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Dr Clifford Stott:Well, it's obviously very difficult to predict when riots are going to happen. What we know, of course, is that the riots happened in 2011 last time, but prior to that there was some 30-odd years before we'd experienced anything like that. So if history's anything to go by, there's no reason to expect that something like that will happen this summer – but again, it's equally clear that something like that could happen. It's always possible. The fact they happen suggests they can.In the most recent example of disordered violence in Hyde Park, young people fought with police. Do you think there's a lot of anger because of police violence, globally as well as in the UK?
The difficulty with those explanations is that those inequalities, those structures, are there all the time. And riots don't happen all the time. So one of the things that we know is that when crowds are policed in a particularly aggressive way – what we might call disproportionately – that plays a major role in whether or not conflict will escalate. We have to recognise that the origins of the 2011 riots lie at the end of a peaceful demonstration outside Tottenham Police Station. Mark Duggan was shot 48 hours or more before that. It wasn't simply the shooting of Mark Duggan that contributed to the origins of the riot in Tottenham; it was actually a whole series of incidences and events and circumstances, which included the failure to notify the family, and all of those failures were then amplified when somebody apparently began to attack a police car.
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But the landscape at the moment does seem conducive to riots, right? There's so much anger among young people against both the police and generally against the state of British society.READ ON NOISEY: Big Narstie is Starring in the Most Ridiculous Film of All Time
But there's nothing inevitable about violence. What we have is a situation where people want to protest about illegitimate forms of policing. We live in a democracy, and they have every right to do that. What we know is that the police can do a lot to alleviate whether or not violence will occur, e.g. by engaging in dialogue with those communities. They can empower the avoidance of conflict. It's not the case that violence is inevitable: it's very much about how those crowds this summer are going to be handled. If they're going to be handled in the right way, then it's kind of likely we won't have disturbances at all.If people are going to riot this summer, what do they stand to gain?
Martin Luther King described in a speech that the riot is a language of the unheard. He did articulate how riots are an opportunity for powerless people to become powerful, and it's that transition of power that is partly what the riot is about. In that sense, it can offer people an opportunity to be heard.
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We've had a number of situations where riots have developed. Riots are already happening. The question isn't, "Will they happen or won't they?" It's more, "Will they escalate? Will they spread to the scale of 2011?" The danger is that we fall back on the language of irrationality with riots. The anger, the frustration. That frustration might bubble up to the surface. Riots don't just happen; they occur in episodes of interaction during crowd events between police and the people involved in those crowd events. The issue is that if these crowd events are handled in the right way, you won't see any major escalation.
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I think all of the research shows that riots occur in the context of economic decline, economic deprivation, inequality and social injustice. That much is true.Should rioting flare up again, does that mean no one's actually learnt their lesson?
Riots can be avoided. And it's important that we learn the lessons from those riots. One of the problems from the 2011 riots was that there was no major governmental inquiry. In the Brixton riots, we had a government report. No inquiry was commissioned [this time around], so that inevitably means that opportunities to learn lessons were lost.Thanks, Dr Clifford.@its_me_salmaMore on VICE:Revealed: Just One London Police Officer Has Been Sacked for Sexual Assault in Nine YearsRemembering the UK RiotsExclusive: VICE Data Shows Virtually No London Cops Get Fired for Complaints of Assault
