Defining the Riots
Once a historical event gets defined as a “riot”, and not a “protest”, it immediately carries the connotation of violence, hooliganism, and destruction,[1] influencing the way a historical narrative is perceived by the public. Following such influence, the public - listening to someone’s talk about riots during a family dinner, skimming through a newspaper with headlines “Anarchy; Out of Control; The Madness Spreads”,[2] reading SparkNotes about riots in a history class — can easily distance itself from the individuals leading and joining the riots. Do the motivations of rioters, seen as violent and criminal, get disregarded more than those of the protesters, and could we easily draw a line between the two? After all, who gets to draw this line, impacting the way a historical narrative is perceived? What do the individuals who participated in the riots have to say?
While some of the primary historical evidence on the riots of 1981, in particular, might still be undisclosed and locked behind doors of various institutions around London,[3] our perceptions of the history of protests and riots in the United Kingdom get distorted. It is crucial for us to consider the theory of historicities, which can inform our public perceptions of historical events.[4] The two historicities distinguish between a history of what happened, and a history of what is said to have happened - with the latter often incorrectly considered to be the objective history, carrying complete facts and truth.[5] However, such history is often narrated by individuals with the power to do so, reinforcing the ideas and ideals of the dominant populations and governments, opting to preserve some historical facts, while excluding the other ones.
The “race riots” across the United Kingdom in 1981 and 1985 united many individuals seeking justice, for causes including - standing up against police violence toward people of color.[6] While some united to protest against issues with the police forces, the others, following the events, rushed to distort the historical evidence around the events - often making the police reports confidential, and instead representing the sources that seemed to fit the dominant narrative.[7] This might have preserved a certain image of the government, police officials, and their actions as “acceptable”, however, it blatantly marginalized the voices of people leading the riots, with their struggles and their stories left untold.
Applying the Digital Humanities Research
Public digital humanities (DH) projects on the events of the riots of 1981, such as data journalism articles, can combine historical and humanities research with effective digital communication practices, offering new ways to analyze how historical narratives have been constructed, and represent perspectives that might differ from the ones told until the present day. These works can be accessible online by the public, providing room for authorial transparency, and a way for users to engage with the subject in a more complex way - maximizing different kinds of historical sources that are presented, as well as communicating the emotions the topic might benefit from disclosing; they can effectively deviate from popular “scientific” ways to present information about the past.[8] Keeping in mind the benefits and limitations of the digital humanities practices, we can utilize their emerging tools and frameworks to communicate about the “race riots” with the public more effectively, and challenge the mainstream, intentionally distorted narrative that has been preserved, and reinforced through various archival primary and secondary materials on these historical events.
As such narratives distanced the public from learning about individual struggles and causes behind the riots, DH tools, in particular the ones I utilize throughout this guide, provide an opportunity to humanize this historical event and represent primary historical sources on the rioters’ motivations. DH practices can foster a sense of understanding and empathy towards these individuals, providing a digital space for their voices to be represented. As of now, this has not been possible to be effectively raised in academic research and within powerful institutions, due to societal power dynamics - with people, who often view riots as purely criminal and unjustified, dominating the spaces that had affected the governmental and public perceptions of historical events in the United Kingdom.[9]
British Government’s Responses to the Riots of 1981 and 2011
Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old black British man, was killed in North London by the Metropolitan Police on August 4, 2011.[10] Protesters from across the area gathered, marching to the Tottenham police station to demand information on Mark’s death.[11] The “five summer nights when London burned” evolved on August 6 and ended on August 11.[12] Widely known as the “London riots” of 2011, the events occurred 30 years after the London race riots of 1981.[13] Journalists, government officials, scholars, and individuals across the U.K. drew comparisons between the most recent uprisings and those in the past, employing prior historical narratives to analyze the events of 2011. By comparing the Government’s responses to the riots of 1981 and 2011, I conclude that while both share an underlying cause of institutional racism, the latter event is often deemed unjustifiable when compared to the former. I argue that such a view denies the presence of police racism in the United Kingdom by reproducing the perspectives of the Thatcher’s Government in the 1980s, which defined riots as criminal and marginalized the investigation of riots’ underlying causes.
