Four months after the August riots in English cities, the revenge attack on working class communities continues. There have now been more than 3,000 arrests in London, 700 in the West Midlands and over 350 in Greater Manchester, as well as between tens and hundreds in other cities where there were also disturbances between 6 and 10 August. Nicki Jameson reports.
By 12 October nearly 2,000 people had appeared in court, including children as young as 11 years old, and 551 had been sentenced, many to terms which are overtly disproportionate to anything they have actually done. For example, on 7 November Damon Barker was sentenced to four years in Liverpool Crown Court for violent disorder and burglary with intent to steal, after breaking into a shopping centre on 9 August. Nothing was actually stolen.
The police continue to mount heavy-handed raids on the homes of suspects, including children, and to seize property, much of which is not stolen, while local councils threaten to evict entire families in which one person has been arrested on riot-related charges. Some magistrates have privately admitted that when faced with mass hearings of alleged rioters, they decided that the best course of action would be to order blanket remands in custody without inquiring into the individual circumstances, and criminal lawyers report that clients arrested on unrelated burglaries, robberies and other crimes which took place during the week of the riots are also being treated by the courts as ‘riot-related’.
Alongside this almost hysterically punitive response, various different inquiries have opened, aimed at understanding the reasons for the uprising, or preventing such occurrences in future, or both. The Home Affairs Select Committee is conducting an inquiry into Policing Large Scale Disorder, while former Chief Executive of Jobcentre Plus Darra Singh is chairing the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel and The Guardian and London School of Economics are undertaking a detailed empirical study entitled Reading the Riots.
In reality, the reasons for the riots are obvious. The explosion of anger was initially sparked off by the police murder of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London, on 4 August, but quickly developed into a nationwide response to racist and anti-working class policing, lack of educational and work opportunities and inner-city poverty. Despite the flurry of government and media condemnation of looting during the riots as ‘sheer greed’ and ‘criminality’, the Ministry of Justice’s own statistical data report, published on 24 October, confirmed that young people appearing before the courts came disproportionately from areas defined by the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Indices 2010 as having high levels of deprivation. 64% of 10-17 year olds lived in one of the 20% most deprived areas whilst only 3% lived in one of the 20% least deprived areas. Over 42% of those of school age received free school meals.
Across the country, 42% of those people appearing in court were white, 46% black or mixed race and 7% Asian. Not surprisingly, figures vary from area to area, so in Harringey, north London 55% of defendants were black/mixed race, while in Salford, Greater Manchester, 94% were white.
In addition to all the riot inquiries, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is investigating the death of Mark Duggan. The IPCC has always been widely viewed as not impartial and as a mechanism for covering up police brutality. Its involvement in this case to date has done nothing to improve this reputation. The police initially alleged that Mark died following an exchange of gunfire and the IPCC adopted this version of events without question. However, by 9 August the IPCC was forced to announce that there was no evidence that Mark had fired a gun. On 19 November, in an article originally entitled ‘Man whose shooting triggered riots was not armed’, The Guardian further claimed that forensic evidence would prove that Mark Duggan not only did not fire but was not carrying a gun, although a shoebox found in the back of the car he was travelling in might have contained one at some stage. The IPCC immediately issued a statement labelling the article’s title as ‘misleading, speculative and wholly irresponsible’ and, along with the Metropolitan Police, is pursuing a press complaint against the newspaper. Controversy then continued on 21 November, when two out of three members of the Community Reference Group, set up to liaise between the IPCC and the local community, announced their resignation. One of them, Stafford Scott, who has been an active community spokesperson in Tottenham since the 1980s, described the IPCC investigation as ‘flawed and in all probability tainted – so much so that we can never have faith in its final report’.
Whatever is ultimately revealed or covered up about the death of Mark Duggan, one thing remains clear – his shooting dead, and the subsequent refusal of the Metropolitan Police to treat his family with respect when they went to the police station on 6 August demanding answers, resonated with black and working class people across the country. No matter how much the media continues to depict the events which followed as incoherent and those who took part as mindless, ill-informed, greedy criminals, they were rising up and fighting back against a system in which racism remains prevalent, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, services are being destroyed and the police are increasingly overt in their brutality. We must continue to oppose the attempts to marginalise and criminalise this resistance.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism 224 December 2011/January 2012
