The Causes and Consequences of Urban Riot and Unrest
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Annual Review of Criminology The Causes and Consequences of Urban Riot and Unrest Tim Newburn Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; email: t.newburn@lse.ac.uk Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021. 4:53–73 Keywords First published as a Review in Advance on riot, disorder, crowd violence, flashpoints, life-cycle model July 6, 2020 The Annual Review of Criminology is online at Abstract criminol.annualreviews.org This review explores those varied bodies of work that have sought to un- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-061020- derstand crowd behavior and violent crowd conduct in particular. Although 124931 the study of such collective conduct was once considered central to social Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews. science, this has long ceased to be the case and in many respects the study All rights reserved of protest and riot now receives relatively little attention, especially within criminology. In addition to offering a critical overview of work in this field, this review argues in favor of an expanded conception of its subject matter. In recent times, scholarly concern has increasingly been focused on ques- tions of etiology, i.e., asking how and why events such as riots occur, with the consequence that less attention is paid to other, arguably equally impor- tant questions, including how riots spread, how they end, and, critically, what happens in their aftermath. Accordingly, as a corrective, the review proposes a life-cycle model of riots. 53
INTRODUCTION Giving evidence to the Kerner Commission that had been established by President Johnson during some of the most severe urban rioting in America in 1967, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, said that he had read the reports of many previous riot investigations and found them to be “a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 483]. Given the regularity with which riot commissions in the United States had repeated their diagnoses and proposed similar treatments, his observation was perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, over the longer-term the social science of the crowd has by no means been characterized by consensus. Whereas early approaches saw crowd conduct as fundamentally irrational and as a source of great social danger, modern scholarship has reacted by seeking to highlight the rational elements of civil disorder, explanations focusing predominantly on underlying social conditions and rioters’ grievances (McClelland 1996). Before we move on to consider these shifts in more detail, a few words about terminology and Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org the focus of this article. Though the title refers to riots, from the outset we must acknowledge Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. that the term is far from straightforward, even when based on a legislative definition. In the US Criminal Code, for example, the basic definition of a riot is “a public disturbance involving (1) an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual or (2) a threat or threats of the commission” of such an act or acts [18 U.S. Code § 2102 (1982)]. In practice, the study of riots tends to focus on much larger groupings, the actions of which involve a fairly substantial breakdown of social order. At heart the problem is that riot is an inescapably political term. It is often used by states or by others in powerful positions to label events of which they disapprove and consider illegitimate. Equally, those involved in such violent events often resist the labels riot or rioter, preferring alternatives such as uprising or rebellion, often to convey resistance to authority they consider to lack legitimacy. It is for this reason that some academics eschew the term riot altogether (see Tilly 2003). In truth, there is no agreed-upon scholarly definition of riot. Indeed, given the difficulties in- volved, much academic work regularly avoids any attempt to either begin with or arrive at one and this article is no exception. The focus here is on crowd behavior generally and violent crowd behavior in particular. Attention is paid in the main to those events that appear to have been suc- cessfully defined as riots; that is, outbreaks of violence that are regularly described in this way not just by government officials and the police but by other observers including social scientists. For reasons of space, the review does not cover what is by now a substantial and important lit- erature on prison riots (Adams 1994, Thompson 2017, Useem & Kimball 1991) but focuses on more public forms of collective violence. Interestingly, the specific focus on riots is something of a recent development in social science. Late-nineteenth-century scholarship, although fixated on the dangers of the crowd, tended nevertheless to focus on crowd behavior more generally. It was the reaction against such work that led to a greater concentration on the violent crowd and the decline of interest in crowd more generally (Borch 2012, Reicher 1996b). This, in turn, has had the effect of privileging certain questions, in particular those concerned with the causes of violence, and relegating others, especially those focusing on the consequences of the violence. In response to this, and in the final section of the paper, I outline what I refer to as a life-cycle model of riots; one that seeks to return academic interest to a broader interest in riots and incorporates both medium- and longer-term consequences. 54 Newburn
EARLY APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CROWD It is traditional for reviews of work in this field to begin with the ideas of the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, although how original his ideas really were caused considerable dispute from the outset (Van Ginneken 1985). Indeed, the Italian scholar, Scipio Sighele, a student of Lombroso and Ferri, went so far as to accuse Le Bon of piracy. This was a period in which there was substantial concern about the fragility of social order and, consequently, about the power and significance of crowds. Indeed, Le Bon [1952 (1896), p. 14; emphasis in original] saw them as being of the upmost historical importance: While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS. Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Le Bon challenged many prevailing orthodoxies, including those that held that crowd members Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. tended to be mentally deranged, criminal, or drawn from the very lowest social strata. Neverthe- less, he viewed them as dangerous, not least because of the way in which the individual conscious personality could be subsumed by the collective mind. Irrespective of who the individuals were who made up the crowd, the power of this collective mind would make “them feel, think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 27]. Much influenced by Tarde’s work on imita- tion, Le Bon saw the individual within the crowd as suggestible and sentiments within crowds as contagious; indeed “contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 30]. As a consequence, he argued, there was something atavistic about the crowd, its actions often characterized by “impulsiveness, irri- tability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), pp. 35–36]. Cultured individuals would become barbarians in a crowd, descending “several rungs in the ladder of civilization” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 13]. His hope was that his work and that of others would facilitate the control of crowds (Moscovici 1985) and though now largely discredited, he was hugely influential, “cast[ing] his shadow over the political events of the entire first half of the twentieth century and even beyond” (van Ginneken 1992, p. 187). The popularization of elements of Le Bon’s ideas outside Europe owed much to the influence of Robert Park. Better known within criminology for his association with the urban sociology of the Chicago School, as a student in Germany at the beginning of the century Park had written a thesis entitled “The Crowd and the Public.” Although unpublished for some decades, Park’s in- terest in collective behavior continued, and in his textbook with Ernest Burgess (Park & Burgess 1921, p. 381) he defined it as “the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the product of social interaction.” In- fluenced also by Tarde, Park saw the crowd as being less critically divided and more homogeneous than the public. The influence of the Chicago School developed further through the work of Herbert Blumer— for many “the most influential crowd sociologist of the twentieth century” (McPhail 2006, p. 433)—in which he advanced a more elaborated version of elements of Park’s approach based on a fivefold model of collective behavior by an active crowd. These stages, which involved the iden- tification of an exciting event, milling behavior, the emergence of a common object of attention, and fostering of common impulses, were held to develop as a consequence of a series of circular www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 55
reactions in which excitement and social contagion help foment elementary collective behavior. Although much more advanced than Le Bon’s approach, it nevertheless promoted the view that individual consciousness was submerged within the crowd, limiting rationality, with suggestibil- ity leading to the spread of group behavior via processes akin to contagion. Park’s and Blumer’s views mirrored elements of Le Bon’s approach but also departed from it. Where Le Bon had seen crowds as “the wrecking crews of history” (Leach 1986, p. 106), the Chicago sociologists took a more progressive view, viewing them as the basis for potential institutional and social change. As Blumer put it, “crowd behavior is a means by which the breakup of the social organization and personality structure is brought about, and at the same time is a potential device for the emer- gence of new forms of conduct and personality” (Blumer 1969, p. 77). Perhaps the most serious criticism of Park and Blumer’s work, and arguably the most surprising given the general nature of the Chicago School, is that their theoretical writing in this field was characterized by an almost complete absence of empirical data (McPhail 1991). The beginnings of a change of approach to collective behavior can perhaps first be seen in the Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org work of the American psychologist Floyd Allport. Rejecting the idea of a group mind, and expla- Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. nations at the level of the group rather than the individual, Allport focused on what he took to be the innate human responses that drive all conduct: underlying instincts, governed by learned behaviors. In such a view collective behavior is in large part a reflection of these common drives and finds expression in common circumstances. Rather than irrational suggestibility, collective behavior was based around the impression of universality; the belief that others share one’s views. The mass, however, tends to produce an exaggerated response; as Allport (1933, p. 295) famously put it: “The individual in the crowd behaves just as he would behave alone only more so.” Whereas earlier views viewed the individual as being submerged within the collective, thereby giving vent to instinctual behavior, Allport’s psychology viewed the collective as enabling the accentuation or exaggeration of individual conduct. For Allport the focus is on the characteristics of the individual rather than the power of the crowd over the individual. Nevertheless, what Le Bon, Park, and All- port all shared was the view that crowd behavior should be understood as primitive and relatively uncontrolled. THE TURN AWAY FROM THE IRRATIONAL Something of a break came in the shape of Turner & Killian’s (1987) emergent norm theory which recognized the heterogeneity of the crowd and acknowledged that people within crowds may act on the basis of a variety of motivations. The focus of their work was “those forms of social behavior in which usual conventions cease to guide social action and people collectively transcend, bypass, or subvert established institutional patterns and structures” (Turner & Killian 1987, p. 3). Such collective behavior was to be distinguished from more routine stable forms of group activity that were governed by traditional norms. They argued that communication—often rumor—concerning changes in the normative order are a common provocation to collective con- duct. In such circumstances, people come together for a range of reasons and do not, at least initially, share clear goals. Guides to action are formed through interaction and, crucially, “emer- gent norms develop and change through [a] keynoting process” (Turner & Killian 1987, p. 10). Out of the multiple options for action, the one that tends to prevail is that which has the great- est latent support (based on the pre-existing latent tendencies of the crowd). The development of emergent norms—broadly understood as an understanding of what is happening and what to do about it—means some “shared redefinition of right and wrong in a situation supplies the jus- tification and coordinates the action in collective behavior” (Turner & Killian 1987, p. 7). Crit- ics of such an approach point both to the problem of explaining how crowd behavior changes 56 Newburn
