August 20, 2011
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MONTREAL — Buildings blazed through the night, cars lay toppled over and broken glass littered the sidewalks. London was burning.
Disorder rocked England for nearly a week, with London districts and sleepy suburbs becoming the scene of rampant arson, looting and violence.
Five people were killed, at least 16 were injured and more than $320 million in private property was destroyed.
The ashes have been swept up now, the courts are working overtime to charge suspects and the world is left shaking its head, asking why.
To most onlookers, the riots seem devoid of any political will. There's no cause, no distinct message, no slogan to chant in unison. Some might argue there's really no motive at all, just a case of hooliganism, pure and simple.
But is there more to these events?
Absolutely, says Concordia University sociologist Beverley Best, but the rioters likely don't even know it.
"A historian might say we can think of this as a kind of unintentional, maybe even unconscious, historical expression of dissatisfaction and anger, of a sense of hopelessness, a sense of a future without many options," said Best.
It's a frustration that's bubbled as the government's austerity measures have cut deep into social programs. University grants have been replaced with loans, welfare and childcare benefits have been slashed and taxes have been hiked.
It's led the disenfranchised to feel betrayed, said Best. They sense they've been let down and left with a frighteningly barren future.
"And they're right," she said.
With an ever-shrinking middle class, the income gap in Britain has now surpassed the disparity found in Europe and North America before the stock market crash of 1929.
"Do the youths participating in these destructive rioting events know that? No," said Best. "They're not going out there saying 'I'm bashing in this window because I realize that my material prospects are declining with respect to previous generations and our leaders made decisions that will decidedly shrink my prospects for having a materially stable and sound life.' I think what they're expressing without consciousness . . . does come from something real."
Prime Minister David Cameron begs to differ.
He's categorically denied poverty or austerity budgets had any hand in fuelling the uprisings, and has instead blamed the riots on street gangs and opportunistic looters. His view is shared by many. After all, how can breaking into shops to steal fancy running shoes or a flat screen television be driven by anything other than greed?
We have to look beyond the people smashing their way into stores and trying on clothes before making off with their loot, says Pascale Dufour, a Universite de Montreal political science professor who specializes in collective action and social change.
"Stealing a television is wanting to have access to consumer society, to be like everybody else. It's not a formulated demand as such, but it's profoundly political," she said.
The street has become a new space for politics today, says Dufour, not solely by means of rioting but also through demonstrating or camping out, as tens of thousands of young Spanish "indignados" (indignants) did last spring to denounce their country's unemployment epidemic. They left their homes and set up makeshift tent encampments in iconic squares across 60 cities, a movement dubbed the Spanish revolution.
So why do some choose peaceful ways of expressing their discontent while others shoot and loot? Some blame the media, arguing quiet demonstrations simply don't lead the evening newscast or make it to the front page of newspapers. Flames, chaos and terror are prime camera bait, it seems.
But to think of rioting as a conscious decision is to miss the point entirely, said Dufour. "You don't choose to do it versus something else, it happens in reaction to a situation."
Although every riot has its particularities, there are commonalities, says Dufour, certain ingredients that make neighbourhoods ripe for rioting. Combine a heaping serving of social inequalities with a wilting economic situation and a lack of political representation of the poor. Throw in discrimination or racial tensions then stir in a trigger, usually an event viewed as an absolute injustice, and chances are your batter will explode.
That's what happened when a 29-year-old father of three, Mark Duggan, 29, was gunned down by police in Tottenham, England.
That's also what happened when Fredy Villanueva, 18, was shot by police in Montreal North on Aug. 9, 2008. A riot ensued two days later. A police officer was shot in the leg, seven cars were set aflame and firefighters were pelted with rocks and beer bottles. But the uproar only lasted a few hours and didn't spread past the Montreal neighbourhood's borders.
Why didn't the violence proliferate throughout Montreal? The answer isn't exactly clear-cut. It's more of an amalgam of factors, says Dufour, including geography, a neighbourhood's history, political context, social networks and many more.
"What we can say is that in France like in England, the spreading (of riots) is linked to a deep social malaise," said Dufour. "That said, Montreal North is a neighbourhood that fulfils the criteria of tension with police, inequalities, unemployment, racial tensions, and we could see a Montreal North Part 2, or an extension of urban violence in other neighbourhoods if these develop a ghetto (an urban space plagued with social and racial discrimination)."
