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The Causes and Consequences of Urban Riot and Unrest Annual Review of Criminology The Causes and Consequences of Urban Riot and Unrest Tim Newburn Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021. 4:53–73 Keywords First published as a Review in Advance on riot, disorder, crowd violence, flashpoints, life-cycle model July 6, 2020 Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. The Annual Review of Criminology is online at Abstract criminol.annualreviews.org Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org This review explores those varied bodies of work that have sought to un- https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-061020- derstand crowd behavior and violent crowd conduct in particular. Although 124931 the study of such collective conduct was once considered central to social Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews. science, this has long ceased to be the case and in many respects the study All rights reserved of protest and riot now receives relatively little attention, especially within criminology. In addition to offering a critical overview of work in this field, this review argues in favor of an expanded conception of its subject matter. In recent times, scholarly concern has increasingly been focused on ques- tions of etiology, i.e., asking how and why events such as riots occur, with the consequence that less attention is paid to other, arguably equally impor- tant questions, including how riots spread, how they end, and, critically, what happens in their aftermath. Accordingly, as a corrective, the review proposes a life-cycle model of riots. 53 INTRODUCTION Giving evidence to the Kerner Commission that had been established by President Johnson during some of the most severe urban rioting in America in 1967, the psychologist Kenneth Clark, said that he had read the reports of many previous riot investigations and found them to be “a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction” [Kerner 1988 (1968), p. 483]. Given the regularity with which riot commissions in the United States had repeated their diagnoses and proposed similar treatments, his observation was perhaps unsurprising. Nevertheless, over the longer-term the social science of the crowd has by no means been characterized by consensus. Whereas early approaches saw crowd conduct as fundamentally irrational and as a source of great social danger, modern scholarship has reacted by seeking to highlight the rational elements of civil disorder, explanations focusing predominantly on underlying social conditions and rioters’ grievances (McClelland 1996). Before we move on to consider these shifts in more detail, a few words about terminology and the focus of this article. Though the title refers to riots, from the outset we must acknowledge that the term is far from straightforward, even when based on a legislative definition. In the US Criminal Code, for example, the basic definition of a riot is “a public disturbance involving (1)an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual or (2) a threat or threats of the commission” of such an act or acts [18 U.S. Code § 2102 (1982)]. In practice, the study of riots tends to focus on much larger groupings, the actions of which involve a fairly substantial breakdown of social order. At heart the problem is that riot is an inescapably political term. It is often used by states or by others in powerful positions to label events of which they disapprove and consider illegitimate. Equally, those involved in such violent events often resist the labels riot or rioter, preferring alternatives such as uprising or rebellion, often to convey resistance to authority they consider to lack legitimacy. It is for this reason that some academics eschew the term riot altogether (see Tilly 2003). In truth, there is no agreed-upon scholarly definition of riot. Indeed, given the difficulties in- volved, much academic work regularly avoids any attempt to either begin with or arrive at one and this article is no exception. The focus here is on crowd behavior generally and violent crowd behavior in particular. Attention is paid in the main to those events that appear to have been suc- cessfully defined as riots; that is, outbreaks of violence that are regularly described inthisway Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. not just by government officials and the police but by other observers including social scientists. Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org For reasons of space, the review does not cover what is by now a substantial and important lit- erature on prison riots (Adams 1994, Thompson 2017, Useem & Kimball 1991) but focuses on more public forms of collective violence. Interestingly, the specific focus on riots is something of a recent development in social science. Late-nineteenth-century scholarship, although fixated on the dangers of the crowd, tended nevertheless to focus on crowd behavior more generally. It was the reaction against such work that led to a greater concentration on the violent crowd and the decline of interest in crowd more generally (Borch 2012, Reicher 1996b). This, in turn, has had the effect of privileging certain questions, in particular those concerned with the causes of violence, and relegating others, especially those focusing on the consequences of the violence. In response to this, and in the final section of the paper, I outline what I refer to as a life-cycle model of riots; one that seeks to return academic interest to a broader interest in riots and incorporates both medium- and longer-term consequences. 54 Newburn EARLY APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE CROWD It is traditional for reviews of work in this field to begin with the ideas of the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, although how original his ideas really were caused considerable dispute from the outset (Van Ginneken 1985). Indeed, the Italian scholar, Scipio Sighele, a student of Lombroso and Ferri, went so far as to accuse Le Bon of piracy. This was a period in which there was substantial concern about the fragility of social order and, consequently, about the power and significance of crowds. Indeed, Le Bon [1952 (1896), p. 14; emphasis in original] saw them as being of the upmost historical importance: While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS. Le Bon challenged many prevailing orthodoxies, including those that held that crowd members tended to be mentally deranged, criminal, or drawn from the very lowest social strata. Neverthe- less, he viewed them as dangerous, not least because of the way in which the individual conscious personality could be subsumed by the collective mind. Irrespective of who the individuals were who made up the crowd, the power of this collective mind would make “them feel, think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 27]. Much influenced by Tarde’s work on imita- tion, Le Bon saw the individual within the crowd as suggestible and sentiments within crowds as contagious; indeed “contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 30]. As a consequence, he argued, there was something atavistic about the crowd, its actions often characterized by “impulsiveness, irri- tability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), pp. 35–36]. Cultured individuals would become barbarians in a crowd, descending “several rungs in the ladder of civilization” [Le Bon 1952 (1896), p. 13]. His hope was that his work and that of others would facilitate the control of crowds (Moscovici 1985) and though now largely discredited, he was hugely influential, “cast[ing] his shadow over the political events of the entire first half of the twentieth century and even beyond” (van Ginneken 1992, p. 187). The popularization of elements of Le Bon’s ideas outside Europe owed much to the influence Access provided by 159.46.196.7 on 01/26/21. For personal use only. of Robert Park. Better known within criminology for his association with the urban sociology of Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2021.4:53-73. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org the Chicago School, as a student in Germany at the beginning of the century Park had written a thesis entitled “The Crowd and the Public.” Although unpublished for some decades, Park’s in- terest in collective behavior continued, and in his textbook with Ernest Burgess (Park & Burgess 1921, p. 381) he defined it as “the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse thatis common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the product of social interaction.” In- fluenced also by Tarde,Park saw the crowd as being less critically divided and more homogeneous than the public. The influence of the Chicago School developed further through the work of Herbert Blumer— for many “the most influential crowd sociologist of the twentieth century” (McPhail 2006, p.
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