quickly—i.e., where there is, in principle, insufficient time for new norms to emerge—and what is, in the end, a somewhat desocialized theory of the crowd. An early attempt to provide a systematic approach, and one based on the view that collective behavior could be analyzed using the same categories as conventional behavior, came from Neil Smelser (1963), although even he was subsequently criticized for his alleged failure to move suffi- ciently beyond a LeBonist bias [see Currie & Skolnick 1970 as well as Smelser’s (1970) rejoinder]. Smelser’s model of collective behavior looked to a variety of external influences—structural strain, generalized beliefs, precipitating factors and social control—as determinants of such conduct. As he put it, his “master proposition [was that] . . . people under strain mobilize to reconstitute the social order in the name of a generalized belief” (Smelser 1963, p. 387). Although the model was broadly structuralist in approach, it nevertheless proceeded from a normative position that in- terpreted collective behavior as a challenge to existing social conditions and led critics to accuse him of adopting a “managerial or administrative perspective on collective action . . . [carrying] the implication that collective behavior is something requiring ‘control’ or ‘containing’” (Currie & Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Skolnick 1970, p. 42). Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. Also critical of emergent norm theory for its assumption of the crippled cognition of crowd members was Richard Berk, who proposed a rational-calculus theory in which crowd members were viewed as being akin to classic utility maximizers (Olson 1965). Berk’s (1974) model involved a series of steps, including seeking information; predicting events on the basis of such informa- tion; establishing options; listing preferences according to anticipated outcomes; and, finally, de- ciding on a course of action. Deciding to act rests on a calculation of a combination of outcome assessments and the likelihood for support for action. At heart, Berk’s approach was individualis- tic, consequently limiting the potential insight into the social nature of collective action (Reicher 1984). Berk’s work was very much of its time and is one of the more radical attempts to high- light the rationality at the heart of collective conduct. Other influential social scientists helping effect this reorientation of approach included John Lofland (1981) and Charles Tilly (1977). Tilly (1978, p. 7) defined action as “people acting together in pursuit of common interests” and he and Lofland encouraged an approach to historical research that focused on the ways in which oppor- tunity structures, group interests, power structures, and systems of repression shape the possible forms of mobilization and influence the employment of different repertoires of action to stake their claims (see Lofland 1985). The decisive shift away from an emphasis on the irrational was influenced by two main factors: the political and sociological response to the American urban riots of the 1960s and the emergence of a new social history, a history from below, or grassroots history (Hobsbawm 1998, Lynd 2014), that sought to rescue the actions of those involved in collective conduct such as machine-breaking and food riots from what E.P. Thompson (1968, p. 13) called the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In addition to Thompson and Charles Tilly, the seminal figures in this movement were George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm. In many respects, it was Rudé who led the way1 (Wilkinson 2009). Arguing that “no historical phenomenon has been so thoroughly neglected by historians as the crowd” (Rudé 1964, p. 3), Rudé’s studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France countered the view that crowds were composed primarily of the criminal and the marginal and challenged the inclination of historians to “take refuge behind such omnibus and prejudicial. . .labels as ‘mob’, illustrating by contrast the part played by rural craftsmen and indus- trial workers, as well as by women, and that crime and riot, far from being inseparable companions, were only occasional and somewhat uneasy bedfellows” (Rudé 1964, p. 203). 1 Despite what some see as an absence of critical assessment of his work (Holton 1978). www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 57
Hobsbawm & Rudé’s (1969) study of the Captain Swing machine-breaking riots of the 1830s in England, for example, found them often quite highly organized, characterized by considerable ceremony, and involving much greater symbolic than physical violence. Far from being irrational outbursts, “behind these multiform activities, the basic aims of the laborers were singularly con- sistent: to attain a minimum wage and to end rural unemployment. To attain these objects, they resorted to means that varied with the occasion and the opportunities at hand” (Hobsbawm & Rudé 1969, p. 195). As Hobsbawm (1971, p. 111) famously observed in Primitive Rebels: “The classical mob did not merely riot as a protest, but because it expected to achieve something by its riot. It assumed that the authorities would be sensitive to its movements, and probably also that they would make some sort of immediate concession; for the mob was not simply a casual collec- tion of people united for some ad hoc purpose, but in a recognized sense, a permanent entity, even though rarely permanently organized as such.” Rather than the conduct of some disorganized rabble, the mob or the dangerous classes, the new social history produced a picture of working people, shopkeepers, and laborers drawn from Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org local communities and integrated into common customs, norms and expectations. In his path- Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. breaking study of the food riots in eighteenth century England, E.P. Thompson (1971) argued that the activities of the rioters were underpinned by a notion of a moral economy. These out- breaks of destruction, rather than being simple, spasmodic reactions to hunger, were almost always underpinned, he argued, by some underlying, legitimizing notion (Thompson 1971, p. 78): By the notion of legitimation, I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of license afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference. In this particular case, according to Thompson, the “central action. . .is not the sack of granaries and the pilfering of grain or flour but the action of ‘setting the price’” (Thompson 1971, p. 108). In short, conflict was less a consequence of hunger and more a collective expression of what was believed to be a moral and political right (Tilly 1977) at a time when the practices of a broadly paternalistic preindustrial society were giving way to the increased influence of laissez-faire indus- trial capitalism. Far from displaying irrational violence, the bread rioters displayed “a pattern of behavior of which a Trobriand islander need not have been ashamed” (Thompson 1971, p. 131). In addition to the new social history, the other crucial influence on the reorientation of aca- demic thought in this period was the American urban ghetto riots that occurred primarily in the mid- to late-1960s and the civil rights movement that helped frame much of the official under- standing of the violence that occurred (Garrow 1978). From Harlem in 1964, to Chicago and Watts in Los Angeles in 1965, to Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit in 1967, the scale of the violence and destruction was often vast. Thirty-four people died in the disorder in South Central Los Angeles (Abu-Lughod 2007), 26 died in Newark (Mumford 2007), and 43 died and almost 700 were injured in Detroit (Fine 2007). One estimate suggested that in 1964–1968 there were a to- tal of 329 riots in 257 cities, with more than 220 people killed, the majority being black citizens (Graham 1980). In the aftermath of the Watts riot, Governor Reagan appointed a commission of inquiry—known as the McCone Commission after its chair, John A. McCone, a former head of the CIA. The McCone Report, in contrast with almost all riot analyses that followed, referred to the outbreak of violence in South Central Los Angeles as a “spasm,” with the rioters “caught up in an insensate rage of destruction” (McCone Comm. 1965, p. 1), and an “explosion—a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless violent protest—engaged in by a few but bringing distress to all” 58 Newburn
