London riots: A nation still waits for answers

Hindustan Times
Dipankar De Sarkar

Eight months on, we know a lot about the riots that swept parts of London and other cities across England. We know much about the social and economic background of the looters and arsonists. We know of family breakdown and disaffection.

We know what sparked it — the police killing of alleged black drug dealer Mark Duggan. But we don’t know why police killed him (his family calls it an execution). The police are stopped from telling us.

This month England has been debating and discussing the riots of the summer of 2011. At least two major studies have shed light on the over-3,000 people who were arrested on charges of rioting.

According to a joint study by The Guardian (a great example of media responsibility) and the London School of Economics, based on interviews with 270 rioters, they were mainly young unemployed men. Half were black but they didn’t consider the disturbances to be ‘race riots.’

A report by an independent panel set up by the government says there are 5,000,000 ‘forgotten families’ in England who “bump along the bottom of society.” It paints a grim picture of this ‘bottom’: broken communities with young jobless who crave the designer goods they see advertised all around but cannot afford to buy.

“When people don’t feel they have a reason to stay out of trouble, the consequences for communities can be devastating – as we saw last August,” said Darra Singh, chair of the panel. But the nub of the matter is this: why did police kill Duggan, the act that lit the fuse?

We don’t know because a law — the only one of its kind in the world apparently — stops police from revealing evidence gathered from phone tapping. This week calls grew for amending it — led by none other than the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

As a result of the provision, an inquest cannot be held. “We’re in the dark now as we were in the beginning,” said Carole Duggan, Mark’s aunt. One compromise – because there are security implications – is for judges to be given the power to rule on individual cases.

Fact. There is a link between cuts and riots

Guardian

We've studied a century's worth of social unrest and the data suggests austerity measures can lead to riots

Incidents of police brutality, such as the beating of
Rodney King in LA in 1992, can provide the spark that
leads to conflagration.

When London stopped burning, the political debate about the causes of unrest began to heat up. At one end of the spectrum, Ken Livingstone blamed the government's cutbacks; at the other, David Cameron attributed the unrest to criminal behaviour, pure and simple. Many of the cuts announced by the coalition government haven't been implemented yet; but it is also true that there is real deprivation in many parts of London, and local services have been cut in some areas already. So, where do sudden conflagrations such as in London last week come from?

A constructive way to approach such a complex question is to distinguish between the incidents that touch off unrest, and the underlying causes that make it more likely. When a petrol station burns down, you don't just want to know who dropped the cigarette; you want to know why all the combustible fumes escaped. Social unrest and instability is typically difficult to explain. In most years, nothing happens; then, suddenly, violence erupts. Academics have tried to understand which factors are involved in creating explosive social environments. According to work on US race riots by the economist Ed Glaeser, for example, ethnic heterogeneity in a neighbourhood increases the probability of unrest. So does unemployment; Poverty, on the other hand, seems to play a smaller role.

In a recent study, we focused on the link between austerity measures and unrest. We analysed a large number of countries, over almost a century, to unearth some empirical regularities. In two studies, we analysed unrest in 28 European countries from 1919 to 2009, and in 11 Latin American countries since 1937. What we found is a clear and positive statistical association between expenditure cuts and the level of unrest.

To construct our measure of unrest, we looked at five indicators: riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempted revolutions. In a typical year and country, there are about 1.5 incidents of this type. The more you cut, the more incidents you get. By the time austerity measures hit 3% or more, the number of incidents has doubled. Interestingly, for the UK, the pattern is even stronger: for every percentage point of cut-backs, instability surges by more than it does on average in the rest of the countries. Importantly, these effects are in addition to the well-known relationship between lower growth (associated with more unemployment) and higher instability.