It’s become a cliche among many people that rioting is an inevitable consequence of deprivation and injustice. Last night’s rioting in Tottenham inspired a predictable – one might say inevitable – crop of examples on Twitter:

It’s because David Cameron turns a blind eye to corruption between Murdoch and Metropolitan Police that alienation makes riots inevitable. – derekrootboy

I don’t agree with riots but was inevitable when working classes are being fucked over like this. – mollymccowen

Riots inevitable in people who cannot express their anger in any other way. Historical precedents a-plenty. – Jos21

The riots were inevitable. That’s the first thing I said when I heard about the shooting. Anger and hot summer nights are a lethal cocktail – iheni

tottenham riots Soh dem mash up Tottenham, !!! Was inevitable after the shooting of Mark Duncan (sic). Wasn’t rocket science in my book – Mafia1065

Historically it’s inevitable there are riots when there are cuts like this – HelenReloaded

the climate in our country is terrible and riots were inevitable but the looting and destroying of places of work saddens me – evey_moriarty

This was inevitable..tory government. Riots. Protests. Cuts. Unemployment. Disaffected Youth. Strikes. Recession. Police Brutality. – xxlucyxlucyxx

When people are attacked by ideological cuts and suffer racism from the police, riots like this are inevitable. – PennyRed

Riots were inevitable given building unhappiness with the manner in which the police conducts itself – dr_rita39

The Guardian is giving front-page space today to a video from a week ago in which a young man from Haringey asserts that the closure of local youth clubs will lead to riots.

Dave Osler at Liberal Conspiracy skilfully avoids the i-word but you can tell he means it:

[S]uch is the degree of disconnect between all the major parties and the street that the chances of positive engagement are next to zero. There is instead the recourse of riot.

Back at the Guardian, Dave Hill offers a slightly more nuanced explanation:

In such a climate [of economic deprivation and government cutbacks], an event such as the shooting dead by police of 29 year-old father of four Mark Duggan on Thursday night is more likely to provide in some minds, especially young ones, a pretext, a rationale or an opportunity to jettison any respect for the law or regard for fellow citizens and let rip.

These widespread views about the supposed inevitability of rioting need closer examination.

Those who make the case for inevitable rioting are rarely speaking about themselves. Journalists and commentators on comfortable middle incomes are less likely to be seriously affected by a sluggish economy, government cutbacks and police thuggery than those at the bottom of the social pile even if they’re as angry about it as anyone else. They won’t be out at 5am torching John Lewis or looting the local Jigsaw.

Nor will the people in the Guardian’s youth clubs video or those discussing the rioting on Twitter. Many of these people are likely to be in very similar circumstances to those burning, looting and attacking the emergency services.

What’s notable about the Tottenham riots and rioting in the UK in general is the scale – not how large and commonplace riots are but how small and rare. Anecdotes suggest that people were coming from across London to join a riot just a few hundred strong in Tottenham. As some of those arrested give their home addresses in court this week we’ll see whether this can be confirmed. Rioting as an activity relies on the disinhibition and physical protection of strength in numbers. Tottenham by itself may have been too small a place to recruit a critical mass of rioters.

All of which suggests that the rioting in Tottenham may be far more about the those few rioters themselves than the society in which all of us live. Rioting stems not from the social grievances and frustrations of the many but from the desire for mayhem and the lack of self control of the few. Even in boom times the UK has around a million people unemployed and looking for work. Why isn’t there a riot every day of the week?

There are adequate good reasons to provide effective public services and social opportunities for people of all backgrounds without resorting to political blackmail: do this or riots will inevitably follow. Whether you want better student funding, good youth clubs or a competent and honest police service, public policy shouldn’t be run like a protection racket. Politicians should fear the masses casting ballots not the mob casting stones.

So people need to be very cautious when talking about the supposed inevitability of riots. If one person riots but the majority of his neighbours in exactly the same circumstances do not, that’s a matter of individual differences not social breakdown. The solutions to this kind of behaviour are found in psychology and criminology not politics.

