Riots and social relations

CT: What do you think triggered the violence of recent days?

JA: There is a growing list now – some people put it at 200 – of black people who have died in police-related incidents and no policeman has been found guilty of any crime associated with these deaths and the answers for them leave the minds wondering if the explanation is true. If you add to that the fact that stop and search has been heightened, the discontent over how the DNA database is being administered, the growing list of unemployed young black people, some in worklessness for generations, poor school achievement, police records, there is a whole heap of social malaise in the background.

Then you get a case like last week where the family [of Mark Duggan] protested peacefully for five hours outside the police station and the police paid them no attention at all because, we are told, the matter is in the hands of the IPCC. Common courtesy after your son or brother has been killed by the police would have said at least you need a liaison officer or somebody to show respect. To ignore is not to show respect.

Then the word gets out, people join in the march or protest, and before you know it the fringe that is in every community, that tends towards creating havoc, got in on the act and the rest is what we have seen.

Nobody condones in any way the lawlessness that is happening on the streets, the ripping out the hearts of communities, the burning and looting. We condemn it unreservedly because we are all victims when that happens, but like Martin Luther King said, riots tend to be the cry of the dispossessed.

I am not legitimising this – absolutely not - but there are circumstances behind this.

CT: There has been the suggestion that the black community and schools haven’t got to grips with gang culture and that has contributed to this. Do you think there is any weight in that?

JA: I don’t think along those lines. Gang culture is not a new phenomenon. Gangs have been around long before the Kray brothers were causing havoc. They have always existed. The gangs that are occurring now, it feels like it is a new phenomenon but it isn’t.

There is clearly an urban problem with too many drugs on the streets, too many guns being too easily available, too many other things like knives and so on. Where are the guns and drugs coming from that are feeding this culture?

There is an overrepresentation of urban poor with low educational achievement and therefore later on, poor job prospects.

There are big social issues. Have we come to terms with all of them? I don’t think we have necessarily. But they are not just matters for one community, they are matters for all communities and for all levels of authority in terms of government and social structures, including the churches I work in.

As we work together and talk together, we may not reach the Promised Land but we may get to a better place.

I hear a lot of people say that when a black person has died in an incident related to the police, they don’t feel they get a fair hearing quickly enough and people feel disrespected. There has always been a hot-headed element to young people but we either feed it or we restrain it.

And some of the growing list of unexplained police-related deaths, the level of social deprivation in pockets of the black community, and the fact that there are so many people now who feel disconnected and don’t really feel part of society, it’s almost as if they belong to an alternative economy and society, so that when they are looting and burning down the city centre they don’t feel like they are part of it. They feel excluded from it. We say ‘you wouldn’t burn down your own home’ and they say ‘this is not my home, it belongs to them over there’.

CT: The images from the media show that the thugs are a real mix of white people and different races.

JA: Yes, it is an urban context that we need to be looking at this in. It is predominantly white, black and Asian because that’s what most of our urban contexts look like. Most white people who can, have moved out. Most black people who can, have moved out. We’ve ended up with a multicultural urban context that is marked by poverty and deprivation.

CT: David Cameron said earlier in the year that multiculturalism hasn’t worked. Do you think that has anything to do with the violence?

JA: I think David Cameron was just wrong on that point. Multiculturalism is not a choice that we have. Multiculturalism is a reality. So to start talking about it not working is a salacious conversation to have. It is like saying that the family hasn’t worked. The family is what you have. You can’t just suddenly decide that the family was an experiment and it didn’t work so let’s change it.

Didn’t multiculturalism work? We have many cultures living side by side, many faiths living side by side. Birmingham was called in a new report a “super diverse” context. There’s no going back from that. It is multicultural. We have to learn to live with it.

But it does throw up many challenges and we need to raise our game when it comes to young people growing up in these melting pots that are our urban areas, many of them are growing up in them unrelated to their old historic cultures, and many of them unrelated and disconnected to contemporary culture apart from the youth culture they are growing up with together with their peers. And usually that is a counsel of despair, because it is the ‘get rich quick’ kind of regime, it is not about the studious and hard work ethic of their great grandparents.