The Brixton race riots occurred over three nights, from April 10 to April 12, 1981.[14] By July 1981, the uprisings spread to multiple locations across the U.K. - Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Nottingham.[15] They frequently involved black British youth clashing with police forces, with one of the primary causes being the increased use of the “sus” (stop-and-search) law by police officers in districts with large populations of people of color.[16] Following the events, the Government commissioned the Scarman Report, published in November 1981, which shared that Brixton’s violent protest was driven by “complex political, social, and economic factors”.[17] It did not, however, provide an account of analyzing the actions of police forces. Neither did it condemn police racism, instead publicly denying the rioters’ belief of these forces being institutionally racist;[18] the report stated that “institutional racism does not exist in Britain.”[19] It also noted that racial disadvantage is a fact of British life, and concluded that the police forces are not responsible for this disadvantage.[20] The Government sought to establish that the race riots of 1981 reflect an unjustifiable activity and to deny the presence of institutional racism, which could hinder changing the regulations of police forces to address the causes of the riots in the coming years.
The analyses of the riots of 1981 are marginalized in the British historiography, arguably due to viewing the 1979 election of Thatcher’s Government as the “end of the crisis and step towards a stabilization of British politics.”[21] The available historiography encourages a favorable view of the government’s motivations and policies of the time when applying such a view to analyze the historical events of riots in the United Kingdom.[22] The constructed view of the race uprisings in 1981, seen as criminal and unjustified, had been reflected in the media and in the course that the U.K. Parliament followed to solve the issues behind these events.[23] Adopting and sharing an incomplete view of riots over time further complicated the public’s and policymakers’ understanding of the riots and available archival and historical research materials created in the 1980s that contemporary scholars can continue to draw on, especially when comparing this historical event with the one in 2011.
The London riots spanned five nights, from August 6 to August 11, 2011.[24] Following the events in London, riots occurred in multiple authorities across the country within these dates.[25] The events had been referred to as “incidents of widespread public disorder,” by the British government officials, hinting that the governmental “order” was not followed as intended; such a way of referring to the riots also reflects that of Thatcher’s Government in 1981, to which the “law and order” had been a central issue, with the race riots of 1981 violating that Government’s agenda.[26] Despite initially rejecting the public calls to produce a report on the riots of 2011,[27] the U.K. Government offered a response in March 2012, highlighting the “key issues to help build social and economic resilience within communities.”[28] Such response emphasized how the causes of rioting are rooted within communities and their relations with the police forces,[29] and motivated the community members and police forces to address these issues locally, rather than to critique existing institutions and inherent systemic problems that have been detrimental to different communities of people in the U.K.[30]
As there had been 30 years between the series of these two historical events, it is crucial for us to note some of the later events that affected and challenged the contemporary governmental perceptions of the riots of 1981 - the new wave of race riots in London in 1985, and the issuance of Macpherson Report in 1999, usually referred to as a successor of the inquiry of 1981.[31]
In 1985, another series of race riots took place in Brixton during September 28 - 30, following the shooting of Dorothy Groce, a black British woman who was left wounded and paralyzed after the police officer from the Metropolitan Police had inspected the house to find her son.[32] Following the uprisings, the Government rejected calls for another “Scarman-type inquiry,” arguing that the riots of both 1981 and 1985 were “a criminal enterprise” and that it was “useless to search for social explanations” behind them.[33] Officials decontextualized the riots by viewing them as the actions of a “small minority who were either criminalized or influenced by some extreme political ideas.”[34] Such a response from the Government further solidified the initial view of the race riots as purely criminal and unjustified.
