Disasters always seem to happen at the same time. During the same week that our flat had been flooded by a clogged sewage pipe, my wife and I found ourselves sitting in our third floor hotel room near Clapham Junction, mouths agape as we watched the carnage of the third night of the London riots (the worst night) playing out across the television.
Our location was no coincidence. We had started on the ground floor, but the area outside had already seen rioting and the hotel staff had kindly moved our room. So there we sat, in a horrified daze, as the reports and pictures of hooded rioters smashing their way through our local high streets streamed in:
‘Buildings were torched, shops ransacked, and officers attacked with makeshift missiles and petrol bombs as gangs of hooded and masked youths laid waste to streets right across the city…The sheer number of incidents – including in Hackney, Croydon, Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham and Ealing – seemingly overwhelmed the Metropolitan police’.
The next evening, we sat in front of the same television and watched with trepidation for the coming carnage. Like millions of others, we waited, breath held. And waited. And waited. Reports of a few minor incidents trickled in but nothing resembling the pandemonium of the previous night. Finally, my wife conceded: “This is boring, let’s watch something else.” It was a peculiar epitaph to a terrifying episode.
My point here is not so much to critique our society’s morbid fascination with watching violence (nor even to query why Wandsworth Council had failed to clean out the tree-roots from our apartment building’s pipes for over forty years). Instead, I would like to float one possibility about why the London riots – which had seemed so irresistible on the third night – fizzled out so quickly, namely that the rioters failed to excel in the areas traditionally associated with durable insurgencies and the police employed appropriate counterinsurgent methods.
This is not to say (as others have done, both academically and in the blogosphere), that the riots can be understood as an insurgency – they were evidentially not – merely that we can glean at least another dimension of understanding by analysing them through a counterinsurgent lens.
Take popular support. The rioters did have some support, particularly within lower-income council estates. Moreover, the act of looting seemed to hold a degree of universal appeal: numerous people joined the riots entirely on impulse, perhaps based on the lure of ‘sticking it to the man’ or merely the chance to grab free stuff. The case of Natasha Reid, who looted a television (despite already owing a larger one), was iconic.
Generally, however, the rioters failed to secure much backing. Their wanton violence and terrorism caused fear, revulsion and anger: the image of a Croydon furniture store transformed into a gargantuan bonfire or an injured boy being mugged by youths feigning to give assistance were particularly striking. Two examples show the public’s reaction. The first were the civic rallies, where members of the public grouped together to clean up the damage, signal their opposition and even establish vigilante groups. The second was a YouGov poll:
‘Asked if the police should be able to use various tactics in response to riots provoked some pretty gung ho responses – 90% of people thought they should be able to use water cannon, 84% mounted police, 82% curfews, 78% tear gas, 72% tasers, 65% plastic bullets, 33% live ammunition. 77% thought that the army should be brought in’.
(Yes, you read it right – one-in-three people wanted the police to start gunning down civilians in London’s streets!)
This had a huge impact. While the rioters were initially able to conceal their planning within local estates and private homes, the absence of a wider popular base meant they could not fade back into the population for sanctuary afterwards. Just five days after the third night, the disgusted public had called in to report 1,271 people and 745 arrests had been made. Some rioters were so ashamed of their own actions that they turned themselves in. This helped break the back of the movement.
Next, there’s unifying cause. The rioters came from all walks of life, many shared no common social, cultural or economic background, and they lacked a unifying cause. Numerous grievances and short-term goals existed, including poverty; funding cuts to lower-income groups (such as the removal of educational allowances); racial profiling; the death of Mark Duggan; and an opportunistic greed for stolen goods. However, the riots failed to provide a vision about how these grievances would be addressed, or supply any ideology to drive longer term action. This robbed the movement of momentum.
The rioters also lacked clear leadership. Some were loyal to existing gangs, who had formed temporary truces but were never going to be able to transcend factionalism in the longer term. Most, however, held no ties to any leader or group. Without a central leadership, there was no one to plan, rally or coordinate future actions. This meant that once the initial spontaneity was lost, the movement rapidly lost the cohesion and organisation it needed to endure.
