5th August 2024
Thirteen years ago, I went along to the south London shopping centre expecting to report on a riot. But there was not a riot.
And so in a splendid exercise of journalism, I filed a piece on a riot not taking place.
The original piece even had a photograph from me of a deserted Bromley town centre – perhaps the least dramatic photograph ever published by any news organ.
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The paragraphs above are adapted from a post I wrote here in 2021, ten years after the 2011 riots.
That 2011 post, in turn, was prompted by comments from a former CPS prosecutor who thought that the prosecutions had been too harsh for some of those “caught up” in the 2011 riots:
“We have to treat people differently otherwise the system’s unfair and so there were people who I regret even having anything to do with,” said [Nazir] Afzal. “In a different atmosphere, in a different environment, they would have been diverted from the justice system altogether – given conditional discharges, probation, restorative justice, pay compensation. But they got rolled into everything else because we didn’t have resources.
“I mean 2011 was the beginning of austerity. I was tasked immediately on taking the role to reduce my budget by 25%, which meant I had to release lots of prosecutors, administrative staff. The police were doing the same, police stations were closing. So we just had to work with the limited resources we had and that meant that we were forced to apply the same rules to everybody and less discretion than we would have been able to exercise otherwise.”
In 2021 these seemed good points.
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Now it is 2024, and there are more August riots.
The same former CPS prosecutor quoted above has referred to his 2011 record when commenting on the riots of the weekend just gone:
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Are the two stances consistent?
Are the regrets stated in 2021 consistent with the pride shown in 2024?
And what is the right way – or the best way – for the criminal justice system to deal with a riot?
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One way is to treat the various offences in a riot as discrete acts, and to treat them as they would be treated by the criminal justice system if there was no context of wider disorder.
Any criminal damage would be treated as criminal damage would normally be treated, and any arson, ditto.
This would be to treat the rioters as simple criminals, regardless of the wider situation of lawlessness.
There is some merit in that position – and it indicates a justice system unfazed by the supposed “legitimate concerns” of the rioters.
(Of course, if a ‘legitimate concern’ is a view held regardless of the evidence, and which is used to justify any hateful thing done or said, it is neither a ‘concern’ nor ‘legitimate’. It is an excuse, cloaking something very different.)
In essence, this stance is that the rioters are criminals pure and simple, and so should just be treated as criminals, pure and simple.
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Another approach is that riots change things – that they change everything.
A riot is, on this view, not a collection of separate criminal acts – each of which could be tried and punished separately.
There is instead an additional quality about the many criminal acts in a riot that means that they should be punished far more harshly than if the criminal acts had been committed in isolation.
This was certainly the approach which the criminal justice system adopted in 2011 (and which the former CPS prosecutor suggested in 2021 may have gone too far in some cases).
One lawyer who gave advice to those being prosecuted in 2011 has recalled that grim experience:
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The rioters in parts of England over the last few days will, it seems, be prosecuted as rioters, and not just as individuals doing particular criminal acts.
Few, if any, sensible people will disagree.
This was not normal, everyday criminality.
Indeed, the disturbances of the last few days seemed worse than riots. They appeared to be more like concerted pogroms. They looked as if they were politically directed and coordinated.
In essence: what happened may have been more akin to terrorism – deliberate political violence.
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SCHULTZ: It is nothing! Children on their way to school! Mischievous children! Nothing more! I assure you! Schoolchildren. Young—full of mischief. You understand?
~ Cabaret
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There has in the United Kingdom long been a special branch of criminal law that dealt with terrorism offences.
This is because the criminal law also does not treat terrorists as normal criminals, pure and simple.
There is an additional quality to the criminal acts in question which mean a different legal response is required. Indeed, terrorism law has offences where there is no non-terrorism criminal counterpart.
It may well be that those who directed – or at least incited and encouraged – the 2024 rioters from afar will find that they have brought themselves within the scope of various terrorist offences.
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There is no one way for the criminal legal system to deal with a riot.
But.
Those who get involved in a riot should not be surprised when the legal system treats their offence as being worse than if the criminal act had been done in another context.
