Riots – we need to understand if we’re going to stop them

I spent most of yesterday with the Government’s independent Riots Communities and Victims panel. Set up by cross party consensus it’s charged with getting to the bottom of the riots and putting forward ideas how to prevent a recurrence. They are visiting as many of the areas affected as possible. Interestingly they are also trying to visit some areas that you might have expected to be affected as the events unfolded but weren’t. They’ve been given a very short timescale – initial findings will be presented in November with a final report in March. It’s fair to say that the investigation and criminal justice proceedings probably won’t have concluded by then, particularly for the more serious offences, like arson and murder.

Camden was one of 22 London boroughs that suffered violence on the night of Monday 8th August. 30 businesses suffered damage in Camden Town. Small pockets of disorder happened in other parts of the borough and a number of residents got up on the 9th to discover their cars had been relieved of little luxuries like all their windows. There’s no doubt that the damage was alarming for the victims and local community. There’s no doubt that had this level of violence happened in isolation we would have regarded it as horrific. But there’s also no doubt that Camden, compared to many other London boroughs, suffered a lower level of damage.

There was only one reported incident of fire – a bin was set alight in the street, away from properties and quickly extinguished.

That said people were scared on the night and in the nights that followed. I was scared for my own safety and I live nearly a mile as the crow flies from the centre of where the disorder took place. On the Tuesday night, a warm August evening, Camden Town’s night time economy lost tens of thousands of pounds as pubs, venues and clubs shut up at teatime. It took weeks for these businesses, these local employers, to recover to normal levels. It took several weeks for takings to recover to normal levels – the riots threatened people’s jobs and livelihoods.

We arranged for the riots panel to meet and discuss issues with a range of people affected. Businesses, community groups, young people and Camden staff involved in so many ways.

It’s important for Camden people to be heard in this process, talking to political peers across London our council did some things that others could definitely learn from, calling and texting hundreds of young people and their parents to encourage them to stay at home, visiting hundreds of businesses to offer personal advice about security and safety and crucially how to ensure staff were looked after. I’m sure we can learn from other boroughs too.

But I was left wanting slightly after yesterday’s visit. This was a listening exercise and it was important. We’d held our own community summits in September to get ideas from the community about what we can do locally to ensure our communities are resilient in the future. But this panel has a potentially unrivalled evidence base to look at disorder, public violence and criminality and to look at community cohesion and resilience in the aftermath and I’m not sure it’s going to happen.

I have a number of views and hypotheses about why what happened from August the 6th to August the 9th happened and I’d like to know that these and other theories are going to be tested against the evidence on raising these issues yesterday I’m not clear that there is this rigorous collecting and testing of evidence unless we push for it.

The senior Camden police officer on duty in the riots describes what happened as ‘shopping’ and certainly when you look at the shops that were targeted in Camden it looks that way. No one was interested in the shops with low value goods. In the Sainsbury’s that was smashed in to there wasn’t a cigarette or drop of alcohol to be found but other goods were largely untouched. What happened in Camden doesn’t look like an outpouring of pent up anger – indiscriminate and burning itself out like other riots. It looks like certain shops were targeted because of the value of goods behind their doors.

But that’s what happened in Camden. The riots started out of what had, on Saturday afternoon, been a peaceful protest outside Tottenham police station. So peaceful that when Spurs fans left White Hart Lane at tea time there was not a hint of violence for them to be caught up in.

Several people yesterday mentioned how long it took for media covering events in Tottenham on the Saturday to change their language from protest.

There then spread – the panel need to understand why. There was clear anger about police handling of a shooting in Tottenham (and the Met have serious and persistent issues about how they handle their PR around these incidents because once again they were found to have put our false statements). And this could have sparked anger in other communities where police community relations are strained. That could explain some of the copycat action – and I think probably does.

But I have a theory that by Monday night, the media coverage, and particularly the footage of the furniture store burning in Croydon, showed more visually than anything else could that the emergency services couldn’t cope. Anyone inclined toward theft would’ve taken that as big green light to say they might be able to get away with it more easily on those nights than others.

That’s at least two reasons for why people might have gone out on the Monday night. There may well be more. It’s been reported that a large number of those convicted have previous criminal justice contact and indeed convictions. This may well be so and we should look at this. We should look at it in the context of the wider causes of criminality too – so often linked to poverty – again we have another large pool of people to look at and really delve in to the evidence.

My other theory, and it’s one I’ve had before the riots, is that Camden got off more lightly than many similar areas. Areas with similar levels of poverty, similar levels of economic divide between the haves and have nots. This is a picture repeated. For example (and I must touch wood on this) while we have some problems with serious youth violence they are not as pronounced as they are in other comparable areas. There are other outcomes I could point too as well.

I have a theory – and it’s one that suits my politics – that this is because Camden historically, over decades, has invested far higher sums of money on discretionary services, from cradle to grave, than most other councils in the country and certainly in London. Finally, because of the riots there should be a large enough cohort of data to test this theory to some extent. I will make sure we submit information that we have on this, but I believe the panel should be asking these questions proactively of the places they visit.

Finally the banks and politicians and behaviour of premiership footballers came up several times. One of the panel members asked that if that was the case why didn’t everybody do it? I thought this an odd question since not every politician fiddled their expenses and not every premiership footballer behaves like and arse and some of our banking community do behave responsibly toward their customers and the wider community. But again, this is theory. I suspect that some people who got involved used it as an excuse, it gave them a permissive justification – ‘everyone else is no the take why not me’. Of course it’s not true but when adrenalin is pumping it’s easy to make spurious justifications for a lot of things that we regret later. It’s part of human nature and doesn’t excuse what happened. But in terms of one of the remits of the panel – how we can stop it in the future – it’s important to understand all the reasons why people got involved.

Overall I welcome the panel’s work but I think there needs to be much more forensic analysis of who was involved, what they have in common and what separates them. If they are coming to your borough, or holding a public event in your area make sure you challenge them not just to hear personal testimony but also to look at huge amount of information and data that the police, businesses, and local authorities hold about what happened and who was involved and why. Otherwise we’ll never be able to stop it happening again because we’ll never understand the underlying causes.