My name is jeff
Shops looted, cars and buildings burnt out, young adults in hoods on the rampage. London has woken up to street violence, and the usual narratives have emerged – pun- ish those responsible for the violence because they are “opportunist criminals” and “dis- gusting thieves”. The slightly more intellectually curious might blame the trouble on poor
5 police relations or lack of policing.
My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction. Before you take a breath of sarcasm thinking “here she goes, excusing the criminals with some sob story”, I want to begin by stating two things. First, violence and looting can never be justified. Second, for those of
10 us working at street level, we’re not surprised by these events.
Twitter and Facebook have kept the perverse momentum going, transmitting invita- tions such as: “Bare shops are gonna get smashed up. So come, get some (free stuff!!!!) F... the feds1 we will send them back with OUR riot! [...] So if you see a brother... SALUTE! If you see a fed... SHOOT!”
15 If this is a war, the enemy, on the face of it, are the “lawless”, the defenders are the law- abiding. An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply “easily”, because they feel they don’t actually belong to the community. Com- munity, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experi-
20 enced themselves cut adrift from civil society’s legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings per- sonal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been con- cerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communi- 25 ties with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient2 solutions than the social care agencies who
30 are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services scream-