Riot! Civil Insurrection From Peterloo to the Present Day

"I suppose my interest stems from the fact that I came from a mining community originally, so in a way industrial conflict is a part of my identity. Back in 1972, when we had the first of the major strikes of the recent era, I became intrigued by what was going on. I applied to do a PhD on strikes at the University of Aston and I attended lots of picket lines around this time, which generated in turn an interest in the policing of industrial disputes. From there, I answered an advertisement for a research associate at what was then Sheffield Polytechnic. It was in the wake of the 1981 riots: they wanted someone to help them out on an Economic and Social Research Council conducted study, called ‘Communication Processes In and Around Public Disorder’. That’s how it all began. One thing I can most definitely say now is that the approach that the police take and the tactics on the day play a pivotal role in how a protest or picket-line confrontation develops. This is one of the things that make my subject area so interesting and important to study. Ian Hernon is a political lobbyist, and he’s done a sequence of books on various forms of social conflict. Riot!’s significance lies in its provision of an excellent corrective to some commonly held misapprehensions. I was recently reading a book review in a police journal by a fellow academic, which asked the rhetorical question, ‘What is a rioter other than a criminal?’ I think that many people would automatically take that negative perspective. Hernon is acknowledging that although riots are sometimes just passionate outbursts or ‘explosions’, more often than not they are a response to some form of oppression. As he puts in his book, the riot throughout history has been the manifestation of ‘social inequality and political impotence’. It’s a very good corrective to this idea of the riot as sheer hooliganism and irrationality. I think it’s because to suggest that riots are justified and rational is to lay the establishment open to charges of oppression and to peddling inequality. There is concrete academic evidence to show that institutions such as the police (not all of them but certainly junior to middle ranks) tend to think of rioting as irrational behaviour. There is this view that when people are in crowds, they are suddenly enveloped by the red mist. This kind of perspective is actually very unhelpful, not least to the police themselves."