Those who talk about the inevitability of riots show gross disrespect to the vast majority of people who live peaceably with their neighbours and abide by the law despite deprivation and injustice. They show disrespect to the rioters too. If some people can’t help themselves rioting they are put outside the proper demands of the community and the law, stripped of any meaningful citizenship. They’re robbed of their moral agency too – deprived of their ability to discern the right course of action whatever the circumstances and to act accordingly.

We need to have higher expectations of everyone than that.

I’m a big fan of London’s Barclays Cycle Hire scheme. I praised it when it was introduced, I created a free API service for developers to help them get live data about bike availability to make useful apps for people, I built a realtime 3D visualisation of bike availability and I even wrote a simulator to help me better understand bike movement patterns. I still think it’s a great system and I’m keen to do what I can to help people use it and to make it work better.

So when Boris announced that the scheme had just passed its one millionth journey milestone it seemed like a good time to ask Transport for London for the journey data. It’s an easy enough job: Just a single database query to fetch the times, origin and destination of each trip. If I could load this data into my simulator I might be able to see where extra bikes and docking stations might be needed. I put in a Freedom of Information Act request, confident that I’d have the data within the 20 working days limit required by law.

That was three months ago on 8 October. I’m still waiting.

The good news is that the data has just been made available in TfL’s developers’ area and some people are already starting to do interesting and useful things with it. But behind that happy fact is another example of a public body deciding to completely ignore their Freedom of Information Act responsibilities and the rights of an applicant in pursuit of its own perceived interests.

Data delayed is data denied

Under the law, public bodies have got 20 working days to reply either with the information requested or to claim an exemption. The time limit is there for a good and obvious reason: Without it, public bodies can string an applicant along indefinitely, and with many requests being time-sensitive this can often past the point where the information would be useful.

Fortunately I didn’t have a specific deadline for using this data but it certainly would have been more useful to me sooner rather than later. I could have been working on it for two months by now. And if TfL had been keen for other developers to use it, they could have had it too. Some developers were keen to get hold of it for the Open Data Hackday on 4 December last year but that came and went without any sign of the data.

So why was the data delayed? I estimate that there would have been less than two hours work to produce it and send it to me, or to put it on an open website where anyone could download the file.

“Your free information is in this locked box. Sign this contract and if we like what you’re doing you can have it.”

The answer lies in TfL’s desire to wrap the data in a complicated contract rather than make it available to me or anyone else directly and legally unencumbered. This might make sense in the context of some data and some data users but it’s directly inimical to the aims and indeed the law of freedom of information. The data in TfL’s developers’ area isn’t open data and it’s not available to everyone. As the site says:

Please complete the registration form below to use our syndication feeds. Before we give permission to use any feeds, we need to know how they will be used, where they will be used and how many people are likely to view them.

So why should anyone have to apply for permission to get access to their freedom of information answer? Why not just send it to the applicant?

The Information Commissioner, who regulates public bodies’ compliance with the Freedom of Information Act is quite clear that information must be supplied regardless of the identity and motives of the applicant. His guidance (PDF) states:

A request therefore has to be considered on the basis that it could have been made by any person; the identity of that person is not a material consideration when deciding whether or not to release information. It is for this reason that we do recommend as good practice that requests under obvious pseudonyms should normally be considered unless there is reason to think that any of the matters below need to be taken into account.

There follows some general exceptions regarding vexatious requests, people requesting their own personal information and costs issues, none of which apply in this case.

On the issue of the applicant’s motives:

There is also no specific reference in the FOIA to the principle that requests for information must be considered without reference to the motives of the requester.

However, there are no references in the Act indicating that anyone can be asked to provide a reason for requesting information and it is from this absence that the principle [of disregarding the applicant's motives] is drawn.

The Information Commissioner then quotes the Lord Chancellor’s code of practice on freedom of information:

Authorities should be aware that the aim of providing assistance is to clarify the nature of the information sought, not to determine the aims or motivation of the applicant. Care should be taken not to give the applicant the impression that he or she is obliged to disclose the nature of his or her interest as a precondition to exercising the rights of access, or that he or she will be treated differently if he or she does (or does not).