(McCone Comm. 1965, pp. 4–5). It was widely criticized for its failure to understand local commu- nity experiences and grievances (Blauner 1966, Calif. Advis. Comm. US Comm. Civ. Rights 1966, Scoble 1968) and to engage critically with the questions being raised by the civil rights movement. Consequently, the report came to be seen as “the apotheosis of the conservative view, or ‘riffraff theory’” (Graham 1980, p. 15): Put bluntly, “Violence in the City” [the title of the McCone Report] claimed that the rioters were marginal people and the riots meaningless outbursts. The rioters were marginal people, according to the McCone Commission, because they were a small and unrepresentative fraction of the Negro population, namely, the unemployed, ill-educated, juvenile, delinquent, and uprooted. What provoked them to riot were not conditions endemic to Negro ghettos (police harassment and consumer exploita- tion), but rather problems peculiar to immigrant groups (resentment of police, insufficient skills, and inferior education) and irresponsible agitation by Negro leaders. Also, the riots were meaningless out- bursts, according to the McCone Commission, not simply because there was no connection between the Negroes’ grievances and their violence, but also because the rioting was unwarranted. (Fogelson 1967, pp. 338–39) Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. By contrast, for Fogelson (1967, p. 339) and other critics, “the rioting, and especially the looting and burning, were articulate protests.” In fact, the Los Angeles rioters were highly selective in the focus of their activities, the primary target of their looting and destruction being “white- owned stores which charged outrageous prices, sold inferior goods, and applied extortionate credit arrangements” (Fogelson 1967, p. 353; see also Davis 1992, Feagin & Hahn 1973). Although it was of course possible to exaggerate the extent of the selectivity of the rioters’ targets in the Watts and later disorder, “in view of the ferocity of the riots, what is remarkable are not the exceptions but the overall pattern and pervasive and intense sense of consumer exploitation underlying it” (Fogelson 1970, p. 151). The patterning of looting regularly found within civil disorder is one of the clearer, but far from the only, examples of the scripted and dramaturgical dimension of riots. Public protest has a choreography that is often clear and gives structure to behavior but remains little analyzed (Snow et al. 1981), for example, styles of dress, locations in which to meet, and symbols that designate a particular culture of protest [such as the mass burning of cars in French rioting (Fassin 2013)] or that indicate attachment to a cause and solidarity in the face of police violence [such as the yellow umbrellas in recent Hong Kong protests (Lee & Sing 2019)]. Subsequent riot inquiries took a very different line from McCone. Key among these was the Presidential Commission of Inquiry, which was chaired by the Governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner; set up by Lyndon Johnson in the midst of the Detroit riot; and established the dominant narrative of the period. Dismissing “riff-raff” theories and other means of marginalizing the significance of the disorder, the Commission famously concluded that, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 1]. White institu- tionalized racism was identified as the primary determinant of the disorder: “What white Ameri- cans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 2]. Underpinning the disorder, the Commis- sion argued, was a “reservoir of grievances,” varying from city to city, but in general relating to “prejudice, discrimination, severely disadvantaged living conditions and a general sense of frustra- tion [among African-Americans] about their inability to change those conditions” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 117]. The outbreak of violence was preceded by some precipitating incident or trigger, often minor and of a type that might occur with relative frequency without provoking violence. In the Kerner model, therefore, “the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 118]. www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 59
The Kerner Report had a huge impact, its various editions selling more than two million copies before the end of the decade, with one commentator describing it as having become “a basic docu- ment in the platform of American liberals for social reform, a catalogue and a program of solutions” (Kopkind 1971, p. 378). Furthermore, the Commission’s report “presented—and legitimized—a specific view of the riots and a particular understanding of America that now constitutes the stan- dard approach to the treatment of social ills” (Kopkind 1971, p. 379). In doing so the Commission steered a middle ground: upsetting the President through its failure to sufficiently acknowledge the impact of his Great Society program (Gooden & Myers 2018, Graham 1980) while also antag- onizing its Vice Chairman, Mayor John Lindsay of New York, who, notwithstanding his impact in stiffening the Commission’s summary report (Lipsky & Olson 1968), nevertheless felt the final report was “wishy-washy” (Kopkind 1971, p. 389). By the end of the 1960s, the established view from Kerner and subsequent reports, such as Skolnick’s to the Violence Commission established the following year (Skolnick 1969), was to present riots “fundamentally as acts of political protest by angry ghetto blacks” (Graham 1980, p. 16; see also Fogelson 1971). In Skolnick’s (1969, pp. xix–xx) Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org words: Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. [M]ass protest is an essentially political phenomenon engaged in by normal people; that demonstrations are increasingly being employed by a variety of groups, ranging from students and blacks to middle-class professionals, public employees and policemen; that violence, when it occurs, is not usually planned, but arises out of an interaction between protesters and responding authorities; that violence has frequently accompanied the efforts of deprived groups to achieve status in American society; and that recommen- dations concerning the prevention of violence which do not address the issue of fundamental social and political change are fated to be largely irrelevant and frequently self-defeating. The view that riotous collective behavior was quite highly structured, was attuned to the redress of specific grievances, and had targets of violence that were often limited and logical (Currie & Skolnick 1970) slowly became dominant. That such explanations paralleled those utilized by Rudé, Hobsbawm, and others in relation to riots in earlier eras was occasionally made explicit. Allan Silver (1968, p. 148) suggested the urban disorder of the 1960s appeared “to be shaping itself into modern equivalents of the traditional forms of riotous