In 1993, an 18-year-old black British teenager was murdered in a racially motivated attack while waiting for a bus in London.[35] The issues behind handling the case by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) motivated the creation of a Macpherson Report in 1999, which concluded that the police force was incompetent and “institutionally racist”.[36] For the first time, such a report documented a representative of the Government and criminal justice system publicly admitting the existence of systemic racism.[37] Such a form of racism was rooted in the established systems of police forces, and behind the discriminatory practices of its officers, the same practices that are meant to maintain law and order in British society.[38]
The publication of the Macpherson Report and the practical implications it brought upon the U.K. Government’s policies related to reforming the police had challenged the prior governmental narrative of the riots of 1981. The series of riots before 1999 started being viewed as justifiable forms of standing up against institutional racism, particularly within the institution of police forces.[39] While comprehending the riots of 1985 could now motivate one’s empathy towards the rioters in the past, as their motivations would be seen as valid, such a shift also has influenced the understanding of the riots of 2011. As a historical lesson on institutional racism seems to have been learned a decade before the events in 2011, with the Government proceeding to implement actions addressing the issue, most of the U.K. public immediately viewed the recent riots as illegitimate,[40] with no reasonable causes underlying the actions of the rioters[41] - as institutional racism had already been identified and, supposedly, dealt with. Such a perspective reflects a reductionist view of the riots of 1981 and 1985 in the past,[42] which has been similarly employed and reinforced by government officials and popular media in 2011. The view does not accurately account for the motivations and causes behind protesting,[43] and it fails to consider the issue of institutional racism in the present, which is believed to be one of the leading triggers behind the riots of 2011.[44]
Although the Brixton riots of 1981 and the London riots of 2011 contain a 30-year gap between them and should be located and analyzed in their distinct political, social, and cultural contexts, by limiting the comparison between them to focusing on the Government’s responses, it is possible to draw similarities, as well as differences between the two. Due to the limited variability in the comparison of the two events in this work, we can benefit from conducting further research on the analyses of data from police reports and court hearings that reflect perceptions held by different individuals and institutions in the U.K., which had powerfully constructed and strengthened the narratives on riots of 1981 and 2011.
While the riots of 1981 initially had been regarded as purely criminal and unjustifiable, the later inquiry of 1999 acknowledging institutional racism in the U.K. challenged and shifted prior historical narrative of the riots in 2011 and resulted in viewing them as less valid when compared to the riots in the past. Such perception of the riots of 2011 arises from primarily employing the perspective of the Government in the 1980s, originally used to frame the historical events of 1981 in a largely negative, reductionist manner. This approach to understanding the riots of 2011 motivates individuals and institutions in the U.K. to disregard the causes behind the uprisings and to this day fails to adequately address them in the present.
Collecting and Analyzing the Scholarship on Riots
Below I review and synthesize a range of scholarly works that critically analyze the representations of the riots of 1981, 1985, and 2011 across British media sources and pose arguments crucial for the contemporary data journalism studies of British riots in the past. Such arguments encompass the media stigmatization of the local authorities, the othering of rioters via the use of specific language, the evidence of a so-called “1981 Riots” prism largely applied to the studies of the 2011 riots, and particular focus of media sources on the notions of violence and deviance in crafting their works on riots in the United Kingdom.
Considering the Significance and Stigmatization of the Local
As the riots of 2011 occurred in multiple local authorities across the United Kingdom, Solomos (2011) argued for the importance of avoiding national-scale generalizations about the role of race in riots, and instead exploring the links between the riots and issues of policing, unemployment, urban deprivation, political inclusion and exclusion, and considering their local and social contexts.[45] Considering the significance of such contexts and the primary media sources presenting them, Butler (2019) investigated how the British press stigmatized the local authority of Toxteth, during, and following the riots of 1981.[46] Butler conducted a combined quantitative and qualitative critical discourse analysis of 496 newspaper articles, examining the techniques used to report on Toxteth, and to construct the authority’s identity.[47] Butler argues that the name “Toxteth” and the identity of the district was largely defined and stigmatized by the dominant British press sources, through the techniques of naming, negativity, oppositionality, and stranger-making.[48] The scholar notices that the press denied the voices of Toxteth residents in the coverage of 1981 events, as fewer than 10 percent of all articles had quoted them when reporting on the riots.[49] By doing so the press denied the residents an opportunity to construct their own identity and that of their district, silencing the issues they have been facing, which could shed light on some of the underlying causes of the riots of 1981. Thus while the prior scholarship emphasized the importance of placing the analyses of the 1981 and 2011 riots in the contexts of local authorities, Butler’s analysis of press articles on the Toxteth riots revealed how the British press had stigmatized the identity of one of the local authorities, constructing a largely negative view of Toxteth and marginalizing the voices of its residents. We should consider the techniques identified by Butler when engaging with the media articles on riots of both 1981 and 2011, to critique these sources and discern between the media- and residents-driven construction of the local contexts of riots.