As the social context of the U.K. riots becomes clearer, questions about who the rioters are and why they turned violent remain.
A cook in an organic restaurant, a graphic designer, an 11 year-old boy. The people behind the London riots often aren't who you'd expect them to be. Many of those charged boast a clean rap sheet and don't seem to have much reason to be taking part in the unrest.
"One was the daughter of a millionaire, some people were fully employed and came home from work, hung up their work clothes, changed into their hoodies and went off to rob shops," said Angela Ford-Rosenthal, a Concordia University sociology professor who was in London visiting family when the riots broke out.
So why were these people ready to risk everything? They weren't all protesting the shooting of Mark Duggan, says Ford-Rosenthal. "It was something that took on a life of its own."
For the sociologist who specializes in deviance, larger variables were at play here, with roots running deep inside British society.
As royal wedding fever swept the world, many sat captivated, and little girls watched the real-life fairy-tale in awe. But for many Britons, the lavish nuptials served as a painful reminder of the U.K.'s rigid wealth divide. Notions of the American dream, a sort of merit-based society where success is contingent on blood, sweat and tears, are foreign to the English.
"(People in North America) know that if they work hard, they can turn their life around and they can make it," explained Ford-Rosenthal. "In England, there's a basic sense of hopelessness and frustration."
People have great trouble turning their life around in England, she said. Universities often won't admit applicants who previously abandoned their studies and companies don't want to hire people who failed the first time.
"(The rejection) is just driving another nail in somebody's coffin, really."
While the hopelessness can understandably lead to anger, how that frustration gets channelled into one faceless violent pack isn't easy to explain.
Of course, theories about a so-called mob mentality have long ruled public opinion. The story goes people get absorbed into a crowd, and lose their ability to control primitive instincts, causing violent behaviour to spew out of perfectly good, normal people.
Not so, says Clifford Stott, a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool who specializes in crowd behaviour and riots.
Stott says the so-called mob mentality has been rejected by psychological literature for well over 30 years. Instead, psychologists today see crowd behaviour as the result of people taking on a shared social identity.
"So (people are) no longer acting in terms of their individual identity but they haven't lost their identity altogether, they've just refocused on a common group membership," said Stott.
But that doesn't mean the newly formed group is riled up and looking for trouble, cautions Stott. The notion that crowds are mad, bad and dangerous is simply not true, says the psychologist.
"The major reason you get violence in crowd events is actually because of the police," said Stott.
"If you have a crowd where there's no problem, you don't stand there with great ranks of riot police all kitted up in riot gear because when you do that people think you're just looking for a fight."
Mario Leclerc disagrees. He was with the Montreal police for over 30 years and has been teaching classes on crisis management and emergency measures at the Universite de Montreal's security and police studies program for over a decade.
"To say that (having anti-riot police present) creates a bigger reaction among rioters, no," said Leclerc. "You really have to not have experienced riots to say things like that."
While he says there are usually leaders in a riot agitating the crowd and whipping them up into a frenzy, no rioter can plead temporary insanity.
"The people who are there know very well why they're there," said Leclerc. "I've seen a lot of (riots), I've analyzed a lot of them, and we're not at all in a context where people don't have control, quite the opposite. We're not dealing with voodoo here," said Leclerc.
So what should police do to stop riots? Clifford Stott has been advising police on how to handle crowds for the last decade. His suggestion to officers? Just smile and chat with people.
"These are ordinary people who want to be treated like ordinary people. So engage, communicate."
But showing up without proper equipment can prove dangerous, even fatal for officers, says Sylvain Lemay, chief-inspector of the Montreal police operational planning division.
That's because police are often seen as the enemy during riots. They're the ones who have to step in and spoil the party, says Lemay.
"A riot or a protest that turns violent has to be tackled upstream," said Lemay. "There are things that have to be done before, there are discussions that need to happen."
Since the Montreal North events, Montreal police have set up committees and invited people to sit down with them to talk about the issues they're facing. Money has been invested in community resources such as sport centres.
Does that mean riots can actually accomplish something? "Yes," said Dufour, "awareness of the terrible malaises ravaging our societies."
Of course, those issues were there all along.
