In his special parliamentary session’s speech following the riots on the streets across the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the “appalling scenes” of violence and looting, pledging stronger police power to ensure that offenders are caught and made to pay for their crimes. He also described the events as “criminality pure and simple”, and made it clear that the government will not allow a culture of fear to exist, and will do “whatever it takes to restore law and order and rebuild our communities”.

His last point raises many issues and questions, and surely they are not easy to answer. The difficult part is not the talking but societies searching for the “right” balance between law, order and the building of a society based on values of rights and responsibilities. In the heat of the moment, many UK citizens and politicians called for the police force to be given extended powers in order to maintain law and order. There were also those advocating that for a force to be stopped, there should be a bigger force.

Notwithstanding all these reasoned arguments favouring more police powers in fighting criminality, these riots simply demonstrated the changing nature of collective criminality and the political management of sub-societies. Until very recently, predictability models that foresaw the simplification of societal behaviour have been dominating the political corridors across the world. Nowadays, the trend is starting to move towards models that advocate fast-response action in order to deal with any arising and unexpected incidents.

The slow reaction by the police force across the UK has clearly demonstrated the limitations of the usual way of doing things. The usage of social media like Facebook and Twitter has put more pressure on different public actors to change their working methodologies to respond to the fast changes occurring at societal level, from the very top to the very bottom of social classes. And it could be the case that Mr Cameron’s call to crack down on social media without a corresponding proportionate change in police structures and methodologies, and also in how society functions, could all be nothing but a long-term failure.

But, should all these riots be understood through the criminality lens? In his speech, Mr Cameron reiterated that these riots were not the result of the government’s recent austerity measures and the increasing inequalities but only due to the “broken society”, a society that talks mostly about rights but with no reference to responsibilities and duties.

However, I believe that one cannot disentangle one aspect from the other. A society cannot pretend not to have angry and disillusioned people when a relatively large proportion of them feel powerless in the face of structural unemployment, and also powerless in their inability to change how politics function in providing an economy that promotes decent job creation, without alienating those at the very top and those at the very bottom of society.

No criminal act can ever be justified. But politics’ aim is to bring together the wisdom of all individuals and act collectively. Academic studies demonstrate that successful companies are able to maintain the best human resources because they provide the possibility of ownership to its employees. The same can be advocated for societies; they cannot simply avoid disillusionment amongst the most vulnerable without empowering them through the provision of more information and the skills to process it.

This event illustrates more clearly that Western liberal societies cannot function without mutual respect and responsibility. But the biggest challenge in today’s reality seems to be for governments to act fast through effective investment in policies that develop the sustainable economy, based on the balanced role of government, civil society and the private sector in an age of a bigger role for the regulatory risk-management state.

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