While much of the prior scholarship heavily focused on individually and comparatively investigating the causes and media representations of riots that occurred within Manchester[50] and Liverpool[51] police force areas in 1981 and 2011, as supported by comparative sociological studies of Wain and Joyce (2012) and Benwell (2020) accordingly, such analyses are lacking from the historiography of local authorities under the Metropolitan Police District in London, including Brixton and Tottenham. Drawing on the outcomes of the studies of Wain (2012) and Benwell (2020), the outcomes of our comparative project of Brixton and Tottenham can motivate the improvement in policing residents in these districts, especially by understanding the long-lasting issues their members have been facing during the riots of 1981 and 2011, and which have failed to be addressed effectively by the government and police forces.
Critical Discourse Analysis on Othering and Agencies of Historical Actors
The analyses of linguistic representations of the 1981 and 2011 riots in the British press by Dijk (1991), Venuti (2015) and Nisco (2015) investigate how these historical events and their actors were categorized by the press. Dijk’s comprehensive critical discourse studies in the Racism and the Press state that the major British press of 1981 constructed the general knowledge on the riots, the “riot script,” with the word “riot” carrying particularly negative connotations.[52] Thus once it is mentioned, for instance, in the headlines of articles - the readers’ interpretation of the rest of the article’s text is skewed by immediately applying their prior knowledge of the “riot script.”[53] The later critical discourse studies by Venuti (2015) and Disco (2015) extend Dijk’s scholarship, by arguing that the prior lens of viewing the rioters of 1981 as binary “Us vs. Them” leads to generalizations about such historical actors that can limit the view of their agency. Thus both scholars conduct critical discourse studies investigating how the press represented agencies of participants of the riots of 2011 during, and following the events. We will consider utilizing such analysis in the later sections, attempting to integrate it into our project deliverables by analyzing the textual data describing the riot events and riot participants’ motivations.
Viewing the Riots of 2011 Through a “1981 Riots” Prism
The historical narrative of the 1981 riots, similarly to Dijk’s (1991) “riot script,” has been established as prior knowledge of riots, especially by the British press, used to represent and criticize the riots of 2011. By doing so, Smith (2013) argues, the press invalidated the causes of the events and marginalized the perspectives of their participants in the light of the riots of 1981, the “legitimate” form of protest against police violence and institutional racism. Murji and Neal (2011) identify such an issue in a comparative sociological study of the riots of 1981 and 2011, stating that the latter has been inaccurately represented through a prism emphasizing criminality. The scholars conclude that future researchers approaching the study of these events comparatively should focus on identifying both the changes and continuities since 1980s, to conduct a more contextualized, complex analysis which challenges the emphasis on criminality when referring to the riot events of 2011.[54]
Portraying and Resisting the Notions of Violence and Deviance
The research articles by Chambers (2015) and Hirsch (2020) critique photojournalism on the riots of 1981 and 1985, including the individual and collective interpretations of images, and argue that media photographs largely excluded the causes of the 1981 riots such as poverty, racism, and discriminatory policing,[55] instead representing the rioters, in particular people of color, as violent and criminal.[56] While Hirsch’s work focuses primarily on the riots photographs taken in Manchester, Chambers incorporates the analysis of a photograph of black youth during the 1981 riots in Brixton. The study’s interpretation sheds light on multiple challenges endured by Brixton’s generations of Black youth, including the police violence, and describes the media-generated pathology of the “Black bomber”[57] evident along with other criminally-inclined images of Black people in the districts where the riots occurred. Such photojournalistic analyses portray how photographs enhance the interpretation of news articles on riots, strengthening the criminality of the “riot script” defined by Dijk (1991), and adding on to the construction of particular identities of the rioters, Black people in particular, as well as their communities, and districts where the riots occurred.
