“Did I just riot when I was there with my camera?”: Social media, riot tourism, and the participatory visuality of riots — A review of I’m Just Here for the Riot (2023), an ESPN documentary.
In our inaugural film review for the blog, Monika Lemke explores a documentary that offers a self-contested portrait of riot sousveillance.
I’m Just Here for the Riot (2023) is a documentary that recounts Vancouver’s June 15, 2011 Stanley Cup hockey riot. As its title indicates, the documentary focuses on the riot’s appeal as a site of dark tourism, offering a popular perspective on the riot and its aftermath. Using standard techniques of the documentary genre, the film presents perspectives from those who participated in the riot, many of those who attended ostensibly as tourists: photographers, glory-seekers, vigilantes, and revellers.
Canadian journalists at the time remarked that, similar to the way Toronto’s G20 demonstrations had attracted its share of revellers (Kuitenbrouwer 2010; Doyle 2011) just a year prior, Vancouver’s 2011 riot presented an opportunity for its tourists to take selfies among broken glass windows and burned out police cars, this time in the aftermath of a sports event. The riot was a prime location for “sousveillance” (Mann 2005) by its participants, a term which relates to bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically or hierarchically. Many of the so-called rioters used digital cameras and camera phones to capture the exhilarating and lurid pleasure of being there for family, friends, and others. Social media, a novelty in the early 2010s, amplified the circulation of riot images.
The fact that the riots’ participants were undoubtably its chief observers was a development not lost on the police. Surveillance studies researchers Christopher Schneider and Daniel Trottier characterise the event and its aftermath as a significant juncture in the development of “crowdsourced policing” (2012: 57), a term which describes how social media became a tool to aid in the identification suspected rioters by people online. The riot was one of the first mass public events to be policed through social media in Canada, and undoubtably Canada’s first social media-era sports riot. In many ways, the 2011 Vancouver riot served as the blueprint for discernable changes in institutional police practices to include social media, as Schneider details in his 2016 book Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media. Likewise, Trottier’s (e.g. 2012; 2017; 2019) research on digital vigilantism, following Johnston’s (1996) conceptualization of vigilantism, responds to the unique ways online communities weaponize visibility against fellow citizens.
In its apparent fascination with the impact of social media on the experience and representation of riots, I’m Just Here for the Riot offers a context to reflect on how the Vancouver Police Department’s (VPD) bid to deputize the masses through crowdsourced policing is attached to a project of riot visuality. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) definition of visuality as the ability to provide a visualization of history, the concept emphasizes the ideological context of visibility and thus usefully draws attention to how hegemonic forces claim the right to look and therefore to nominate the visible (i.e. the ability to name, classify, and define the elements in a field). To make the point plainly, because it was important to the policing of riots that rioting remained unappealing to the public (dangerous, ugly, shocking, shameful, uncivil, and so on), the VPD sought to simultaneously use sousveillance footage for it purposes and to banish the alternative visual cultures of rioting responsible for some of this footage, where rioting might have seemed funny, fun, appealing or entertaining, at least at first. In this way, the marginalization and criminalization of riot tourism and its souvenir-images strengthens a punitive and vigilantist culture of riot sousveillance. This documentary is a dramatic illustration of the police and vigilantes’ punitive vision that informed the ordering of the 2011 Stanley Cup hockey riot’s visuality.
As it presents this ordering, the documentary often feels confused in its sympathies towards the exposed rioters — a dynamic that played out in the documentary’s own relationship with the riot images. For the most part, the documentary positions sousveillance images as central to the social knowledge about the riot, peepholes into the eye of the storm from the perspective of those who lived it. Its interviews, which cast the rioters in a sympathetic light, often contextualize the sousveillance images as youthful foolishness gone awry or harmless, if carnivalesque, entertainment. Yet, in montages, these same images fuel hegemonic visual stereotypes of riots as menacing and shameful occurrences. These crossed purposes with which the sousveillance images of the riot are used in the documentary would seem either to undermine the fairness of the rioters’ punishment or unravel the stereotypical representation of the riot that deny rioters their heterogeneity and complexity. Nevertheless, in the documentary’s choice of subject matter because of this tension, I’m Just Here for the Riot provides opportunities to appreciate the struggle over the meaning of the 2011 Vancouver riot’s images and the complex visual cultures that inform riot images’ production, circulation and consumption.
