Nazir Afzal was a chief Crown prosecutor in 2011 during the August riots that began in London and spread across the country. In 2024, one week after the murder of three girls at a dance class in Southport and the subsequent far-right riots throughout the UK, he told me that the current violence is “reminiscent” of 2011. What has changed since then and what lessons have been learned – by the police and by politicians like Keir Starmer, who was director of public prosecutions at the time? Afzal spoke about the “amplifying” effect of social media, both in sparking the violence and in raising levels of public fear, and the state of the UK’s prisons and criminal justice system to handle the aftermath.
Afzal was appointed chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners in 2016, a position he resigned from following the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing so that he could comment freely on the attack. In our discussion, he stressed an element of the current disorder that has been overshadowed by the focus on immigration and the tension of multiculturalism: misogyny. He pointed out that, as with the bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, the Southport attacker targeted a specific demographic in his choice of a Taylor Swift dance class. “The driver here was male violence,” he told me, calling it “a pandemic that will outlive the one that we’ve just been through”.
Rachel Cunliffe: I want to start by asking what your reflections are on what we’ve seen over the past week in terms of the civic violence on our streets?
Nazir Afzal: We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that three little girls died a week ago. Despite what we’re told – that these riots and this disorder and these protests are aimed at reflecting what happened to those three little girls – the reality is that we’ve forgotten about those three little girls. We mustn’t lose sight of that.
I’ve spent the weekend dealing with dozens of people who’ve randomly contacted me from all over the country, fearful of the situation, which is very reminiscent of how I experienced August 2011, the riots that started in Tottenham. People then were really fearful. My children were very much younger. I remember them looking up at the sky and seeing helicopters and really being scared.
I think what we’ve got at the moment is an enormous amount of fear, trepidation. We need to bring calmness back. I’ve had to provide reassurance to pretty much everybody that I’ve spoken to that this will end and people will be safe. And then there will be consequences for those who’ve been involved in the various activities [on the streets] in different parts of the country.
It has been disconcerting and quite painful to listen to the stories I’ve heard. It was very reminiscent, unfortunately, of my youth. I grew up [in Birmingham] in the Sixties and Seventies and I remember going to school and coming back with [my] coat covered in saliva, none of it was mine. I can’t forget the fact that three racists beat the living daylights out of me, literally. If it wasn’t for the support and care I was given, I might not have survived that. And that was all racism, that was the Seventies. I thought we’d put that behind us. Clearly we haven’t, because what we’ve seen in the last few days is targeting of people from minority communities, targeting of Muslims and mosques, targeting of the most vulnerable in our society. And the police bravely putting on a front to protect us all and, as importantly, enormous numbers of the best of British who’ve stood and prevented these neo-fascists from causing any more harm.
The most positive thing that’s come out of this is how we’ve come together against these people who would wish to divide us.
RC: That’s some incredibly shocking detail there. Thank you for sharing your personal experiences. You mentioned today is reminiscent of the 2011 London riots and you were a prosecutor during that episode. How did things escalate back then and what parallels or, indeed, lessons do you think we can draw between that period and what’s going on today?
NA: I think there were a number of differences. I lived in Manchester, and Salford was pretty much second place after Tottenham [in 2011, in terms of level of disorder]. And then you discovered that there were people in Tottenham who were related to people in organised crime in Salford. And you thought, hang on a minute, there’s something more amiss. It’s not by chance that it’s Salford second after Tottenham.
So I think there were a lot more organised crime elements to what was happening then. It was more troubling because you didn’t know [what was happening]. The police now have got some really good intelligence about these disorders and roughly know where things are going to happen as and when they do happen. We didn’t have much intelligence at all [in 2011] about where it would break out next. I remember being at a wedding in Wolverhampton and the hotel that we were supposed to stay in was full of police officers who had been brought down from Scotland just in case something happened in Birmingham.
And we’ve learned from that. So there is a national public order team. People are moving around geographically: if police numbers are low in one part of the country where trouble is anticipated, officers will come from another part of the country. So I think from a policing perspective, they’re better prepared.
Of course, there are fewer of them, compared to where we were in 2010 and 2011, and less experienced, but we have police in the right places. I think prosecutors are better prepared. We’ve learned – a protocol was brought into place pretty much immediately after the August 2011 [riots], which enabled us to move quickly when an event like this took place. And that’s been actioned, I think, pretty astutely to prepare for the weekend we’ve just had, so that people can be processed very quickly, charged as needed, and brought to court.
But I think what’s different this time is two things that we didn’t have [as] much of back in 2011. That’s social media and smartphones.
They were very much in their infancy then. All the evidence that we had in 2011 was CCTV evidence, general filmed evidence by the usual, traditional means. Now, today, we have body-worn cameras, we have CCTV, we have drone evidence, we have social media evidence. People have been uploading in real time enormous amounts of what will eventually become evidence.
That does two things. One is that it scares people. Because there’s actually less going on now than there was in August 2011 in terms of violence and harm – but it’s in your face. It’s on your TikTok. It’s on your screens all the time. So people are more scared, I think, because they’re seeing so much of it.
