Protesters are exploiting the tragedy in Southport to “fuel their own agenda and trigger a summer of thrill-seeking impulsive insurrection”, an academic has claimed.
He was joined by fellow researchers in policing who warned the disorder and unrest seen in the wake of Monday’s attack had “nothing to do” with the incident and was instead being stoked by misinformation amid historic tensions over other problems in society.
Sir Keir Starmer has said “action will be taken” following “violent disorder” in parts of England in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
The Prime Minister summoned police chiefs to Downing Street on Thursday following unrest in London, Hartlepool and Manchester overnight, while a demonstration in Aldershot saw a tense stand-off with riot police.
John Coxhead, a professor of policing at Staffordshire University, said the initial incident which left three children dead and others injured had “emboldened a vocal minority to vent their pent-up frustrations”, leading to a form of “peculiar protest”.
He told the PA news agency: “The investigation at Southport is serious and the focus on those killed and injured is now being distracted by others who are wanting to use the tragic incident to fuel their own agenda and trigger a summer of thrill-seeking impulsive insurrection.
“The big underlying problem with this negativity is that it is a form of peculiar protest. They seem to know what they don’t want but they have no idea how to lead because they do not have a clue about where they do want to go”, he said as he claimed groups were being “cynically stirred up by opportunistic populists with nothing better to do”.
At worst, those behind the unrest are “seeking to stoke-up a religious war”, he said, adding: “It seems to me that these rants of ‘we want our country back’, whilst burning police vehicles and beating servants of the Crown, signify the act of a deluded and destructive rabble of people.
“Those stirring up hatred and division seem to be doing so in order to create violence on our streets to cause fear of the ‘other’. The ones we should be concerned about are the ones purporting to burn our streets in the name of the nation’s flag.”
Disorder in Southport on Tuesday night focused on a mosque near where the attacks took place, and Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera, director of policing at the University of East London, described the riots as “ethnocentric” – the attitude that one’s own group, ethnicity or nationality is superior to others – and said “someone needs to counter the misinformation”.
Tensions are rising due to historic underlying unrest over other societal problems which are “nothing to do with Southport” and need to be addressed amid “populist” influence, he told PA.
Soyful Alam, a former imam at the mosque targeted, had said people “have a right to be angry” while a nation in shock comes to terms with the tragedy, but he stressed that no matter what the background of someone who commits a crime, the community they come from or are associated with should not be targeted.
“People need to be told that a crime is a crime and a criminal is a criminal,” he said.
“Whoever (that person may be), he or she is responsible for a crime and to go targeting people who may be of the same colour or may be from the same region in the world isn’t justified, it isn’t a humane way of going about things.”
Other academics told PA that while mass stabbings are “incredibly rare”, violent incidents can be more common in warm, summer months.
Professor Jonathan Shepherd, part of Cardiff University’s Violence Research Group, said: “Violence is always consistently more common in the summer than it is in the autumn and the winter and the spring,” adding that violence prevention activity “needs more emphasis in the summer than it does in the other seasons”.
Dr Sue Roberts, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth whose research focuses on community safety and policing, including knife crime and youth violence, said: “It is directly relatable to the larger number of people in public places and more activities organised outside.
“We think that there is a correlation between people’s activities and the things that occur in warmer weather in terms of groups of people being outside. So yes, there is a correlation between violence in warmer months.”
But she said it is “very hard” to say whether the warm weather was one of the factors in disorder breaking out in the wake of the attacks, pointing to misinformation spreading on social media possibly being a key driver.
Prof Coxhead added: “Street disorder and hot weather do have a correlation we can see over time, but it seems to me that any and every situation is currently being exploited to repeat a narrative of hate and fear,” and he suggested the recent disturbances were a planned and orchestrated congregation rather than being “spontaneous and opportunist”.
