October 31, 2011

The Riots in England

One major theme of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature is that They Do It Better in Northern Europe, which makes the August riots in England kind of embarrassing. A reader sends in some numbers:
Hey, Steve.  I'm a longtime reader and I'd thought I'd throw out some interesting data.  The government has estimated that 46 percent of the arrested rioters were black, 42 percent were white, and 7 percent were "Asian" (ie Indian/Pakistani/Muslim).

Using the census data on the ethnic makeup of the impacted riot areas and weighting those areas by the number arrested, blacks seem to have been arrested at 6-6.5x the white rate.  Asians were arrested at about 0.85x the white rate.  One downside to using the government data, with respect to Asians, is that it doesn't differentiate between Middle Easterners (Arabs, Persians, Afghans, Turks) and South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankan Tamils).

I found a separate list of the names of the arrested rioters.

Looking through the names,  I found that slightly under half of the Asian rioters were of Middle Easterners of non-South Asian origin (Morrocan, Egyptian, Arab, Persian, Turk).  That's quite an overrepresentation when you consider that their numbers aren't especially large in the UK.  Adjusting for their representation in the local population and making some reasonable estimates, it seems they were arrested at about 6x the white rate.  This is a conservative estimate and the actual representation could be even higher.    
For South Asians, I calculated estimates for three groups - Indian Hindus, Indian Sikhs, and South Asian Muslims (mainly Pakistani, some Bangladeshi, few Indian).  Indian Hindus were arrested at 1/7th the white rate, Indian Sikhs were arrested at 1/2 the white rate, and South Asian Muslims were arrested at 0.8x the white rate.

Another source claims that the top nationalities of arrested rioters were Jamaicans, Somalis, and Poles.

None of these numbers are adjusted for age.  The average rioter was 22 years of age and ethnic minorities tend to be younger than white British, so factor that in when looking at arrest rates.

So, historian David Starkey seems to have been more or less right: a black vanguard started the riots and white lumpenproles and Ali G-like immigrants from some countries (but not others) finished them off.

34 comments:

  1. Steve,
    You've got to factor the absolutely enormous level of immigration into Britain that the last, disasterous, New Labour government allowed into Britain.
    Basically you have a huge population of young, cocky, leery men - often out of work or in low paid employment, concentrated in Britain's inner cities.These men are by definition 'foreign' - having no loyalty, love or attachment to their host nation, which would act as a restraint and inhibition on a patriotic citizen.Basically they just see Britain as a money-making opportunity.
    Brtitish born blacks started it, of course, as a group they are just as criminal as American blacks.
    The chavs joined in - but generally they are the scum and dregs of white Britain.

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  2. It should be pointed out that the racial makeup of rioters changed as the violence moved out of the capital. In London, it was mainly black. By the time it reached Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham, the natives from the sink estates had more or less taken over.

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  3. I'm from Irish Catholic stock myself, but I think you'll find that "demographic" was disproportionately at work outside London. British whites are v. far from homogenous.

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  4. Your reviews of Better-Angels have been nice to your qausi-friend, but can you do a short post that just explains how the book *isnt* nothing more than the usual "as humanity gets more northern-europe socialist it gets better"?

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  5. Nonsense. It just proves that the cops are racist.

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  6. This should come as no surprise to the regulars on this blog - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7856404/Police-statistics-shed-fresh-light-on-link-between-crime-and-race.html

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  7. It should be pointed out that the racial makeup of rioters changed as the violence moved out of the capital. as did police reaction - the whiter the crowd the greater likelihood of using violence - that is why the manchester riots were stopped almost immediately.

    as with our elites harsh reaction to the BNP or any nationalist movement vs kid glove treatement of islam, they send out a sublte message - minorities and their ways are more powerful

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  8. The U.K. does not count as NW Europe to academics. It counts as USA Lite. Had this happened in Sweden, it would have

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  9. The Moslem rate may be slightly reduced by it being the religious time of Ramadan. It is possible it is also reduced by the police being cautious of being seen to be picking on immigrants. Also the base figure of Asians willm include a lot of Chinese who are very law abiding (except within their ownn communities).
    Even so it is somewhat ressuring towards much of the immigrant community

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  10. Judging from the extreme forms of official PC censorship and double-speak in the UK, these numbers are probably greatly distorted against whites.

