Ten years ago London burned. Could it happen again?
Plus Science Museum exposed and tube signage litigation
Ten years ago this week, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot dead by armed police on the streets of Tottenham Hale.
The reason given at the time was that Duggan was under surveillance and thought to be armed. After the shooting, a bullet was found embedded in a police radio and media reports implied that the bullet had been fired by Duggan.
It hadn’t.
Weeks later the IPCC stated: “It seems possible that we may have verbally led journalists to [wrongly] believe that shots were exchanged.” (The bullet is now thought to have come from a police firearm and become lodged in the radio after passing through Duggan’s body.)
Two days later there was a peaceful march to Tottenham police station, organised by friends and relatives of Duggan. After it got dark another group set Tottenham’s post office on fire, police cars were attacked, shops windows were smashed and some shops were looted. A police cordon had to be set up around Tottenham police station and twenty-six officers were injured.
The next day The Guardian reported that the “very volatile situation” had been “contained, for now” and that the scale of the unrest had not matched that of the Broadwater Farm riots twenty-six years earlier, which had erupted after Cynthia Jarrett died during a search of her home by police officers.
N.B. A 2015 investigation into Duggan’s killing found there was no case to answer for any officer involved in the shooting. And in May of this year the police watchdog refused to reopen its investigation into the case.
The next day, things got a lot worse.
There were riots in Brixton, Enfield, Islington, Wood Green and the West End; and violence in Dalston, Denmark Hill and Streatham.
If you were in London that week, then you probably remember what it was like to see the city burn and shatter around you. If you were ‘lucky’ you watched it unfold on your television screen. If you were less fortunate, you watched it happening outside your front door.
On Monday it felt as though the entire city was holding its breath, waiting for nightfall. People were allowed to leave work early so they could get home before dark. Tube lines were closed. Businesses were shuttered up by lunchtime. Rumours flew, and it felt like both the media and the police were struggling to keep up with a city that was disintegrating around them.
One news story would be about residents banding together to clean their streets of broken glass and repair shops fronts. The next news story would be about business owners arming themselves with whatever they could, in order to see off looters.
On Monday evening people prayed for rain, and all 32 boroughs of London were placed on riot alert.
But there was no rain and, once the sun disappeared, it felt like the whole of London became a battle zone. The Wikipedia page for the riots lists over 30 areas where some kind of unrest occurred on that Monday night. The most trouble came in Ealing, where 68-year-old Richard Bowes was assaulted after trying to put out a fire (he died three days later from his injuries); and in Croydon, where 26-year-old Trevor Ellis was shot and killed and the House of Reeves furniture store was burned to the ground.
The riots spread out of London that night, with similar unrest in Birmingham, Bristol, Gillingham and Nottingham. The next day Time magazine wrote:
“Not since the blitz during World War II have so many fires raged in London so intensely at one time.”
On the Tuesday, David Cameron decided now was the time to cut short his Italian holiday, and when he got back he ordered 16,000 police officers on to the streets of London.
By Wednesday, a combination of that massive police presence (and the threat of rubber bullets and water cannon), plus some heavy rain, brought the rioting to an end.
Five people were dead, at least 16 others were injured as a direct result of the violence, and property damage was estimated at around £40m for each day of the riots.
Could it happen today?
One publication trying to answer that question is The Guardian, which has analysed “data around youth services, stop and search and deprivation” in an attempt to see how much things have changed ten years on.
The results aren’t good.
Since 2001 youth services have been “cut by £372m when adjusted for inflation, down 73%” with some areas experiencing even steeper cuts. In Haringey (where the riots started) “the youth services budget fell from £5.6m to just £970,000 – a cut of 85% when taking inflation into account.”
It’s not a surprise that The Guardian’s research also found that “while stop and search numbers have declined overall, black people are still far more likely to be targeted by police than white people.” And we also know that this situation is likely to get a lot worse if stop and search powers are expanded to allow the police to search people without suspicion.
The Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, has penned a column for the Guardian in which he laments the fact that only a handful of the 63 recommendations made by a report published after the riots were ever implemented (the recommendations included “greater support for families, address youth unemployment, improve school attainment, improve police relations and tackle reoffending by young offenders”).
Lammy also writes about the fact that, after the riots, a lot of the blame was put on Blackberry Messenger (look it up kids) and social media, which allegedly allowed rioters to mobilise and organise.
However, James Ball (global editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) has written an excellent piece for Tortoise which seems to contradict this widely held belief. Ball says that research from the time shows that “every assumption the authorities had made about rioters coordinating via Twitter was wrong. People used Twitter then as they generally do today – to share news and rumours.”
“Twitter’s biggest sin, if anything, was misinformation: photos of Egyptian tank deployments were reported as being near the Bank of England; people falsely claimed tigers had been released from London Zoo; and so on. But Twitter didn’t mobilise the riots.”
Ball also looks at the claims around BBM, noting that the very fact that “BlackBerry Messenger essentially worked like a slightly-more-difficult-to-use WhatsApp” means that saying BBM was used to coordinate the riots is “as meaningless as saying text messages or phones coordinated the riots.”
Ball’s conclusion that the central debate about “policing, inequality, racism or some other modern-day horror” should not be allowed to turn into a debate about social media, is a very important one as we go into August 2021.
Middle Eastern news publication The National ran an article about the London riots yesterday, and for it they interviewed professor of criminology at the London School of Economics, Tim Newburn, who said that “insufficient progress has been made to guard against the possibility of some repeat” of the riots. He also raises the elephant in the 2021 room: the easing up of Covid restrictions.
“There will be times in the coming months where the police will be confronted with difficult situations,” Newburn says, “then everything rides on are how well they handle those conditions.”
With the events of the Sarah Everard vigil still fresh in our minds, you’ll forgive us if we’re not overly optimistic.
And the rest
New figures show that attacks on police officers have risen during the pandemic, with most assaults taking place on London officers. The Met recorded 6,419 incidents (“with or without injury”) in the year since March 2020.
Channel 4 News has discovered that The Science Museum signed a gagging clause in its agreement with Shell International (who sponsored their climate change exhibition), which meant the museum could not “say anything that could damage the company’s reputation.”
An airline pilot who was knocked unconscious when a Kentish Town station sign fell on his head last year, is taking legal action against TfL after he suffered “vertigo, depression, low energy and memory loss.”
The mayor has launched a £1.3m fund to “support creative jobs across London”. The fund will be used to increase employment in creative sectors, particularly for Black, Asian and minority ethnic people and women.
Fortune magazine has taken a look at how “London became 2021’s hub for hot new tech IPOs” citing money-transfer app Wise, cyber security company Darktrace and…erm, Moonpig as some the big winners of 2021 so far.
The London Post has a rundown of some of the new restaurants opening in Brixton Village this month “from a new pizzeria to Brixton Village’s first sushi restaurant, a new artisan deli & wine store and a patisserie dedicated to cheesecakes”. Big Hospitality has taken a closer look at that sushi restaurant, the “traditional Japanese handroll bar” Temaki.
AnOther is running a series celebrating local bars “which have long played a crucial role in creativity and connection”. The latest instalment looks at Little Mercies in Crouch End.