IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/socres/v16y2011i4p193-198.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

King Mob: Perceptions, Prescriptions and Presumptions about the Policing of England's Riots

Author

Listed:
  • Hugo Gorringe
  • Michael Rosie

Abstract

As journalists and academics, politicians and other commentators struggled to make sense of the social unrest across England, they reached for theoretical understandings of the crowd that have long since been discredited. The powerful imagery of the madding crowd has always been a popular trope with journalists, but what concerned us was the way in which even sociological commentators echoed such ideas. This paper, therefore, draws on our past research, informal interviews with senior police officers and media accounts to offer an analysis of the riots, how they were policed, and contemporary understandings of crowd behaviour. In so doing we question whether current understandings of collective behaviour, deriving from socio-political expressions of anger or protest, are equipped to make sense of the English riots. Similarly, we ask whether police public order tactics need to change. We conclude that the residual attachment to myths of the madding crowd continues to hamper the search for flexible, graded and legitimate means of managing social unrest.

Suggested Citation

  • Hugo Gorringe & Michael Rosie, 2011. "King Mob: Perceptions, Prescriptions and Presumptions about the Policing of England's Riots," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 16(4), pages 193-198, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:16:y:2011:i:4:p:193-198
    DOI: 10.5153/sro.2521
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.2521
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.5153/sro.2521?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Michael Rosie & Hugo Gorringe, 2009. "What a Difference a Death Makes: Protest, Policing and the Press at the G20," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 14(5), pages 68-76, November.
    2. Le Bon, Gustave, 1896. "The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind," History of Economic Thought Books, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, number lebon1896.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giorgia Doná & Helen Taylor, 2015. "The ‘Peaks and Troughs’ of Societal Violence: Revisiting the Actions of Turkish and Kurdish Shopkeepers during the 2011 London Riots," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 20(1), pages 83-93, February.
    2. Kim Allen & Sumi Hollingworth & Ayo Mansaray & Yvette Taylor, 2013. "Collisions, Coalitions and Riotous Subjects: Reflections, Repercussions and Reverberations - an Introduction," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 18(4), pages 1-14, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Saad, Mohsen & Samet, Anis, 2020. "Collectivism and commonality in liquidity," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 137-162.
    2. Will H. Moore, 2015. "Tilting at a windmill? The conceptual problem in contemporary peace science," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 32(4), pages 356-369, September.
    3. Ho, Tzu-Ya & Tsai, Hsien-Tang & Lin, Pao-Hui, 2019. "The effects of technology innovation and network presence on Otaku identity," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 144(C), pages 82-92.
    4. Rossouw, Stephanié & Greyling, Talita, 2022. "Collective emotions and macro-level shocks: COVID-19 vs the Ukrainian war," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1210, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    5. Nepp, Alexander & Okhrin, Ostap & Egorova, Julia & Dzhuraeva, Zarnigor & Zykov, Alexander, 2022. "What threatens stock markets more - The coronavirus or the hype around it?," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 519-539.
    6. Braun, Robert & Koopmans, Ruud, 2012. "Bystander responses and xenophobic mobilization," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Migration, Integration, Transnationalization SP IV 2012-701, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    7. Kritikos, Alexander S. & Bolle, Friedel & Tan, Jonathan H.W., 2007. "The economics of solidarity: A conceptual framework," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 73-89, February.
    8. Beck, Susanne & Brasseur, Tiare-Maria & Poetz, Marion & Sauermann, Henry, 2022. "Crowdsourcing research questions in science," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(4).
    9. Baddeley, M. & Burke, C. & Schultz, W. & Tobler, P., 2012. "Herding in Financial Behaviour: A Behavioural and Neuroeconomic Analysis of Individual Differences," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1225, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    10. Danquah, M. & Ouattara, B., 2023. "Aid and social cohesion," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 118-131.
    11. Finsterwalder, Jörg & Kuppelwieser, Volker G. & Fisk, Raymond P., 2022. "Dynamics of individual actors’ self, social, and task pre-dispositions in multi-actor service ecosystems," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 518-531.
    12. Amin Ghaziani, 2021. "People, protest and place: Advancing research on the emplacement of LGBTQ+ urban activisms," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(7), pages 1529-1540, May.
    13. Zysberg Leehu, 2018. "The People Demand Social Justice: The Social Protest in Israel as an Agoral Gathering," Journal for Perspectives of Economic Political and Social Integration, Sciendo, vol. 24(2), pages 31-45, December.
    14. Jonathan Haidt & J. Patrick Seder & Selin Kesebir, 2008. "Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 37(S2), pages 133-156, June.
    15. Paul Marsden, 1998. "The Selectionist Paradigm: More Implications for Sociology," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 3(4), pages 26-36, December.
    16. Michelle Baddeley, 2020. "Hoarding in the age of COVID-19," Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE), vol. 4(S), pages 69-75, June.
    17. Economo, Evan & Hong, Lu & Page, Scott E., 2016. "Social structure, endogenous diversity, and collective accuracy," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 212-231.
    18. Braun, Robert & Koopmans, Ruud, 2014. "Watch the Crowd: Bystander Responses, Trickle-Down Politics, and Xenophobic Mobilization," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 47(4), pages 631-658.
    19. Morton, Thomas A. & Power, Séamus A., 2022. "Coming together after standing apart: What predicts felt safety in the post-coronavirus crowd?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 293(C).
    20. Jin, Yuchang & Li, Zinan & An, Junxiu, 2020. "Impact of education on Chinese urban and rural subjective well-being," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:socres:v:16:y:2011:i:4:p:193-198. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.