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  11. Captain Jack Aubrey11/1/11, 10:59 AM

    "Using the census data on the ethnic makeup of the impacted riot areas and weighting those areas by the number arrested"

    Hooey. You can't simply look at the demographic data of "the impacted riot areas." You have to explain why there were no riots at all in areas where there are few if any blacks. Scotland and Wales have few blacks and, iirc, weren't affected by riots at all.

    As the riots were a national phenomenon, it's better simply to look at the share of blacks arrested versus their share of the overall population.

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  12. @Captain Jack Aubrey

    There weren't many blacks in Salford, but that didn't stop the party kicking off there..

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  13. I'm from Irish Catholic stock myself, but I think you'll find that "demographic" was disproportionately at work outside London. British whites are v. far from homogenous.

    Interestingly, the drug dealer whose shooting kicked off the initial riot was half Jamaican, half Irish.

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  14. Britain was far better off when it was a mono-racial society. Letting non-whites, especially blacks and muslims into the country was a terrible mistake.

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  15. Captain Jack Aubrey11/1/11, 12:39 PM

    "There weren't many blacks in Salford, but that didn't stop the party kicking off there."

    Really? You're saying whites sometimes engage in criminal acts all on our lonesomes, without help from any other race? Gosh, who knew? So I guess by that logic you won't mind moving to Compton or Detroit...

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  16. >Britain was far better off when it was a mono-racial society. Letting non-whites, especially blacks and muslims into the country was a terrible mistake.>

    But it was good for Kevin MacDonald's usual suspects. From a state of distracted anomie can emerge little intelligent resistance to organized usury and international con games.

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  17. I miss them. They made the news more interesting. Now it's all about not paying back borrowed money. Pretty dull by comparison. Unless I guess you're the one who loaned the money.

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  18. Why so many Poles?

    In London, a lot of Poles tend to hang around blacks.

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  19. I wonder if Clinton or Blair feel even a slight tinge of guilt for the hundreds of thousands of lives they have ended or wrecked.

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  20. You can't separate white participation in these riots from Leftist white-hating politics:

    http://tinyurl.com/3u8893x

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  21. When are you goofs going to give white people credit for having the ability to make decisions on their own?

    I mean if this whole, "the smooth, charismatic black man made me do that shit" thing is true, Then I guess Barry vs. The Herminator in 2012, and every other presidential election going forward, is not fair and logical, it's inevitable, right?

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  22. As a frequent business visitor to London, I appreciate the fact that the hotel and restaurant industries are now staffed largely by attractive, hardworking Eastern Europeans instead of fat, surly locals.

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  23. The riots started in an area of North East London near large Turkish, Kurdish and Arab communities.

    It also appears that Asian Muslim ghettos had no rioting, probably because they own all the businesses in their own neighborhoods. Asian Muslims perpetrated a series of riots across northern England in 2001 and had another big riot around 1997 or so. In those riots, the police, white people and white business were attacked.

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  24. When are you goofs going to give white people credit for having the ability to make decisions on their own?
    sweetheart no one says they didn't make decisions on their own.. but the riots wouldn't have started in the first place if no blacks where there.

    The riots where there were few blacks- like manchester - were quickly put down by the police because they were not afraid of the racism! angle - and if you think this is an exageration you don't know how wack-pc the UK has become- there have been cases of constables and police chiefs coming forward and admitting that they discouraged white women from reporting rapes by asian/blacks.

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  25. Britain was far better off when it was a mono-racial society. Letting non-whites, especially blacks and muslims into the country was a terrible mistake.
    unless you're a people who thinks their 'golden age' was moorish occupied spain, and that homogenus white christian nations are all one step away from being the next Hit-la.

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  26. The riots started in an area of North East London near large Turkish, Kurdish and Arab communities.

    It also appears that Asian Muslim ghettos had no rioting, probably because they own all the businesses in their own neighborhoods. Asian Muslims perpetrated a series of riots across northern England in 2001 and had another big riot around 1997 or so. In those riots, the police, white people and white business were attacked.