protest: a self-conscious drama that substitutes shops, consumer goods, police, and white passers-by for granaries and grain-carts, tax officials, local notables, and townhouses.” In many respects, by the end of the 1960s, the gen- eral approach of the new social history and what Silver referred to as the diagnostic sociology of Kerner and other inquiries had formed a general approach to collective violence that focused on its “meaningful and patterned character” and laid stress on its “socially caused, uncollusive character” (Silver 1968, p. 150). CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES Little has occurred since to disturb this dominant scholarly viewpoint, one that takes the structural problems facing communities in which riots occur and the grievances such problems give rise to as the primary motivational explanation for the behavior of rioters. In his analysis of recent riots in England, France, and America, Wacquant (2008, p. 24) puts it typically forcefully, arguing that they “constitute a (socio)logical response to the massive structural violence unleashed upon them by a set of mutually reinforcing economic and socio-political changes.” It is an approach that posits, more or less straightforwardly, that violence from above begets violence from below. The under- lying conditions—inequality, exclusion, racism, state violence, and so forth—give rise to tensions and grievances that may, under certain circumstances, explode into collective violence. The ex- planatory approach generally uses the metaphor of a flashpoint or spark, viewed as the necessary 60 Newburn
ingredient that sets alight the underlying tinder. As the Kerner Commission put it, “As we see it, the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative pro- cess of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this sense the entire chain—the grievances, the series of prior tension-heightening incidents, and the final incident—was the “precipitant of disorder” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 118]. In a similar vein, in his report into the Brixton riot in south London in 1981 Lord Scarman (1981) identified one particular arrest made by police officers as being the spark. As he put it, “Deeper causes undoubt- edly existed, and must be probed; but the immediate cause of Saturday’s events was a spontaneous combustion set off by the spark of a single incident” (Scarman 1981, p. 37). One of the best-known analytical models in this field, and one that utilizes this metaphor, is David Waddington’s flashpoints schema, developed with a range of colleagues (King & Waddington 2005, Moran & Waddington 2016, Waddington et al. 1989). The model has six levels of analysis, set out in its original formulation as a set of concentric circles ranging from the macro to the micro and including the structural (the material circumstances of different social groups, Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org their relationship with the state, and how such factors relate to conflict), political/ideological (the Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. relationship between dissenting groups to political and ideological institutions and how they are treated by those institutions), cultural (different social groups’ understandings of the social world and their place in it), contextual (the long-term and more immediate backdrop to relationships— for example, between particular groups and the police—within which disorder occurs), situational (the spatial and social determinants of disorder), and interactional (the dynamics of interaction between police and protestors). It is at this latter level that flashpoints (single or multiple) are found. To the original six levels of analysis, Moran & Waddington’s (2016) revised model adds a seventh, institutional/organizational level to better account for the importance of understanding such matters as traditions and philosophies of policing, systems of accountability and so forth. As Waddington (2008) acknowledges, it is not just the immediate factors that may act as the source of grievance and frustration but longer-term historical experiences and folklore that may inform and shape such matters as, for example, relations with the police. He quotes Keith’s (1993, p. 169) observation that “trigger events are not epiphenomenal or incidental to the development of vio- lence. They provide a key element in the signification of action, the meaning of the riot set against its spatial and social context.” The flashpoints model has been used by its originators, and numerous others, as the basis for the analysis of a range of riots and other forms of crowd conduct (Body-Gendrot 2012, 2013; Moran & Waddington 2015, 2016; Waddington 1992, 2010). It has also been subject to a certain amount of criticism, including suggestions it flattens out the complexity of such events, imposing a false level of coherence (Bagguley & Hussain 2008) and that it tends to underplay the fluid ways in which disorder develops over time and in space (Otten et al. 2001). More trenchantly, a namesake of the originator of this model, P.A.J. Waddington (1991), has been critical both of claims linking factors such as poverty and antipolice sentiment to riots and, more particularly, the flashpoint idea at the heart of such explanations. In relation to the latter, his argument is that the time-lag between a so-called flashpoint and subsequent riot reduces its explanatory utility, such that flashpoints can never be defined in advance, only retrospectively. He goes on to suggest that in both its popular and academic form, so dominant has such an approach become since the late 1960s and “so widely and uncritically accepted in academic and related circles that it now occupies the position of a received wisdom” (Waddington 1991, p. 221). Indeed, Waddington (1991, p. 244) goes on to argue that this is more a reflection of political positions than empirical reality: “despite pretensions to the contrary [it] might better be seen as justifying or excusing the riots, and apportioning blame and responsibility to groups other than rioters. In short, it might be regarded, not as analysis, but as advocacy.” www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 61