Then there’s the terrain. To some extent, the rioters capitalised on the complexity of London to hit different areas across the city without warning. They utilised the streets to surge back and forth, amassed where the police were weak and quickly moved on when the police increased their presence. However, their ability to hide later was hindered by the urban environment. In many cases the police already knew where the troublemakers had come from and were quick to track them down in the days that followed. Similarly, the hostility of the populace prevented even previously unknown participants from hiding for long.
Copy-cat riots did occur in other UK cities and these had the potential to disrupt the level of policing available for London and sap overall public will. Generally, though, the riots were condemned outside of London and the rioters were left firmly isolated (except perhaps for a rather tongue-in-cheek endorsement from Colonel Gaddafi).
Finally, there’s the counterinsurgent effort. Generally, the police did a good job. For example, by encouraging the public to stay clear of the streets, they reduced the availability of ‘human terrain’ and forced the rioters to engage in conventional set pieces. Towards the end of the third night, the police used ‘shock and awe’ tactics (such as armoured van charges), which helped to break up large crowds of rioters and on the fourth night they deployed massively increased numbers of riot police to deter and break up attempts by rioters to undertake large-scale actions. During the days, they conducted systematic search and apprehend missions that were based on local intelligence, public tip offs, facial recognition software and dogged policing. This all prevented the movement from securing a critical mass (e.g. by securing a set area of territory or specific population to hide in). While it is true that the police’s use of rigid formations disappointed the public – who could see their local communities being torched and looted while the police seemingly did nothing – it was nonetheless the correct approach. By remaining in organised groups, they maintained cohesion and avoided being surrounded by the rioters and suffering the same tragic fate as PC Blakelock during the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots.
Three months have passed since that explosive week, and we have learned one incredibly important lesson: always check the pipes thoroughly before moving into a new apartment. That seems to be about the extent of it though. There has been shockingly little discourse about how the riots were fought and why the government was able to restore order so quickly. This is a missed opportunity. In 2004, John Nagl suggested that the British were successful in restoring order to Malaya because we learned from our mistakes. Perhaps it is time we re-examined the 2011 London riots, this time to learn from our success.
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What I find striking about all of this is the absence of comment from the 4th Generation Warfare/Hybrid Warfare/Swarming aficionados. For all the sound and light accompanying networked forms of warfighting, the hierarchical state seems to have whacked this one pretty effectively. I suppose the jury is still out for the Arab Spring, but even there the evidence does not look good for the theorists. At the end of the day, it takes a tremendous, heroic effort to overcome the resources even a moderately incompetent state can throw at a problem. Twitter has not solved the problem of attrition warfare despite the hopeful pretensions to a high tech approach to manoeuvre.
Well the lack of a unifying cause is surely one of the reasons why this ended quickly. A few protests about Mark Duggan quickly morphed into riots and looting, which attracted opportunists and caught others up in the anarchic mood. Once the rioters had nicked enough stuff, once the taste of unrestrained freedom (to loot and burn) had faded away and once the mood turned against them, with the police finally standing firm, then the whole thing collapsed.
One aspect of the police effort that was very weak were their appearances on TV. There was a constant parade of senior officers, most of whom looked unfit for riot duty, waffling away. Nobody I spoke to was impressed, or reassured, by their efforts. It took days before any of them stood up and spoke bluntly.
There was one thing that linked many of the rioters, but it isn’t very politically correct to say. Namely that a disproportionate number of them were black. Nobody wants to say this for fear of looking, or being called, racist. However the figures prove it: http://humstats.blogspot.com/2011/11/england-riots-2011-new-police.html
The other topic which has been avoided was the reaction of local communities. In the face of police failures to crack down early, various groups in London formed unofficially to defend themselves: Sikhs (temple), Turks (restaurants in Dalston), whites (Enfield), Muslims (mosques and Islamic banks). In other words, there was a balkanised response, which bodes ill for the future.
Francis – it was such a promising academic career, right up to the point at which you started blogging…. Welcome!
Paul, yes, I agree. Given the levels of excitement that usually accompany any hint of networked warfare from the 4GW and global insurgency crowd, you would have expected more theorising from their corner. I suspect the answer lies within your comment though: Despite the prolific use of blackberries and social media to coordinate the riots and a flux of other supposed ‘post-classical’ features, the movement collapsed in response to even modest opposition from a government that didn’t really use their suggested techniques. The case doesn’t fit, so they keep silent and wait for the next potential example.