It is crucial for us to consider how the “riot script” could have been resisted by the other media sources that represented the rioters’ voices more accurately, such as U.K.’s Black press. Venner (1981) briefly outlined the responses of such press (the Caribbean Times, Westindian World, and the Jamaican Weekly Gleaner) along with those of the dominant British press to the inquiry report immediately following the riots of 1981, portraying both opposing and shared views that the press had on the governmental responses to these historical events.
Summarizing the Inferences from Scholarship
By reviewing multiple scholarly articles on the riots of 1981 and 2011, I portray different parts of the problem of distorted narratives on these historical events. I note several considerations that should be integrated into the future sections of proposing solutions to the problem. These include differentiating between the media and rioters-driven construction of the local contexts of riots, critically analyzing how the press represented the agencies of participants of the riots of 2011 during, and following the events, identifying the changes and continuities since the 1980s to challenge the emphasis on criminality in the narratives on 2011 riots, and considering how the conventional “riot script” might have been resisted by less dominant British media sources representing the rioters’ voices more accurately.
Footnotes
[1] Joshua Hummel, "Conflict’s Connotation: A Study of Protest and Riot In Contemporary News Media." https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/hummel_joshua_r_201705_ma.pdf.
[2] “UK Riots front pages - in pictures," The Guardian, August 9, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/media/gallery/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-front-pages-in-pictures.
[3] Alan Travis, "After 44 years secret papers reveal the truth about five nights of violence in Notting Hill," The Guardian, August 24, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/aug/24/artsandhumanities.nottinghillcarnival2002.
[4] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the past: power and the production of history (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995).
[5] Ibid.
[6] Kaleena Fraga, "How The Brixton Riots Exploded In London — And Forced A National Reckoning On Race," All That's Interesting, April 15, 2021, https://allthatsinteresting.com/brixton-riots.
[7] Alan Travis, "After 44 years secret papers reveal the truth about five nights of violence in Notting Hill."
[8] Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/.
[9] Teun van Dijk, “Race, riots and the press: An analysis of editorials in the British press about the 1985 disorders,” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) 43, no. 3 (1989): 229–253, https://doi.org/10.1177/001654928904300305.
[10] Bethan Bell, “Riots 10 Years on: The Five Summer Nights When London Burned,” BBC News, August 6, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-58058031.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Aamna Mohdin, “The Brixton riots 40 years on: ‘A watershed moment for race relations’,” The Guardian, April 11, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/11/brixton-riots-40-years-on-a-watershed-moment-for-race-relations.
[15] Tim Newburn, Paul Lewis, and Josephine Metcalf, “A new kind of riot? From Brixton 1981 to Tottenham 2011,” The Guardian, December 9, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/09/riots-1981-2011-differences.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ian Law, “The Scarman Report,” in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, ed. Charles A. Gallagher (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663202.wberen102.
[18] Stephen Cook, “Scarman report into Brixton riots published – archive, 1981,” The Guardian, November 26, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/26/scarman-report-into-brixton-riots-published-archive-1981.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Evan Smith, “Unraveling the Thatcherite narrative: The 1981 riots and Thatcher’s crisis years.” https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/unravelling-the-thatcherite-narrative-the-1981-riots-and-thatchers-crisis-years/.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Teun van Dijk, “Race, riots and the press: An analysis of editorials in the British press about the 1985 disorders,” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands) 43, no. 3 (1989): 229–253, https://doi.org/10.1177/001654928904300305.
[24] John Solomos, Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (1989; repr., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 170-171, https://books.google.com.uy/books/about/Race_and_Racism_in_Contemporary_Britain.
[25] Karim Murji and Sarah Neal, “Riot: Race and Politics in the 2011 Disorders,” Sociological Research Online 16, no. 4 (2011): 216–220, https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2557.