The positive, if there is a positive, is that whilst our phones have become smart, the people using them haven’t. What they’re doing is they’re recording their criminality and the criminality of people around them. As we move to the next stage, which is the justice stage, there is now an overwhelming amount of evidence. I’ve already heard people have pleaded guilty [on Monday] morning, because they are faced with their own video evidence of whatever it is that they’ve done.
And when you are faced with that, you have two options. One is to try and fight it and then lose and get a longer sentence, or you plead guilty and hope that you’ll get a discount in terms of your sentence.
So I’m reassured in this respect that we will be able to bring people to justice quickly. But at the same time, I’m concerned at the impact that social media has had on this particular disorder, because not only was it encouraging, but it’s also about amplifying what’s happened so that people have become more scared than I remember back in 2011.
RC: I wanted to ask about the justice system and essentially whether you think it’s going to be able to cope with the sheer numbers. We know there’s a crisis in our courts and the courts’ backlog. We’ve heard that courts are going to run 24 hours a day in order to process and prosecute those responsible as quickly as possible. But we’ve also got a crisis with overcrowding in prisons. And the Prime Minister has mentioned the challenges inherited from the last government. Does that worry you?
NA: I think that the response to the riots over the weekend will be very thorough and expedited and swift, and they will deal with the cases as fast as we dealt with them back in 2011.
What will happen though is that there’ll be an impact on those cases that should have happened this week, next week, the following month. And there have been people waiting – for example, the current average wait time for a rape case is just over two years, from reporting to conclusion of trial. And that’s absolutely unacceptable in any modern society. But there are other types of crime too, where people are waiting inordinate amounts of time for their day in court. That day in court is going to be put off for a number of them.
What will undoubtedly be happening right now is they are risk-assessing all their casework for this week, next week, the next month or so, deciding what they can put off. There will be cases that will be delayed. There’ll be impact on, hopefully not the most serious cases, hopefully not the cases with vulnerable people in them, but there will be cases that will be impacted on because this is the priority. There will be an impact downstream.
RC: You mentioned that you were concerned about social media and the widespread use of it. Obviously, we know that one of the triggers for the riots was false information, which was posted on social media and then spread very widely before police could correct it. We’ve also seen some of these individuals using social media to organise and plan, and that’s been very difficult for the police to stay ahead of. We’ve also got more traditional media pushing certain narratives, such as the Telegraph‘s front page yesterday, which reads “Far-right clashes with Muslims in rioting”. What does the way we consume media – the way that things get fact-checked, the speed of it all – what impact has that had?
NA: It has a massive impact. It’s impossible to disprove a lie when it’s been out there. And that’s what’s been happening. I think the people who are telling these lies play on that. They know that Full Fact or some fact-finding website will take forever [to correct the story]. And by that time, everybody believes whatever.
Unfortunately, we’re in a post-truth society and people are making up their own truth. I don’t know what the answer is. Better regulation of social media is clearly part of that.
The important thing, however, unlike August 2011, is that this time around police and prosecutors will be looking at those people who have incited and conspired. They’ve captured all of this, by the way. Another bit of learning from 2011 is that pretty much everything anybody puts out in real time online is captured by the authorities. You can’t delete it five seconds later, they’ve got it. That means there’s a mountain of material which they can examine and assess to see whether or not somebody’s messaging has actually inspired, incited or even worse conspired with somebody to commit some of the violent disorder that we’ve seen. And then they will face the consequences.
RC: You started off our conversation with a very important reminder that three little girls are dead and that was the horrific tragedy that kickstarted all of this. You walked out of your job as head of the national body for police commissioners after the terror attack in Manchester and you wrote for the New Statesman in 2018 that this was so you could “speak up about the fact that the attack was specifically aimed at women and girls”. Obviously, the attack that started all of this was on children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. Do you feel that this element has been missed as the conversation has turned to immigration?
NA: One hundred per cent. We’re missing the misogyny here. We won’t know until the trial what were the motivators, if there were any, in relation to the alleged killer of these three girls. But a month before that, BBC presenter John Hunt lost his wife and two daughters [to an attack by] a white man. There were no demonstrations there, apparently.
RC: They were killed with a crossbow.
NA: With a crossbow. So that’s three women [murdered] a month ago. You know the facts. More than 100 women every week are killed by their partners or ex-partners. The Ariana Grande Manchester Arena scenario was massively impactful for me because I thought, hang on a minute, 17 of the 22 victims are women or girls, the youngest being eight years old. He deliberately targeted them, he could have picked the wrestling match that took place the night before, which was a predominantly male audience. No, he picked an audience which was predominantly female and deliberately targeted them.
That, I think, is something we’re missing in this. We’re continuing to see the war on women – where men, quite frankly, and male violence is the issue.
Rather than talk about male violence, we’re talking about immigration. Well, absolutely, we should be talking about immigration. I agree. But the driver [in the first attack] was male violence. He was born in this country, the alleged killer. So immigration is not the issue.
And we are not having that conversation. It’s a pandemic that will outlive the one that we’ve just been through. And I don’t see a sense of urgency about this that we need to have before we have more people like these young girls killed.
You can listen to this full interview on The New Statesman Podcast here.
[See also: Can Kamala Harris save America?]
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