But when people begin demonizing rioters and attributing uprisings to irredeemable criminality, it becomes easy to justify a repressive agenda, says Stott.
klalancette@montrealgazette.com
Montreal Gazette
London riots driven by lack of hope: expert
Disorder rocked England for nearly a week, with London districts and sleepy suburbs becoming the scene of rampant arson, looting and violence.
Five people were killed, at least 16 were injured and more than $320 million in private property was destroyed.
The ashes have been swept up now, the courts are working overtime to charge suspects and the world is left shaking its head, asking why.
To most onlookers, the riots seem devoid of any political will. There's no cause, no distinct message, no slogan to chant in unison. Some might argue there's really no motive at all, just a case of hooliganism, pure and simple.
But is there more to these events?
Absolutely, says Concordia University sociologist Beverley Best, but the rioters likely don't even know it.
"A historian might say we can think of this as a kind of unintentional, maybe even unconscious, historical expression of dissatisfaction and anger, of a sense of hopelessness, a sense of a future without many options," said Best.
It's a frustration that's bubbled as the government's austerity measures have cut deep into social programs. University grants have been replaced with loans, welfare and childcare benefits have been slashed and taxes have been hiked.
It's led the disenfranchised to feel betrayed, said Best. They sense they've been let down and left with a frighteningly barren future.
"And they're right," she said.
With an ever-shrinking middle class, the income gap in Britain has now surpassed the disparity found in Europe and North America before the stock market crash of 1929.
"Do the youths participating in these destructive rioting events know that? No," said Best. "They're not going out there saying 'I'm bashing in this window because I realize that my material prospects are declining with respect to previous generations and our leaders made decisions that will decidedly shrink my prospects for having a materially stable and sound life.' I think what they're expressing without consciousness . . . does come from something real."
Prime Minister David Cameron begs to differ.
He's categorically denied poverty or austerity budgets had any hand in fuelling the uprisings, and has instead blamed the riots on street gangs and opportunistic looters. His view is shared by many. After all, how can breaking into shops to steal fancy running shoes or a flat screen television be driven by anything other than greed?
We have to look beyond the people smashing their way into stores and trying on clothes before making off with their loot, says Pascale Dufour, a Universite de Montreal political science professor who specializes in collective action and social change.
"Stealing a television is wanting to have access to consumer society, to be like everybody else. It's not a formulated demand as such, but it's profoundly political," she said.
The street has become a new space for politics today, says Dufour, not solely by means of rioting but also through demonstrating or camping out, as tens of thousands of young Spanish "indignados" (indignants) did last spring to denounce their country's unemployment epidemic. They left their homes and set up makeshift tent encampments in iconic squares across 60 cities, a movement dubbed the Spanish revolution.
So why do some choose peaceful ways of expressing their discontent while others shoot and loot? Some blame the media, arguing quiet demonstrations simply don't lead the evening newscast or make it to the front page of newspapers. Flames, chaos and terror are prime camera bait, it seems.
But to think of rioting as a conscious decision is to miss the point entirely, said Dufour. "You don't choose to do it versus something else, it happens in reaction to a situation."
Although every riot has its particularities, there are commonalities, says Dufour, certain ingredients that make neighbourhoods ripe for rioting. Combine a heaping serving of social inequalities with a wilting economic situation and a lack of political representation of the poor. Throw in discrimination or racial tensions then stir in a trigger, usually an event viewed as an absolute injustice, and chances are your batter will explode.
That's what happened when a 29-year-old father of three, Mark Duggan, 29, was gunned down by police in Tottenham, England.
That's also what happened when Fredy Villanueva, 18, was shot by police in Montreal North on Aug. 9, 2008. A riot ensued two days later. A police officer was shot in the leg, seven cars were set aflame and firefighters were pelted with rocks and beer bottles. But the uproar only lasted a few hours and didn't spread past the Montreal neighbourhood's borders.
Why didn't the violence proliferate throughout Montreal? The answer isn't exactly clear-cut. It's more of an amalgam of factors, says Dufour, including geography, a neighbourhood's history, political context, social networks and many more.
"What we can say is that in France like in England, the spreading (of riots) is linked to a deep social malaise," said Dufour. "That said, Montreal North is a neighbourhood that fulfils the criteria of tension with police, inequalities, unemployment, racial tensions, and we could see a Montreal North Part 2, or an extension of urban violence in other neighbourhoods if these develop a ghetto (an urban space plagued with social and racial discrimination)."