Waddington’s criticisms have met with robust rejoinders (see, for example, Waddington 1998). Ironically, one of the elements of the flashpoints model that is arguably least well developed is that of the flashpoint itself (Newburn 2016b). In much of the literature in which this model is used, there is a lack of clarity as to what constitutes a flashpoint, and what processes are involved— although this may be an inherently problematic exercise (Waddington 1991). It is here in par- ticular, however, that I suggest psychological theory has a crucial role to play. In parallel with its sociological counterpart, contemporary psychological explanation has moved considerably away from the reductionism of early approaches to the crowd. The social identity model (SIM), the most persuasive of these social psychological approaches, with its roots in interactionism and social identity formation, draws on Turner’s (1982, p. 21) observation that social identity is the funda- mental cognitive mechanism underpinning and enabling group behavior. Based on this, the work of Reicher (1984, 1987, 1996a, among others) offers a thorough-going theorization of these ele- ments of crowd conduct. This (elaborated) social identity model takes group action to be based on social identity rather than individual or personal identity and allows for conceptions of the self to Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org be variable and multiform. Rather than a loss of identity as posited in deindividuation approaches Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. (Reicher et al. 1995), the “shift from individual to group behavior involves a shift from personal to social identity and hence the emergence of cultural standards as a basis for behavioral control” (Reicher 1996a, p. 116). Reicher illustrates this in his analysis of the 1980 riot in the St. Paul’s district of Bristol, England. Describing the events as being characterized by “spontaneous social behavior with the twin characteristics of uniformity across individuals and of clear social limits” (Reicher 1984, p. 17), he shows how traditional individualistic explanations and even more recent approaches such as emergent norm theory are inadequate in explaining such patterns. Rather, he suggests, there was “a match between the social self-definition used by participants and their actions” (Reicher 1984, p. 18). It is the shape and limits of the actions of those involved in crowd activity that he takes to illustrate the operation of collective identity. He goes further to argue that there is something dis- tinctive about such crowds, in that the nature of the circumstances and actions involved “give rise to a sense of power which allows members to express their identity even in the face of outgroup opposition” (Reicher 2003, p. 197). Furthermore, and of central importance in understanding how crowd violence comes to occur, Reicher and others’ research suggests that social identity may be transformed during the course of such crowd activity with, for example, previously nonviolent members coming to embrace more aggressive forms of behavior. It is here that the social identity model offers a basis for the unpacking of the idea of a flashpoint. In a series of studies that focus on citizen–police interactions, Reicher and colleagues (Drury & Reicher 1999, Stott & Reicher 1998) have illustrated the processes lying behind shifting social identities within crowd activity: how, for example, perceptions of illegitimate and indiscriminate police action “can be used to ex- plain how a fragmented mass of demonstrators [come] to form a psychologically homogeneous crowd” (Reicher 1996a, p. 130) and one that is more prepared to engage in violence. In these studies, violent conflict tends to emerge as a consequence of gradually escalating and problematic intergroup dynamics (often between the crowd and the police) and may also be precipitated by particular symbolic events: most obviously, arrests and other displays of police power, especially where these are seen as particularly inappropriate. In this context, and borrowing from the SIM, I take flashpoints to be exceptionally symbolic moments in social interactions that act to focus or condense particular (oppositional) social identities. THE LIMITS OF CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES A combination of structural sociological analysis of the broad conditions that conduce toward outbreaks of significant social tensions together with social psychological interpretation of the 62 Newburn
meso- and microlevel interactions that may affect social identity and serve to translate anger and grievance into violence appears to offer a sound basis for an understanding of the etiology of riots. Furthermore, although they are by no means used in combination in this way, such approaches do appear to be of increasing influence. Notwithstanding this positive conclusion, I argue that there are at least two important respects in which academic consideration of riots continues to be too restricted, both of which stem from the nature and extent of the reaction against the assumptions of the irrationalism of the crowd in earlier eras. The first concerns the relative invisibility of those elements of riotous behavior that fit uneasily into accounts that privilege rationality: spontaneity, emotion, and indeed, all conduct that displays few obvious or immediate instrumental character- istics. It is by no means my intention to suggest that the understanding of violent crowds can be reduced to such influences or factors; simply that no account of collective disorder can be fully realized in their absence. The second arises from the dominance of violence at the heart of social scientific inquiry. This has had a number of consequences, one of the more important of which has been to unduly restrict scholarly concerns, in particular diverting the focus away from what occurs Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org in the aftermath of violence; in short we pay insufficient attention to the impact or consequences Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. of riots. In an important series of contributions, Borch (2006, 2012) argued that one of the consequences of the backlash against traditional psychological and sociological portrayals of the crowd was to diminish interest in the field of study generally. The study of the crowd, he suggested, has been “exiled to the outermost limits of sociology” as a result of “double discomfort” (Borch 2006, p. 84): unease with the crowd’s associations with irrationality on the one hand and the growing dominance of methodological individualism on the other. Read superficially, Borch’s work could easily be misunderstood as some form of attempt to rebuild Le Bon’s scholarly reputation. In fact, and rather like Marx (1970) before him, Borch’s argument is that the consequence of the wholesale rejection of Le Bon’s work has been the emergence of an unhelpful binary opposition of the rational and irrational in understanding collective conduct with, ultimately, the general expulsion of anything associated with irrationality from scholarly concern in this field. The danger is that interpretations of disorder become prey to over-rationalization. In this vein, Marx (1970, p. 24) argued that social science’s great failure was its inability to deal with those ex- amples of collective violence “where the elements of protest, ideology, grievance, strain, lack of access to channels for redressing complaints, social change and social movements, are relatively insignificant factors, if not absent altogether.” Again, there is no suggestion here of a return to viewing violent crowds as irrational mobs. Rather it is simply to acknowledge that not all riots are focused, or not primarily focused, on some desire to bring about social or political change. The problem, Marx (1970, p. 21) suggested, was that the “exclusive contemporary focus on protest riots (however interesting and accessible) may obscure certain general predisposing factors, psycholog- ical states, social processes, and consequences found in the most diverse types of riot.” There is a broader issue here. As Rock (1981) observed: “Riots are written about by those who attach weight to ideas, intentionality and thoughtfulness, for whom things do not just happen. Riots are seen by them as part of a scheme: vehicles and signifiers of meaning about the world. A riot thus achieves a solemnity which is quite imposing. It is made to say so much.” The ever-present risk, he suggests, is that an excess of significance will be imposed on such social phenomena (see Katz 2016). Crucial as it is to recognize the importance of the underlying political, economic, and social conditions underpinning social unrest, it is also vital to acknowledge the seemingly impromptu and somewhat spontaneous nature of such events (Keith 1993). Doing so requires that greater attention is paid to the role of emotions than is standardly the case currently. As Elias (1982, p. 284) argued more generally about social action, approaches that focus on consciousness, reason, or ideas, “while disregarding the structure of drives, the direction and form of human affects and www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 63