But there are incendiary things that happen, such as the unexplained police related black deaths, the way many young people feel that they are targeted by police for stop and search, the way they feel that once they come into contact with police they either end up in the mental health or criminal justice system, and then they can’t get a job once they are blacklisted and then they are locked into this exclusion from mainstream society. So they don’t need much invitation to mash down Babylon!

CT: What role do you think the family has to play in fixing this problem because there seem to be a lot of angry young people?

JA: Yes there are a lot of angry young people. There is a sense in which this country has become less and less godly and the morals that were taught within faith and within religion have been pushed to the side and so we have been working on economic progress but not the spiritual health of the country, including our young people.

Where do people now get their moral and spiritual support from? Many of the black youngsters that used to be in church with their parents have now moved away, there is a second generation of children who don’t go to Sunday school. It doesn’t mean that when they were in church we didn’t have any problems, but it meant that there was a narrative about good behaviour that was being passed on from one generation to the next and that has largely been discontinued, there is no doubt.

CT: There were some suggestions that many of the youths terrorising the streets were from single parent households.

JA: In the black community, something like 70 per cent of African Caribbean households in this country are single parent families and many of them are headed by a female. Unless you have very good structures around that micro family - and even links with extended families are breaking down - then you have one mother struggling to raise one or two or three children and it is difficult.

But I don’t think it is necessarily the case that because you grew up in a single parent family you are going to be out of control. I myself was raised by a single mother who left Jamaica to come here and make a living. Some haven’t done that well, some have done extremely well. It isn’t the case that simply because it is a single parent family that means automatically that that child is going to turn out troubled.

I think that’s part of the equation but it’s not the whole equation and there is no whole equation. There are a lot of counter prevailing realities but there are some trigger points and the trigger point in this case is another black man dead, in a death that is linked with the police and no answers coming, and it is what has now ignited this particular scene.

CT: But we’ve seen young people just rioting for no apparent reason?
JA: It is apparently for no reason but they are part of the great discontent and the great alienated lot who don’t feel that they are stakeholders in society and don’t think twice about looting and taking what they can get and burning places down.


CT: How do we fix that?

JA: That is the million dollar question. Does anybody know what the answer is to that question? What I do know is that we have to be in this for the long haul and fix the things that can be fixed. For example, the police can change their attitudes towards deaths in their custody, they can become more open and transparent. They can develop a culture that says they don’t feel trigger happy around their black detainees and we can do some of the things that we are already doing, which is to try and raise educational attainment in schools and to help young people see education as a way forward and something that can help them make a career and a future. We can also try and keep guns off the street, drugs off the street. Parents and leaders of the community can continue to reach out to these people.

But it’s not easy because I don’t want to get caught up in a crowd with them, because there is nothing to tell me that they are going to have any respect for me as an elder at all! The journey ahead is going to be long and hard but it becomes manageable if the various parts of society engage better with each other about the real issues, and how we can find the solution and reach the young people that we can reach.

When this has died down the chances are it will flare up again somewhere else because there will be another trigger and as long as you have a body of discontented young people with no job prospects and cuts – and I’m not anti-cuts at all because I think we have to live within our means – but when you look at the restrictions now imposed because of the difficulties we are in I have had a number of people call into my radio stations who said they were the glue in their communities but because of cuts to services they are no longer able to offer services, so there is a lot of firewood. And we just have to knock our heads together and figure out how best together with young people we can carve out a better future.


CT: Do you see a fundamental role for the church in that?

JA: We do have a role in that, but we are a part of the reality too. We live in an increasingly secularised society in which the church for many people isn’t part of their equation. We will continue to do what we have always done and try to be salt and light in the world but one has to recognise that the reality is that many people are no longer listening to that voice of reason coming from a faith perspective.

It doesn’t mean we stop speaking and contributing but it does mean that it is made much harder by the almost hostile anti-faith brigade that is there in society as well. We will do what we can but the reality is that it is a very long road ahead.

So get involved, pray and be salt. There are a number of prayer vigils taking place around the country in churches and in parks. We have to both speak and act and there is quite a bit of that going on. The future has to be better for us if we work to make it better. If we let this go to the dogs then all of us will end up being the dog supper and we can’t allow that.