As the social context of the U.K. riots becomes clearer, questions about who the rioters are and why they turned violent remain.
A cook in an organic restaurant, a graphic designer, an 11 year-old boy. The people behind the London riots often aren't who you'd expect them to be. Many of those charged boast a clean rap sheet and don't seem to have much reason to be taking part in the unrest.
"One was the daughter of a millionaire, some people were fully employed and came home from work, hung up their work clothes, changed into their hoodies and went off to rob shops," said Angela Ford-Rosenthal, a Concordia University sociology professor who was in London visiting family when the riots broke out.
So why were these people ready to risk everything? They weren't all protesting the shooting of Mark Duggan, says Ford-Rosenthal. "It was something that took on a life of its own."
For the sociologist who specializes in deviance, larger variables were at play here, with roots running deep inside British society.
As royal wedding fever swept the world, many sat captivated, and little girls watched the real-life fairy-tale in awe. But for many Britons, the lavish nuptials served as a painful reminder of the U.K.'s rigid wealth divide. Notions of the American dream, a sort of merit-based society where success is contingent on blood, sweat and tears, are foreign to the English.
"(People in North America) know that if they work hard, they can turn their life around and they can make it," explained Ford-Rosenthal. "In England, there's a basic sense of hopelessness and frustration."
People have great trouble turning their life around in England, she said. Universities often won't admit applicants who previously abandoned their studies and companies don't want to hire people who failed the first time.
"(The rejection) is just driving another nail in somebody's coffin, really."
While the hopelessness can understandably lead to anger, how that frustration gets channelled into one faceless violent pack isn't easy to explain.
Of course, theories about a so-called mob mentality have long ruled public opinion. The story goes people get absorbed into a crowd, and lose their ability to control primitive instincts, causing violent behaviour to spew out of perfectly good, normal people.
Not so, says Clifford Stott, a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool who specializes in crowd behaviour and riots.
Stott says the so-called mob mentality has been rejected by psychological literature for well over 30 years. Instead, psychologists today see crowd behaviour as the result of people taking on a shared social identity.
"So (people are) no longer acting in terms of their individual identity but they haven't lost their identity altogether, they've just refocused on a common group membership," said Stott.
But that doesn't mean the newly formed group is riled up and looking for trouble, cautions Stott. The notion that crowds are mad, bad and dangerous is simply not true, says the psychologist.
"The major reason you get violence in crowd events is actually because of the police," said Stott.
"If you have a crowd where there's no problem, you don't stand there with great ranks of riot police all kitted up in riot gear because when you do that people think you're just looking for a fight."
Mario Leclerc disagrees. He was with the Montreal police for over 30 years and has been teaching classes on crisis management and emergency measures at the Universite de Montreal's security and police studies program for over a decade.
"To say that (having anti-riot police present) creates a bigger reaction among rioters, no," said Leclerc. "You really have to not have experienced riots to say things like that."
While he says there are usually leaders in a riot agitating the crowd and whipping them up into a frenzy, no rioter can plead temporary insanity.
"The people who are there know very well why they're there," said Leclerc. "I've seen a lot of (riots), I've analyzed a lot of them, and we're not at all in a context where people don't have control, quite the opposite. We're not dealing with voodoo here," said Leclerc.
So what should police do to stop riots? Clifford Stott has been advising police on how to handle crowds for the last decade. His suggestion to officers? Just smile and chat with people.
"These are ordinary people who want to be treated like ordinary people. So engage, communicate."
But showing up without proper equipment can prove dangerous, even fatal for officers, says Sylvain Lemay, chief-inspector of the Montreal police operational planning division.
That's because police are often seen as the enemy during riots. They're the ones who have to step in and spoil the party, says Lemay.
"A riot or a protest that turns violent has to be tackled upstream," said Lemay. "There are things that have to be done before, there are discussions that need to happen."
Since the Montreal North events, Montreal police have set up committees and invited people to sit down with them to talk about the issues they're facing. Money has been invested in community resources such as sport centres.
Does that mean riots can actually accomplish something? "Yes," said Dufour, "awareness of the terrible malaises ravaging our societies."
Of course, those issues were there all along.
But when people begin demonizing rioters and attributing uprisings to irredeemable criminality, it becomes easy to justify a repressive agenda, says Stott.
klalancette@montrealgazette.com
Montreal Gazette
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