But if I want to get a response to my FOI request from TfL I am asked to enter into a contract with them whose terms include:

2.1.2 [You shall] only use the Transport Data in accordance with these Terms and Conditions and the Syndication Developer Guidelines, and not use such information in any way that causes detriment to TfL or brings TfL into disrepute. The rights granted to You under these Terms and Conditions are limited to accessing and displaying or otherwise making available the Transport Data for the purposes stated by You in Your registration.

So not only is TfL’s contract explicitly asking me to state my motive as a precondition of access, it also constrains me from using the information for any other purpose and arguably prevents me from using that information to criticise TfL, thereby causing it “detriment” or bringing it into “disrepute”. If I don’t agree to this they can deny access altogether and if I subsequently break the agreement in their view they can revoke access. This is a funny kind of free information.

The Freedom of Information Act is designed to enable scrutiny of government. It’s inevitable that some information requested may cause embarrassment to the public body providing it or even bring it into disrepute. If the law is going to be workable at all, public bodies must consider each application on its merits alone without concerning themselves with the applicant or their motives. To do otherwise would allow public bodies to effectively pick and choose which requests they answered. TfL’s decision to require me to enter into an extremely restrictive contract with them to get a response to my freedom of information request is applicant and motive discrimination by the back door. It’s not something that should be tolerated from TfL much less adopted by other public bodies as a way to weaken FOI applicants’ rights. Free information should not come wrapped in a restrictive contract wall. That’s why I won’t be accepting TfL’s terms and I’ll simply have to leave the analysis of this Cycle Hire data in the very capable hands of others.

If you’ve ever wanted to whistle up a pair of wheels while walking around London, now you can. Friday’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme puts 6000 short-hire bikes at 300 docking stations within a few hundred metres of any point in the centre of the city. No matter where you are, you shouldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from a hire bike.

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Article title preserved for posterity but it’s clear now that Ian Tomlinson was not a protester and was just walking home from work. Please see the updates in the comments at the bottom of this post.

Unnamed: The protester who died. Photo: public domain via Guardian

Photo by Alex Watts.

I’m shocked and saddened that a man died during the G20 protests in London yesterday.

Every death potentially related to police activity is automatically investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. But while their inquiry is in progress, the truth about this incident needs to surface, and soon.

Mainstream media reporting has spun this story away from its most obvious potential substance — policing tactics — to the alleged behaviour of the protesters themselves who the police say attacked police medics trying to give assistance to the dying (or perhaps, dead) man.

The Telegraph dutifully repeats the police allegations as fact without troubling themselves with any corroboration:

[A]s officers went to the man’s aid, they were pelted with bottles and other missiles, forcing them to retreat.

The Times at least paraphrases its source:

The Met said that as the officers tried to revive the man they came under attack from protesters who threw bottles at them

The Guardian is also happy to repeat the story without corroboration:

A man died last night during the G20 protests in central London as a day that began peacefully ended with police saying bottles were thrown at police medics trying to help him.

Meanwhile over on Twitter, @jdodds writes:

Talking to eye witnesses from yesterday.protester who died had symtoms related to a head wound.was seen to be hit by truncheon

If true, this puts a wholly different light on events. There isn’t any dispute that the man died within the police cordon near the junction of Birchin Lane and Cornhill between 7 and 8pm yesterday. Did he die from natural causes? Were these aggravated by effectively being detained on the street, possibly without food or drink? Did he suffer a head wound and was it caused by the police? Did the cordon itself prevent him receiving timely treatment? How did the other protesters react? Violently? Helpfully?

We don’t know, but given that the police have been very quick to tell the tale about the “attack” on them by protesters but were wholly unable to give any indication as to why the man may have died, it’s about time we found out.

As I write there is a protest against the man’s death taking place near the Bank of England, where tributes have been left.

R.I.P.

To some it must seem the very vision of Utopia: an elegant New England-style enclave with neatly clipped lawns, docile residents and a 9pm curfew for social housing tenants aged under 15.

This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.

But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.

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According to Westminster Council, the bulging bladders of that city’s denizens are an accident waiting to happen:

Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.

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