Carlos, I agree to an extent. I think the public struggled to understand why the police stood in immobile blocks and watched/suffered as the looters seemed to do whatever they pleased. My perception, though, was that a lot of anger was reserved for the politicians: people felt that the police had too few resources and too little freedom of action (the Yougov poll is really quite chilling in demonstrating how far we are willing to empower the state when faced with even a modicum of danger). I think the speed with which the police changed their approach was actually quite astonishing – compare the day or so it took for them to begin employing radically better methods to the years that we usually take to employ new approaches (such as in Iraq and Malaya etc).
The issue of vigilante justice is interesting. On the one hand, I agree that the vigilante groups could be seen as concerning (although I do remember feeling a similar “how dare you do this to my city?” emotional response). On the other, though, a central tenet of good COIN is creating local defence / police units to protect communities from small-scale actions and subversion. Perhaps the key to tackling future unrest would be for the government to have in place the facilities to quickly establish local community defence forces, which concerned citizens can join. This would both mitigate the risk of unfettered vigilantism and provide a useful second tier of anti-rioter interdiction.
Ken, many thanks for the welcome. It promises to be an adventure.
Estimates of the size of the riots depend on the percentage of rioters who were arrested. AFAIK that puts them about 20-odd thousand. Even the most hayseed British police forces deal with multiple, quite aggro, crowds of that size on any given Saturday – football crowds.
On this occasion, though, the equivalent of a third division football crowd managed to consume all the police numbers they could concentrate. Actually, depending on your assumption above, the police may have finished the job by actually outnumbering the rioters.
Thanks for the comment Alex, a very interesting point. I think that the numbers issue underpins one the reasons why it’s beneficial to look at the riots through a counterinsurgent lens, rather than purely a policing one.
Small groups of insurgents tying up vastly larger numbers of counterinsurgent forces is a hallmark of many insurgencies. In fact, many theorists – both old and new – suggest that the government needs at least ten or even twenty times the number of soldiers on the ground as their insurgent opponent. Based on this logic, the question we might ask is not so much why it took so many riot police to subdue the disorder in London, but more why it only took so few.
I also think there is quite a marked difference between troublemakers at a football ground (who are by and large contained to one distinct area and the police may already be present in force) and the London riots (where numerous disparate groups surged up, without any real warning, across the breadth of the capital).
I think the trouble with looking at this through a COIN lens is that, as John Mackinlay would no doubt say, this simply wasn’t an insurgency because of the lack of a political element. Whilst the violence started with protests and rioting, which had a real political purpose, it swiftly turned into opportunistic looting. Hence the speed with which the violence burnt out: without a political goal or ideology it was unable to sustain itself beyond the temporary material desires of the participants.
Even the use of the word ‘riot’, of which I am also guilty, is suspect. Perhaps it would be better to call this a temporary anarchy.
That said, Mao would undoubtedly have pointed out that one reason the riots collapsed so quickly was because they managed to alienate the public, to dissipate any support they might have had over the death of Mark Duggan and because they failed to control the population. It was notable that some looters were given up to the police by neighbours, friends and family, even in tightly-knit communities notorious for their hatred of ‘grassing’.
In that sense we can look at this as a failure to create an insurgency: where a political grievance amongst a minority community offered the potential to create an insurgency, but that without leadership, organisation or ideology that potential was squandered.
In which case perhaps the slow police reaction was actually a benefit. Given time the rioters became looters, which lost them public support, and which paved the way for a successful re-establishment of law and order by the police, who gained greater public support the longer the anarchy continued. In other words, the police, accidentally or otherwise, gave the looters enough rope with which to hang themselves.
Carlos, I think your comment about the riots/temporary anarchy representing a failure to create an insurgency is an interesting one. Even if you are right, however, I think the occasion still provides many useful lessons for COIN analysts. Understanding why an insurgency fails to develop from the potential seeds of such a movement is hugely important: we can use that knowledge to improve how we go about suffocating (unjust) insurgent movements at birth, before they can grow into something more widespread and virulent.