Riotous connections?

As Robert Reiner remarked during a recent Howard League lecture, the August 2011 riots in England became something of a criminological Rorschach test insofar as almost every commentator tended to see in them a vindication of their own particular perspectives and concerns. This has been so largely irrespective of the quality of evidence (if any) they considered. A number of the earlier more political forays into the field of riot accounting collapsed quickly as a more sophisticated and, crucially, properly evidenced, picture began to emerge. Suggestions that the riots were the work of ‘feral’ and ‘disconnected’ or underclass youth, or were ‘gang inspired’ or even (rather perplexingly) a consequence of insufficiently robust policing, soon fell by the wayside as the evidence about those arrested, charged and prosecuted began to mount (The Guardian, Citation2011; Morrell et al., Citation2011).