[26] Evan Smith, “Unraveling the Thatcherite narrative: The 1981 riots and Thatcher’s ‘crisis years’.”
[27] Clifford Stott, Stephen Reicher, and John Drury, “London’s 2011 Riots: Report Blames Deprivation And Poor Policing – Not Mad, Bad, Dangerous People.” https://www.keele.ac.uk/kpac/newsandblogs/2019/february/2011-riots-report/deprivation-poor-policing.
[28] “Government response to the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel’s final report.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-response-to-the-riots-communities-and-victims-panels-final-report.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Stuart Hall. “From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence.” History Workshop Journal, no. 48 (1999): 187–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289641.
[32] “Dorothy 'Cherry' Groce inquest finds police failures contributed to her death”. The Guardian: Press Association. 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/10/dorothy-cherry-groce-inquest-police-failures-contributed-death.
[33] John Solomos. Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain. (1989), 170-171. https://books.google.com.uy/books/about/Race_and_Racism_in_Contemporary_Britain.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Danny Shaw. “Stephen Lawrence: How has his murder changed policing?” BBC News. BBC, February 19, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47161480.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Tim Newburn. “The 2011 England Riots in Recent Historical Perspective.” The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 39–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azu074.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Teun van, Dijk. “Race, riots and the press: An analysis of editorials in the British press about the 1985 disorders.” Gazette (Leiden, Netherlands), 43(3), 229–253. 1989. https://doi.org/10.1177/001654928904300305.
[43] Tim Newburn. “The 2011 England Riots in Recent Historical Perspective.” The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2015, Pages 39–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azu074.
[44] Andrew Pilkington. Institutional racism, stop and search, and the 2011 riots. Invited Presentation presented to: University of Bedfordshire Criminology Seminar Series, University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, 25 January 2012. http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/4087/.
[45] John Solomos. Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain. p. 170-171. 1989. https://books.google.com.uy/books/about/Race_and_Racism_in_Contemporary_Britain.
[46] Richard Butler. “‘Worse than Bloody Sunday’: How the UK’s papers covered the 1981 Brixton riots.” The Guardian. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/10/worse-than-bloody-sunday-how-the-uks-papers-covered-the-1981-brixton-riots.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Simon Wain, and Mike Joyce. “The Riots in England in 2011.” The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 52, Issue 3, May 2012, Pages 555–575, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs012.
[51] Butler, Paul. "Brixton: the scars of urban uprising still run deep." The Guardian, April 10, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/10/brixton-the-scars-of-urban-uprising-still-run-deep, and Benwell, Max. "London riots: 'This is what austerity looks like'." Open Democracy, August 10, 2020. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/london-riots-austerity-looks/.
[52] Teun van, Dijk. (1991). “Racism and the Press.” In R. van Dijk (Ed.), Elite Discourse and Racism (pp. 143–161). Sage.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Neal, Sarah, Karim Murji "Introduction: Reading the Riots." Sociology 45, no. 5 (2011): 669–674. doi:10.1177/0038038511416169, and Smith, Emma. "Unraveling the Thatcherite narrative: The 1981 riots and Thatcher’s crisis years." Hatful of History, January 9, 2013. Retrieved from https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/unravelling-the-thatcherite-narrative-the-1981-riots-and-thatchers-crisis-years/.
[55] Chambers, Clare. "A Review of 'Reading the Riots: Investigating England's Summer of Disorder'." Sociology 49, no. 5 (2015): 992–994. doi:10.1177/0038038515584188.
[56] Hirsch, Andrew V., and Kelle Barrick Swanson. "Race, Class, and Urban Marginality: Disentangling Neighborhood Effects on Homicide Victimization in Chicago, 1990 to 2005." Homicide Studies 24, no. 2 (2020): 130–154. doi:10.1177/1088767919832761.
[57] Chambers, Clare. "A Review of 'Reading the Riots: Investigating England's Summer of Disorder'." Sociology 49, no. 5 (2015): 992–994. doi:10.1177/0038038515584188.