And those who incited and encouraged the rioters should also not be surprised if the legal system treats their involvement as being within the context of terrorism.
For, to conclude, section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 is in broad terms:
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I think that there will be some very hard work done by the police and CPS over the next weeks and months.
It could be difficult for the CPS to decide what to charge these offenders with. As you say it could be ‘ordinary’ arson, or a terrorist offence.
Personally, I lean towards terrorism, but nothing in the UK criminal law is straightforward.
I think that no matter which offence these people are charged with, there will be some substantial jail sentences.
As a man on the Stockholm omnibus it will be interesting for me to see how it all pans out.
Many thanks indeed.
Having been caught up in the riot in Birmingham city centre back in 2011 whilst eating out in the Bullring (sic), I had a grandstand view of rioters looting, rather ineffectually, shops on the High Street and New Street.
I submitted a report of my worm’s eye view of events to Richard Burden who was then the Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield.
I never had the chance to thank the support and cleaning staff of the Bullring who tried to direct people away from the rioting after their colleagues in security had it seemed fled the scene.
Is there an offence of stupidity?
One group, I learnt the following day had broken into a mobile phone shop and stolen the dummy phones on public display whilst leaving the stock for sale safe behind the locked door at the rear of the store.
Still, I will say for them that they did not riot where they lived, soiling their neighbourhood as is too often the case with rioters to the detriment of the poor souls alongside whom they reside.
And there was no repeat of the deaths of the two men who died in the fire of their shop in Handsworth in the riots there in the 1980s.
I always thought there was an argument for *weaker* sentences for certain criminal acts carried out during a riot (but not for those instigating the riot).
The basis for this is that those engaging in looting are in part looting because there’s a form of social proof indicating that the normal rules don’t apply. I suspect that may of those during a riot might not carry out criminal damage or theft outside a riot.
If they’re (mistakenly) under the impression that normal rules don’t apply, then they’re acting less deviantly than someone who believes the normal rules to fully apply. The latter person is the greater deviant and should therefore be punished more severely.
If someone breaks a shop window and steals a phone when there is no riot taking place, should they be punished less than someone who incidentally steals a phone (as part of a riot)? Maybe the sentencing already takes this into account for other reasons.
If someone commits an offence (such as stealing a phone) for their own gain, then the fact that they have been caught and sentenced is likely to act as a deterrent in future as they have made a substantial loss instead of a gain.
If they commit an offence for no personal gain (typically because of ideology), then they are much more dangerous as being caught and sentenced may not detract from their satisfaction with the result – indeed they may gain satisfaction by regarding themselves as righteous martyrs for a cause. This means that much more severe sentencing may be needed whereby we must assume that the effect is limited to prevention of future offending by detention alone.
Equally, of course, for someone caught up in the heat of the moment, their actions may be ones they would come to regret anyway and so would be less likely to re-offend and with a very mild sentence.
The bit about austerity and lack of resources, doesn’t gel with how the CPS dealt with unfortunate people like Hollie Bentley and others who took to Facebook and made jokes about it in 2011.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/hollie_bentley_prosecution_how_w
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-15964268
A well written article all these rioters and the internet rabble rouser’s must all be treated as terrorists and jailed .
Your discourse on riots reminds me of when, straight from school I started work in Southend-on-Sea Magistrates’ Court. I was assigned a very small desk in the corner of an office. When I opened a drawer I found a copy of the Riot Act on stiff card with the announcement a magistrate was required to make in the presence of the assembled persons. Probably it had never been used. The wording had to be correct and was:
“Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.”
It must have taken a degree of bravery for a magistrate to stand and deliver that. Fortunately the last time it was used in England and Wales was in 1919.
In 1965, newly qualified and working in Inner London Magistrates’ Courts I was assigned to the Borough Petty Sessional Division which was a lay magistrates’ court just to the south of London Bridge. There I found a similar copy of the announcement and was warned by the Chief Clerk not to move it as it might be needed in an emergency.