passions, can be from the outset of only limited value” (see also Katz 2002). As I have argued elsewhere (Newburn et al. 2018, p. 56), participants’ descriptions of what it feels like to be involved in a riot help shed light on what it means to be involved: “engaging with the emotional experience of rioting offers another, potentially important means of understanding why riots occur, and why they occur in the ways that they do.” The second limitation in current approaches to the study of riots derives from the centrality of violence in the study of the crowd. Although this might seem an odd observation to make in the context of riots, we should remind ourselves that classical studies in this field, even though now discredited in many ways, were focused on collective behavior more generally rather than riots more narrowly. In the past half century, the field has been dominated to a significant degree by crowd violence and crowd conflict; the study of the peaceful crowd has taken something of a backseat (Holton 1978). In some respects one of the greatest influences on this trend has been the social histories of popular protest discussed earlier. Although such work was in many ways suc- cessful in countering Rudé’s observation that the study of the crowd had been unfairly neglected, Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org it nevertheless cemented a particular approach to such history that privileged the violent crowd. Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. At the heart of Rudé’s work was an especially narrow view of the crowd that excluded all manner of collective action [see Rudé’s (1964, p. 4) own description], and which made Rudé’s claim to be studying the crowd in history “little short of pretentious” (Harrison 1988, p. 11). Nevertheless this conception of crowd, which conflated protesting or rioting crowds with crowds in general, became well-established and fairly standard in historical studies. The irony of this was that although Rudé sought to challenge much of Le Bon’s work on the irrationality of crowds, and did so very success- fully, he also reinforced this conflation. He may have “established the ‘respectability’ of the mob, but it was a mob just the same” (Harrison 1988, p. 12). This narrowing of focus has had a number of consequences. The tendency to separate the study of violent crowds from other forms of collective activity means that the cross-fertilization that would potentially result from a wider, more inclusive approach to collective behavior is un- derutilized. The fact that the literatures on riots on the one hand and on social movements on the other now proceed relatively independently of each other is an illustration of this ongoing separation.2 Arguably, this separation has also limited comparative study in this field, in particular restricting potentially instructive comparisons of riotous locations with places that are (relatively) riot-free. The fact that the underlying conditions that tend to be associated with the existence of riots only rarely give rise to disorder illustrates why there is potentially much to be gained from studying not only the presence of violent disorder but also its absence (Newburn 2016b, Ray 2014). In this context, the protests that spread across America in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in 2020 varied greatly. Some became violent, while many others did not. When violence did break out it differed in its origin, nature, intensity, and extent. Understanding these patterns, how and why violence occurs, spreads, and stops, as well as the forms it takes, are matters of great consequence. Asking how order is maintained, and what mitigates the risks of large-scale violence, potentially has much to offer the study of disorder. The few attempts to study the absence of avoidance or rioting may be broadly subdivided three ways. The first attempts to understand periods of relative calm within jurisdictions that have a history of rioting. Michael Katz (2012), for example, argues that the relative absence of urban rioting in the United States in the decades that followed the disorder of the 1960s could be explained in part by the new ecology of urban power that reduced 2 For example, with the exception of discussion of policing, references to riot or collective violence barely appear in either the Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Snow et al. 2007a) or della Porta & Diani’s (1999) Social Movements: An Introduction. 64 Newburn
boundary challenges or ethnic conflicts and deflected civil violence as well as by the selective incorporation of African Americans and through the emergence of new forms of control that helped undercut possible protest. Second, and somewhat in parallel, Lukas’s (2009) comparative analysis points to the existence of local initiatives and broader Federal programs that have helped Germany avoid the levels of civil disorder found in neighboring European nations such as France. Finally, there have been small-scale attempts, using the spread of riots as a focus, to ask why some locations are affected by rioting, whereas others remain (relatively) peaceful (Mitchell 2011). The absence of rioting in Marseille during the extraordinarily widespread rioting in France in 2005 was linked in one account to a variety of factors ranging from its specific form of cosmopolitanism and lower social and ethnic polarization to the impact of the systems of informal social control derived from the influence of organized crime groups (Schneider 2014). In this vein, in a study of two locations where riots might reasonably have been anticipated during the disorder in England in 2011, Newburn (2016b) used elements of Waddington’s flashpoints model, together with the SIM, to show how matters at the contextual and interactional levels appeared to be crucial in Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org avoiding escalating violence, not least via initiatives to improve police–community relations, the Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. adoption of flexible but firm policing tactics, and, crucially, the availability of, and willingness to trust, local community representatives and others on the ground as mediators and peacemakers when serious rioting looked likely. The final way in which the contemporary study of riots