    Right. Asian Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs didn't riot much because it was their businesses under attack from Africans, Jamaicans, and white Chavs. The video footage seemed to show lots of wailing Asian shopkeepers whose stores had been trashed by blacks and lower-class whites. In that type of environmnent, Asians probably saw the rioters as an ethnically distinct enemy.

    Of course that didn't stop Middle Easterners (Turks, Arabs, Kurds) from being as represented as black British. In the French riots, it seems that Middle Easterners and blacks were content to burn cars of their coethnics.

    The general reputation of British Muslims (Pakis/Bangladeshi/Indian) has been that they're generally docile, but heavily into religious fundamentalism and socially/residentially segregated. Underclass behavior and criminality seems to be on the increase, but it's not so bad as what you might see in the French banlieus. The bigger problem is the estrangement and hostility that exist between the Asian Muslims and everyone else.

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  27. Poles in Britain have a reputation for being troublemakers. Not as bad as African/Jamaicans or Middle Easterners, but hardly a super law abiding group.

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  28. i'm going to add "lumpenproles" to my lexicon.

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  29. With...
    Poles in Britain have a reputation for being troublemakers. Not as bad as African/Jamaicans or Middle Easterners, but hardly a super law abiding group.

    and...
    Why so many Poles?

    In London, a lot of Poles tend to hang around blacks.


    and...
    i'm going to add "lumpenproles" to my lexicon.

    I also suggest "lumpen-Poles". (Sorry Steve, just had to make that joke.) I wouldn't be surprised if Britain collected much of Poland's underclass, since it collects so many other undesirables!

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  30. Poles in Britain have a reputation for being troublemakers. Not as bad as African/Jamaicans or Middle Easterners, but hardly a super law abiding group.

    How do Poles compare to Albanians?

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  31. "Poles in Britain have a reputation for being troublemakers. Not as bad as African/Jamaicans or Middle Easterners, but hardly a super law abiding group."

    There is a lot of Polish crime in Chicagoland. Then again, Chicago has more Poles than Warsaw, so one would expect them to be well represented. I think the British Poles are acting up because:
    A. People from Eastern Europe are, generally less law abiding than the westerners. They come from cultures where corruption is the norm, and they have little respect for the authorities because, well, the authorities that they are used to don't deserve much respect.

    B. They are immigrants. Immigrant children and the children of immigrants, generally, behave worse than those comparable to them in every other way. Immigrant parents tend to be more defeated by their daily tasks, navigating life in a foreign language, than they would have been back home. They exude less authority. The children often have to translate for the parents, so they feel that they can get away with more. When the immigrant parents go about instilling morals into their children, the point of reference tends to be the mother country or the small immigrant community, not the new country's community as a whole. This bundled with the fact that immigrant parent often express their homesickness by bashing the new country and everyone in it, makes it okay to behave badly toward the native population, in the minds of some child immigrants and immigrants' children. Lastly, but very importantly, immigration often merges classes that wouldn't merge otherwise. The working middle class and the utter trash who wouldn't have been caught dead in the same environment back in the home country start to co-exist in the same neighborhoods. The kids start hanging out together, and bad behavior of a confident co-ethnic jackal becomes one with the language the jackal speaks. It's hard to explain to those who haven't experienced it, but rest assured, a large group consisting of parents whose sense of confidence had been shaken by a recent dip in status and kids looking for someone who has the confidence for guidance spells trouble, no matter who they are.

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  32. Actually, white agent provocateurs started the riots.

    The blacks were peaceful until they were shown a broken shop window.

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  33. Miserable Old Brit11/4/11, 8:19 AM

    Are those arrested a fair sample of all rioters, or are they just the dumbest ones? Maybe immigrants are less likely to know when it's time to scarper?
    I'm really surprised about Poles: in London Polish has become a brand for various trades and services - we expect them to do a good job. Whereas everyone knows Albanians are all pimps. I'm surprised how easily they drove the gallant sons of the George Cross Island out of their niche.
    I believe people riot in Britain because they enjoy it, and from that point of view Whites with a taste for recreational violence were probably under-represented cf those of a similar bent of other ethnicities. There's a hell of a lot more white thugs than there were rioters.

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