Clifford Stott on riot prevention

The Life Scientific

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why does violence break out in some crowds and not in others and what can the police do to reduce the risk of this happening? Professor Clifford Stott tells Jim Al-Khalili about his journey from trouble maker to police advisor and explains why some policing strategies are more successful than others.

As a teenager Clifford was often in trouble with the police. Now he’s a professor of crowd psychology who works with the police suggesting new evidence-based strategies for public order management. ‘If we misunderstand the psychology of the crowd then all attempts at crowd control are doomed to fail’, he says. Cliff’s work on football crowds revolutionised the way matches were policed and led to a dramatic reduction in football hooliganism. He’s studied the riots in London and other British cities in 2011 and the mass protests in Hong Kong in 2019. And in 2020 he joined the government advisory board, SAGE to advise the government on how to reduce the risk of civil unrest in the wake of a global pandemic.

Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
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0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.5	Hello I'm Jim Alkalelli and this is the podcast of the Life Scientific. Today I'm talking to a man who studies riots.
0:49.0	Why does violence break out in some crowds and not others and what can the police do to reduce
0:55.1	the risk of this happening.
0:57.0	BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
1:02.3	In recent weeks millions of people around the world have come out onto the streets
1:06.5	to protest against racial injustice sparked by the death of George Floyd after a US
1:12.0	police officer held a knee to his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and he protested, I can't breathe.
1:19.0	My guest today studies how peaceful protests tip over into riots. He is interested in the
1:24.8	psychology of crowds and he works with police forces across the UK to develop strategies
1:30.7	for maintaining public order during mass gatherings.
1:34.0	He says, if we misunderstand the psychology of crowds, then our attempt to manage these crowds are
1:39.8	doomed to fail.
1:41.8	Clifford Stots, early work on football hooliganism, changed the way
	...

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