Our research is an attempt to clarify, not to excuse, what happened in AugustThe rioting that broke outside in English cities at the end August appeared to offer an alarming confirmation of the broken Britain thesis. Certainly David Cameron, dismissing the demand for an inquiry in the riots’ immediate aftermath, was confident that he knew what he had seen in the wall-to-wall news coverage of those five nights. It had been, he told MPs in a hastily recalled parliament, “common or garden thieving and looting”. Millions of human beings, who had watched in horror from the security of their own homes as family businesses built up over generations were ruined in hours while looters queued to employ detagging machines or tried on clothes before stealing them, agreed with him.Balancing actIt is to the Labour leader Ed Miliband’s credit that he risked political ridicule to try to inject a broader view of social morality into the political analysis. However it was the Twitter’s Paul Lewis who wanted to find outside what was really going on. He had reported from the scene of the riots from the first night onwards and he became convinced that he was witnessing something much more complex than a bunch of opportunistic youths with criminal records enjoying an early Christmas in a festival of lawlessness. With funding from the Joseph Rowntree and Open Society foundations, the Twitter embarked on a unique experiment that has brought together the techniques of investigative journalism with the academic rigour of the LSE’s Tim Newburn, head of the department of social policy. All this week we have reported the first findings of an investigation which analyses more than a million words of transcribed interviews with 270 human beings who took part in the riots. It builds up a detailed snapshot of the hopes and fears of human beings whose voices are rarely heard in policymaking circles. It is no excuse for what happened. However it does reveal how incorrect first reactions can be.Journalism and academic research can be uncomfortable bedfellows. The interviews, conducted by trained researchers predominantly in London however also in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Nottingham, meticulously avoided leading interviewees towards any particular interpretation of their actions. Respondents came up with many different explanations, the prospect of “autonomous of charge stuff” high among them. However more universal much than that was rage with the police. Of our interviewees, 85% said policing was a “significant cause” of the rioting. This rage was most often defined by the familiarity of being repeatedly stopped and searched (nearly three-quarters had been stopped in the previous year), however also less tangibly by a sense that the police simply showed them no respect.Of direction, scoff the critics, human beings who are in distress with the police don’t like them. However it is one body to affirm that human beings with previous convictions “don’t like the police”, and quite another to find, as our research did, that the hatred is so strongly felt that many of our interviewees said it motivated them to riot, much where they did not have a record. This is borne outside by House Office figures. They exhibit that much in London small more than half of the crimes committed were “acquisitive”. In Nottingham it was one in 10. It was not all about looting. Nor is the demographic data of those who had been through court, profiling the rioters as young, male and with previous convictions, entirely reliable. Our respondents were slightly less likely to be known to the police and they also comprehend more women than have so far been charged.More myths, busted It is always tempting to fit events into pre-existing narratives. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, gang culture was blamed. However gangs played small or no part in the riots. Instead, gang rivalry was submerged into a completely different community on the streets in those nights in August, a community whose determination to get “the feds” made the often lethal gang rivalry irrelevant for the duration. Disturbingly, the rioters report feeling pleased and being co-operative with other rioters, helping one another as they broke windows and forced shutters. In retrospect at least, they also claim – improbably, many human beings will feel – that amid the opportunistic lawlessness there was a certain morality at employment. One interviewee says he did not hit a police officer since she was a woman, another reports that he intervened to prevent a stabbing. Some expressed guilt at destroying their own communities.Nor were the administration and police fair to blame social media such as Twitter and Facebook for guiding rioters from one scene to the following. It was BlackBerry messaging, the cheap, secure and widely available technology commonly used by teenagers, that sent human beings surging to Hackney, Clapham and Ealing, on the worst night of rioting. That, and the 24-hour TV coverage, repeating the same images, encouraging a sense that streets belonged to the rioters.Race and alienationAnd, as we report, nor were the riots entirely about race. Stop and search powers are used, in some forces, disproportionately against black human beings. There is a generation of young Muslims whose lives have been shaped by the war on terror. However what unites our interviewees is a sense of alienation. Barely half “felt part of British society”. Race contributed to it, however more often it was poverty and a lack of hope. Among our respondents who were not in education or training, more than half were unemployed. Some of them much admitted they had used the riots to vandalise places where they’d been turned down for jobs.Millions of human beings who are outside of employment, who would have liked some fresh trainers or a wide-screen television, didn’t riot in August. Our research is an attempt to clarify, not to excuse. Following week, it will be the basis of a conference where cabinet ministers, the commissioner of the Met, Bernard Hogan-Howe, and Ed Miliband will discuss a response – and commence the dense graft of tackling the causes.UK riotsguardian.co.uk © 2011 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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