The question is, what happens to visuality of a riot when the police are no longer its privileged watchers, and the rioters carry the bulk of the cameras? What makes I’m Just Here for the Riot (2023) so fascinating is its focus on how the crowdsourced social media images of the riot are appropriated for police and vigilante purposes. Although the documentary is interested in the riot participants’ decision to capture images of the riot for their own sake, the only images that are discussed in the film are those that came to serve “crowdsourced policing” efforts. Thus, the documentary focuses on the stories of the people who are “named and shamed” either by digital vigilantes or the criminal justice system, positioning the visual culture of the Vancouver hockey riot exclusively in relation to the punitive response to the riot. Organizing the visuality of the 2011 hockey riot in this way, the documentary takes the surveillant state’s role in establishing the conditions for the punitive spectacle around the riot images for granted. Yet, in its immersion in the police’s visuality of the riot, the documentary makes it possible to explore how the police construct the visual culture of riots in the social media era in ways that provide, subtle as well as explicit, moral instruction to the public. In this piece, I approach the film as a text that expresses the dominant visuality of the 2011 Vancouver hockey riot’s project of disciplining riot tourism, thereby promoting a vigilantist visual culture of riots and making a crime of riot tourism.
Sousveillance and punitive spectacle: stupid gets caught
The moral core of the documentary is that Vancouver’s 2011 Stanley Cup riot threatened the community’s sense of pride. The documentary simmers through a first act in which it presents images of the crowd souring, smoke and flames from burning property, and intersperses this footage with the news media’s characterization of the riot as “moronic” and “stupid”, a collective act of “trashing their own city”, and the epitome of “first world problems.” Such a representation of shame-provoking chaos is counterposed against footage of an ostensibly more civic-minded Vancouver community who clean up the city’s streets and express determination to set things right in the aftermath.
The documentary then draws attention to how mass media framed the riot as a national shame, especially in its senselessness and stupidity. As the documentary tells it, the 2011 riot was especially embarrassing to the city of Vancouver, because a similar hockey riot had happened before, in 1994, and had made the 2011 riot, by some accounts, anticipated. In contrast to the surveillance footage of the 1994 riot taken from static CCTV cameras presented in this film, the 2011 riot’s footage is kinetic in the way it is taken from the crowd’s perspective and follows the action, so to speak. As the media and police narrative tells it, the new generation of rioters were pumped up by social media to pose for their own cameras, which fueled the riot.
The documentary places its focus on the participants who recognise themselves as a riot unfolding. Some of the riot participants speculate that a riot is a step toward the complete breakdown in social order (“We’re all capable of anarchy”) and attest, in hindsight, to being taken in by mob mentality (“I wasn’t thinking logically, I was just so taken in by what was going on”), apparently caught up in a generalized state of excitement capable of overpowering individual reason. Towards the conclusion of the film, another commentator told the documentarians that the riot showed “how thin our moral line can be.” These remarks resonate with Hobbesian, authoritarian appraisals of the human condition that would seem to necessitate policing’s repressive mode of regulation. The mindless, out-of-control condition ascribed to riots by even the rioters themselves renders its politics and culture illegible and irrelevant, justifies violent interventions against it and conveniently warns an impressionable public against its allegiance with or participation in it.
The documentary is explicitly didactic elsewhere, a cautionary tale to would-be sports rioters and tourists. Accordingly, the ubiquitous presence of cameras has made it so that people can no longer get away with “acting stupid”. It transforms the moral diagnosis of police and vigilantes — the need to punish what they label stupidity — into a matter of common sense. As then-Chief of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) Jim Chu remarks in one of his interviews for the documentary, “naming and shaming” was a justified response to people who were stupid enough to get caught up in the mob and get caught on camera doing what they did. In other words, riots are stupid and criminal, and stupid gets caught. The film’s narrative explains that the anonymity of the crowd is deteriorating, and interpellates the viewer: your dumb escapades are now subject to scrutiny by social media-savvy police and vigilantes, so watch yourself. The unwavering core message of the film is to remind the audience (young people, especially) to think twice about being seen doing ‘riotous’ things in public. It thus models contempt as an appropriate response to the footage and images of the rioters. Then, it invites pity for that same bunch when retribution catches up with them.
On this theme, a notable absence from the documentary’s narrative was Nathan Kotylak, a teen who was photographed during the riot attempting to set fire to a police car. Although the documentary made the decision to bypass the details of his case, it included the arson and muted footage of his apology in its montage. His story became emblematic of the policing of the riot’s youthful and impressionable contingent, because he had stepped forward to identify himself after a photograph of him went viral. As a minor, Kotylak had been legally entitled to anonymity, but he had sought the court’s permission to waive his legal right in order to make a public apology (Dempsey 2011). The nature of his alleged offense (anti-police, brazen, etc.) and his decision to make his apology public placed him at the center of the moral opprobrium toward young, middle-class riot participants. His story of being an impressionable youth caught up in the riots, and then inexorably drawn into the public eye by doxers and his own conscience was a key parable of the riot, targeting middle-class would-be rioters and/or glory-seeking tourists.
