Introduction

The August 2011 public disorders provided the pivotal moment when the changing nature of British urban youth cultures – specifically ‘the proliferation of violent youth gangs and the culture they ferment’ (Pitts, 2008:4) – was shown to the world. Looped television news montages, made instantly available to a global audience on a plethora of online platforms, depicted mob violence directed towards the police, burning buildings and the pillaging of high street retail stores. For many years prior to the 2011 riots there had been a steady increase in local and national news-media headlines discussing gun and knife violence, postcode wars and other violent crimes that were deemed to be gang related. More specifically, during the past two decades the nation has been ‘shocked’ by a number of high-profile youth homicides caused by gun and knife violence. The menace of serious urban youth violence was initially thrust into the consciousness of the nation by the killing in November 2000 of 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death in a stairwell on a housing estate in south-east London, after being stabbed in the leg. In January 2003 best friends 17-year-old Latisha Shakespeare and 18-year-old Charlene Ellis were the innocent victims of a fatal ‘drive-by’ shooting in north Birmingham. However, it was the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, who in August 2007 was shot dead by a 16-year-old youth in Liverpool, that ‘perhaps more than any other single case … set the agenda’ (Goldson, 2011:4).

But even if the Rhys Jones case did usher in a new policing and policy agenda concerning violent youth crime, it was ceremoniously and ambitiously usurped by the events that unfurled during five days in August 2011, when England experienced significant and widespread civil unrest. From the outbreak of the disturbances on 6 August and for many months after they ended on 10 August, politicians and senior police officers queued up to take every available media opportunity – of which there were plenty – to blame the violence, looting, arson and criminal damage on urban youth gangs. In his address to Parliament on 11 August, the Prime Minister pronounced that the riots were not caused by poverty but ‘gangsta rap’ culture, a ‘culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority’.