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23 Policing Soc'y: Int'l J. Res. Pol'y 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/pgsty23 and id is 1 raw text is: Policing & Society, 2013 Routledge Vol. 23, No. 1, 1-5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2012.731274 - Taylor&FrncisGroup EDITORIAL Riots and social protest in an age of austerity The last issue of Policing & Society devoted purely to policing and public protest was in 2005 (Volume 15 Number 3). Not only did both of us contribute to this, but so did three of the other authors here. However, although two of the papers in the present issue compare recent developments with other events that occurred in 2005, this collection is not a simple retrospective. Rather, it focuses on social disorder and protest in Europe and North America at a time of increasing economic austerity. The issue opens with two contributions concerned with the English 2011 riots, which started in Tottenham, N. London, after the shooting of Mark Duggan by police on 4th August and rapidly spread to many other parts of the country. Duggan had been a minicab passenger when he was killed by an officer from the Metropolitan Police's C019 (Firearms Command) acting under the auspices of the then Trident Command unit which has in the past primarily focused on black gun crime. What followed was a clear lack of effective coordination between the police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC 2012) concerning releasing information regarding the shooting: misinformation as to the circum- stances being given to the Press Association by an IPCC spokesperson and the police failing to inform Duggan's parents of his death (indeed, his mother heard the possibility of this on television news) (p. 17). The interview given by the IPCC spokesperson only served to confuse and inflame matters more, this claiming that there had been 'an exchange of shots' (House of Commons Home Affairs Committee 2011, p. 6). Although this was in fact wrong (the only shots fired were by the C019 officer) and later stated to be neither police nor IPCC 'official press lines', the story was never 'actively rebutted' (Metropolitan Police 2012, p. c24). In turn, Duggan's family and about 40 community supporters marched from Tottenham's Broadwater Farm Estate to Tottenham Police Station on Saturday 6th forming a group of about 100 in total demanding to know what actually happened and to see a senior police officer. Eventually, after the family members had left, apparently unhappy with the delay and lack of meaningful response by the police, there was, what the Metropolitan Police review recognised as, a distinctive 'step change' in which some of the gathering crowd started throwing 'multiple missiles' at the police station and burning two police cars (Metropolitan Police 2012, p. 17, 32). The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel's (RCVP 2011) interim report found quite decidedly that the main immediate cause of this escalation was the 'information vacuum' on the part of the police and the IPCC (p. 11). The 6th August rioting in Tottenham continued and by early the next morning had spread to neighbouring areas and by the following evening to other parts of London including Brixton in the south of the city. A total of five days of rioting took place in 66 areas of England, actively involving between 13 and 15,000 participants and in which 5 people died (RCVP 2011, pp. 10-11). © 2013 Taylor & Francis

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