Soon after that the Act was repealed.
Several years later, and in a rather more senior position, I was approached by a local magistrate who, being aware that an anticipated protest against a new road was going to take place in his vicinity, asked me for the announcement which he intended to deliver to those protesting, he would do it from the middle of a roundabout! I had to inform him the Act was not in force and gently suggest that it would be better that he did not attend and to leave it for the police to decide what to do.
Fascinating. I wish I could upvote this.
It is a small point, but when Sir Keir, Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution Service in 2010 was asked by George Osborne to cut the staffing budget of the CPS by 25% in 36 months, Sir Keir chose to do so by 25% in 18 months.
The 25% cut in staffing budgets within 36 months was made to all central government business units.
The riots were well over halfway through Sir Keir’s 18 month period of staffing cuts.
To achieve the cut in 18 months, Sir Keir chose to persuade the brightest, the best and the most effective, and odds on the most costly of his staff to, in the immortal words of Gus Hedges, push forward the parameters of their careers into new and fresh challenges in exciting fields outside of the CPS.
I imagine you would have to fire a lot of purveyors of light refreshments from trollies or junior administrative staff to come anywhere close to the salary of a single top flight KC.
Nazar Afzal is right to say the CPS in 2011 was not well placed to take a considered approach to individual prosecutions of rioters, in part, because of his boss.
As an aside, Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education offered Osborne a 50% cut in the DfE’s staffing budget, got talked down to the original request of 25% by his new Permanent Secretary, who observed to his SoS that as the Minister was planning to increase the responsibilities of the Department at the centre, it would soon be necessary to take on extra staff …
There must be a stage at which the armed forces (probably the Army) will be required to Aid the Civil power. Then, rioting will be a danger to the rioters just as rioters are a danger to the community.
The total establishment of our armed forces, land, sea and air, 183,230 personnel amounts to just 16% of the population of Birmingham, some 1,143,300 men, women and children.
Our armed forces, supporting our newly (re)established Special Patrol Group, sorry, Tactical Support Unit, correction, standing army of specialist police officers would bring in that context a whole new meaning to the thin line, whatever its colour, tipped with semi-automatic weapons.
In 1973 a young man from Galveston, Texas told me a story about a border town that was being disrupted by riotous behaviour. (He didn’t state the cause.) The municipal authorities sent an urgent message appealing for help from the Texas Rangers. In due course a train arrived and down stepped Officer Valdez. The reception committee was horrified.
“Where are the rest of you? Why is there only one of you?”
“Y’only got one riot, ain’t you?”
That evening he was to be seen strolling up and down the empty main street with his shotgun cradled in his arms.
Note: I do not subscribe to the doctrine that “an armed society is a polite society”. My point is that skilled riot-controllers don’t need to outnumber the rioters.
More importantly, if riot-control in Britain becomes re-militarised (remember Peterloo), there are despots and lovers of despotism all over the world — and here — who will seize on that as proof that Sir Robert Peel was a wimp, that Western liberal democracy was always a hypocritical veneer and that Sir Keir Starmer’s preferred style of government has no rôle in the real world.
To me the many so called “commentators” on social media are as culpable as those carrying out the rioting. Today we have the sight of an ex Tory Member of Parliament one Brendan Clarke – Smith gleefully posting and I quote ” no need to go abroad, I hear parts of the UK are scorching right now” and of course blaming Labour for the riots. Let us thank God this individual is no longer an MP!!
If you join a demonstration where you know that there is a likelihood that sections of the demonstrators will be destructive or violent, are you committing an act which is morally wrong?
I remember asking myself this during the 1985 riots. I have a history in shopkeeping and I am not naturally sympathetic to rioters. A visit to the remains of the shop where, I believe, the famous bottle of water was stolen in 2011 did not change that.
Maybe the twenty odd years spent as a prosecutor that have passed since the 2011 riots have hardened Mr Afzal’s opinions. That would be unsurprising. However, I suspect that his different response is at least partly due to the political motivation behind these riots. The 2011 riots I recall were peculiarly free of political rationale.