has been unhelpfully narrowed also derives in part from the overriding emphasis on violence and, more particularly, from the priv- ileging of questions of etiology over other concerns. Although the focus on violence is in many respects understandable, it deflects attention from matters that are arguably of equal importance. These include questions concerning the spread of riots, in terms of both how violence escalates beyond its starting point and, as stated above, why some locations are affected and others not. The sizeable academic scrutiny of the extraordinarily extensive 2005 riots in France, for example (Body-Gendrot & Savitch 2012, Jobard 2014, Moran 2012, Roché & de Maillard 2009), included almost no socio-spatial analysis (for a slight exception, see Lagrange 2009). An exception to this general absence of the spread of protest and disorder, though still in its early stages, can be found in the work of psychologists studying the diffusion of violence in the 2011 England riots, again utilizing ideas of shared social identities and collective empowerment as the basis for explanation (Ball et al. 2019, Drury et al. 2020). Although it would be unfair to say that scholarly analysis has ignored matters beyond etiological questions, it is certainly the case that these have dominated discussion. In addition to the relative lack of attention paid to the processes by which riots mutate and spread once underway, there has been little analysis of how riots come to an end. Where the focus on violence has had its most significantly limiting effect, however, is in drawing attention away from what happens in the aftermath or as a result of riots. What are the implications for those involved in the violence as perpetrators and/or victims? What is the impact on the localities affected? If commissions of inquiry are established, what effect do they have on politics and public policy? As Sidney Fine (2007, p. ix) noted in the introduction to his book on the 1967 Detroit riot, the violence had “important consequences for the city. . .the state of Michigan, and the nation.” Importantly, by no means were all of these negative, for as sociologists from Robert Park onward have been keen to highlight, crowds, including violent ones, may also be vehicles for positive social change. The deaths of Trayvon Martin in Sandford, FL, in 2012, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY, both in 2014, and the protests that followed were crucial to the rise to the #BlackLivesMatter movement (Lebron 2017, Taibbi 2018). The death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis, MN, in 2020 further stimulated that movement and widespread pressure for police reform and broader social change. It is to be seen how significant www.annualreviews.org • The Causes and Consequences of Riots 65
any change will be. Assessments of what has happened since the Kerner Report half a century ago are hardly a cause for optimism (Farley 2018, De La Cruz-Viesca et al. 2018, Loessberg & Kiskinen 2018), and yet, at least in the midst of the 2020 protests, there is a sense that they may spark serious reform efforts, and not only in America. Despite the widespread evidence that social protest can be a transformative vehicle (see, for example, Duberman 2019) it remains rare for a consideration of the impact of protest, riot, and social disorder to form a significant part of social scientific inquiry into such phenomena. Given this, I conclude below with a brief outline of what I refer to as a life-cycle model of riots—one that offers a broad analytical approach to thinking about these phenomena in the more extended way I have suggested. CONCLUSION: A LIFE-CYCLE APPROACH TO RIOTS This life-cycle model (Newburn 2015, 2016a) builds on extant approaches and focuses attention not only on the economic, social, political, and institutional features of the landscape that conduce Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org toward rioting but also seeks to draw attention to the ways in which agents, agencies and institu- Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. tions operate once the violence has ceased and what the implications of such social reaction might be. In Figure 1, I set out the major features of this model, beginning with issues of context and riot dynamics. Context mirrors some elements of the flashpoints and cognate models, not least of which are the structural, political/ideological, cultural, and institutional elements influencing crowd conduct. Crowd dynamics refer to not just those matters that appear to be the more im- mediate origins of rioting but also the features that influence how disorder matures and spreads and how extensive it is temporally. Nature focuses on issues of participation and motivation (who and how many people are involved in the rioting, how they experience their involvement, and the reasons and rationales for their participation), the ways in which the disorder is policed and people ordered and controlled, and, finally, what forms violence takes, together with some consideration of the question of if and how violence mutates. Finally, there are issues of response and impact. Again, I have separated these into three subdivisions: the political, public, and media responses that frame violent events; the response of the penal state; and, finally, the economic, political, and cultural policy responses. In each of these cases, the questions that face us concern not simply the nature of the responses to violence but the immediate, medium-term, and long-term consequences of such reactions. Having devoted the bulk of this review thus far to the more traditional areas of riot analysis, I finish with a few observations on the final response (and impact) element of what I have called a riot’s life cycle. My argument is that any full understanding of riots must necessarily incorporate some analysis of what happens once the violence has ceased while accepting that many of these features may begin in the midst of the violence. The model divides such responses into three broad categories, though it makes no assumption that all major responses to riots are contained within these categories. The first concerns the political, public, and the media responses. How are riots framed? Indeed, is the term riot used and by whom? How is collective violence talked about, defined, defended, and attacked by politicians, pundits, and the public? Such issues deeply affect popular conceptions of disorder and are matters that vary considerably by time and place or, if one prefers, historically and comparatively. In this regard, however, it is important to recog- nize that the influence of the reactions to rioting—what politicians, journalists, and others have to say—often continues long beyond the period of rioting itself, affecting the ways such events are perceived and how they are responded to. In this context, media framing may have a very signifi- cant impact on public images of protest, establishing understandings that are both pervasive and durable (Halloran et al. 1970, Snow et al. 2007b). Political framing can affect almost everything, including both the penal and public policy responses that I discuss below (Newburn et al. 2018). 66 Newburn
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