanisms for solving coordination problems amongst self-interested individuals. The police have traditionally responded by infiltrating the crime families and other trust networks using undercover agents, wiretaps, and other staples of police procedurals.
Social media have the obvious capacity to increase the amount of rioting--that’s why the Tottenham riot spread so quickly across England, and why the protests of the Arab Spring popped up in so many places at once. On the other hand, technology can also work against the rioters, by reducing the impunity that comes with the anonym-ity of crowds. The most important thing the Toronto police did with the G20 riots was not all the head-cracking and the random detentions, but crowdsourcing the identities of people who were photographed com-mitting crimes. The Vancouver police have been busy gathering videos and images of the rioters, and Scotland Yard is now doing likewise. They won’t catch everyone, but they might identify enough people that it will serve as a significant deterrent to future riots. But to really put an end to flash-mob rioting, police are going to have to do the social networking equivalent of going under-cover. They will have to infiltrate the groups of wannabe rioters, find out their codes and coordination mechanisms, and other-wise turn the technology against them.
In the meantime, we need to stop assum-ing that these occasional flare-ups of mass
social unrest are signs of profound social dysfunction. You certainly can’t discount
the role of unemployment, since being unemployed sharply reduces the risks associated with rioting. If I get caught
smashing a shop, I’m probably going to lose my job and my reputation. If a chav on
the dole in Tottenham gets caught, what does he have to lose? If anything, a spell
in prison will only increase his status.
Yet if you don’t believe that almost anyone can take genuine pleasure in the anti-social behaviour that anonymity enables, then you
haven’t been reading the comment boards on the Internet, or you’ve never scanned the
graffiti in the typical public bathroom stall. Those horrible people writing those nasty
things aren’t drooling troglodytes sitting in their parents’ basements; they are your hus-
bands and wives, your colleagues, your doctor and your lawyer and everyone else you know.
Do you want to know what sort of person joins in a riot and trashes their city and loots
their neighbour’s shop? Just look around you. Or better, look in the mirror. Rioting
is fun, and we’d all do it if we could.
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