What criticism I have read of the police or the Prime Minister’s statements isn’t that they have condemned the rioting in itself, or promised heavy sentences, but that they have concentrated on criticising the real or assumed political position of those attending whether themselves rioting or not.
What happened after Cable Street? Accounts from a brief search differ but although there was heavy fighting between the Police and resisters, charges appear to have been quite light. Perhaps people were more inured to street violence – a contemporary newsreel has the commentator cheerfully remarking, “Heads will be broken”.
Let’s hope that few readers of this blog will require the dire warnings in this post!
Perhaps we’ve just found a new use for the Bobby Stockholm? It can hold 500 prisoners and is currently empty. The irony would be off the scale.
I hope that the rioters are not prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws. That is not because I sympathise with them – they are violent criminals and should be treated as such. However, I am alarmed by the continued mission creep of government power in general and terrorism legislation in particular.
The criminal law has safeguards built into it for a reason. Sometimes the police make mistakes and arrest innocent people, whether for rioting or other crimes. (Sometimes the police intentionally and abusively arrest innocent people – see the recent Baird report on the GMP for some shocking stories.) A civilised society should have safeguards built in so that those people can defend themselves, and receive basic human rights. Anti-terror legislation that lets the authorities lock up whomever they dislike for fourteen days without charge, probably in an extremely intimidating high-security setup with extra strip-searches for bonus traumatisation, does not pass that test of basic decency.
No one likes defending alleged rioters. No one wants to be seen as soft on crime. But the end result of that attitude is that the state, even individual police officers, has immense and dangerous freedom to ruin the lives of whomever it pleases. Fourteen days in jail is enough to lose someone their job, see their children taken into care, potentially lose their house. We shouldn’t give the government power to do those things in anything other than the most extreme circumstances.
And have no doubt, when governments get extra powers, they use them. Remember Gordon Brown solemnly promising that the 2001 Act would only be used against the worst terrorists? Seven years later that Act was used to prosecute Icelandic banks for the crime of being inconveniently bankrupt. No government can be trusted to refrain from using overly-broad powers handed to it by a generous public.
Right now the government has an opportunity to grab extra power. Emotions are high and the commentariat are falling over themselves competing to see who can sound toughest on rioters. In a few weeks time the country will be sober again, and we will have new and dangerous precedents on the books.
Many good points there, Sarah, well made.
Thank you Sarah for shining daylight on what my emotional instincts initially perceived as the darkest of nights. Thank you for making me think.
Terrorism charges against the rank and file, cannon-fodder rioters? Surely not, for the reasons expressed above.
But for the instigators, organisers, influencers, and dog-whistling politicians? Well, that could be a different matter.
Do we not have extradition treaties with Cyprus and the USA to help us bring the instigators to justice?
“No government can be trusted to refrain from using overly-broad powers handed to it by a generous public.”
Indeed, and we’ve seen it over and over again. A good example is Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which permits suspicionless searches at ports. It was meant to be random but has been used on known travellers. Lord Falconer, the minister behind it, wrote about it after David Miranda was stopped in 2013, saying that this was not the power that the Act granted. He was apparently unaware that it had been used that way for years and approved by the courts.
Well said. These points you’ve made resonate with me incredibly. Having grown up in NI during the troubles; you can see the impact of decisions made in haste.
“that meant that we were forced to apply the same rules to everybody”
While I think I see what is really meant by that, it’s a poor way of expressing it as we should be all equal before the law.
I agree with Sarah, and would make some additional points. First when is a riot not a riot? Take two rival football supporters. If they have a violent set too is it a riot?
Secondly all surveys show trust in the police at an all time low. The Battle of Orgreave still burns deep in the memories of Yorkshire. Do we want more of these?
Does the Labour party have a true mandate to introduce draconian measures? With only around 20% of the available votes (total registered voters plus 8 million unregistered), perhaps not.
The criminal justice system addresses riots through law enforcement interventions, arrests, and subsequent legal proceedings. Effective management and accountability are crucial to restore order and uphold justice.