Identifying the crowd’s barefaced rioters
As VPD’s representatives admit, in this documentary and elsewhere, the strategy of engaging the public thorough “crowdsourced policing” was an explicit intention of the police. It is captured succinctly in the film when VPD Inspector Rai roundly asserts, “We marketed the riot to capture and arrest people.” Prior to Vancouver’s riot, Canadian police had begun to use social media to gather information about large scale demonstrations and identify its members, such as during the G20 meeting in Toronto on June 26, 2010, a strategy had been effective in securing “identity-based prosecutions” (Rieti 2011; Appleby 2013). Whereas the Toronto Police Service (TPS) were relatively quiet about its use of the technology during the charged protest event, the apparently politically neutral indignation around Vancouver’s 2011 riot offered an ideal context to acquaint the public with the enhanced surveillance capabilities that social media afforded the police and position the crowd’s sousveillance of itself as a natural expression of community policing or policing by consent.
The coverage of the aftermath of the riot characterized the rioters as an anti-social and racially coded other, though, interestingly, the matter is not discussed in the documentary itself. “A band of criminals won’t define us,” wrote British Columbia Premier Christy Clark in her open letter to the public. “You will not be able to hide behind your hoodie or your bandana.” Likewise, VPD Chief Chu asserted that those to blame were “criminals, anarchists and thugs who came to town bent on destruction and mayhem’ regardless of the outcome of the game” (CBC News 2011). Steve Rai, an Inspector with the VPD, who appears in the documentary in his police uniform, diagnoses the rioters’ affect as generally anti-social as well as specifically anti-police: “You have hundreds of young men, all drunk, angry at something. Are they angry at society? Were they angry at their life? You know, they were yelling things like, ‘Kill the Fucking Pigs.’”
Regardless of the share of blame placed on this folk-devil band of riot instigators, the visuality of the police’s investigation, and the documentary’s visual inventory of the riot, is organized around the faces of young and naïve riot participants. The VPD’s messaging to the public in the riot’s aftermath was that it was mainly concerned with tracking down the youthful troublemakers that had gotten caught up in the mayhem and caused their fair share. Unlike the typical images of riots that relied on surveillance footage or privileged a view of the crowd from a detached vantage point, the sousveillance footage together with the “crowdsourced” policing strategy brought conspicuous, unobscured faces out of the crowd and into venues where they could be identified by the community (or even themselves) as rioters.
In its endorsement of community policing, the documentary uncritically portrays the VPD as the ‘good cop’ in contrast to the overzealous vigilantism of the digital mob, the ‘bad cop,’ even as the two operated in harmony with one another. In the documentary’s quietly uncritical treatment of the police’s handling of the riot and apparent lack of curiosity about the police’s use of the crowdsourced media, it in fact functions as a masterful product of police “image work” or the police control over their public perception through media (Ericson 1982: 10). Likewise, the documentary idealizes the public’s participatory relationship with the police, especially as it concerns the police’s use of sousveillance images. The documentary includes coverage of the launch of the VPD website that platformed vigilante surveillance and gamified police tipstering: “Can you ID the rioters?” As a newscaster’s voiceover states during a montage, “Lots of people are taking it upon themselves to play detective,” a blithe observation that hails the vigilantist response to the hockey riot into the cultural mainstream.
Posing as a rioter: the crime in riot tourism
Although the documentary consistently disavows the riot’s entertainment aspect, the documentary is invariably drawn to the middle-class consumption of the riot experience as a form of tourism. Evidently, some degree of enjoyment informed the creation and circulation of some of the riot’s most viral images that are at the centre of the documentary such as its trophy shot-staged poses, immersive videos of the riot’s ground-level atmosphere, and action shots of big, fiery explosions. I wondered about the nature of the sousveillance images taken by members of the crowd that were not publicized or made notorious through social media — what stories did they have to tell? The documentary only spotlights stories where the souvenir images of the riot have betrayed their subjects by falling into the hands of vigilantes and the police.
In the documentary, we hear from the people who were unlucky enough to be ‘named and shamed’ online for appearing riotous, such as one of a rioter who was doxed and subsequently lost his career as a professional BMX rider for posing in front of a burning police car. These people were apparently drawn in by the thrill of photographing or posing next to wreckage, or other signifiers of a riot, such as a man in a balaclava and a black t-shirt with “I’m just here for the riot” printed on it. In fact, the only participant who was implicated in the commission of a criminal act associated with rioting, aside from the vague and inclusive crime of participating in a riot, was a college-aged woman who had been photographed grabbing a rack of clothing from the broken-in department store, which she reportedly dropped to the ground right after the photo was taken. Overwhelmingly, the rioters featured in the documentary were associated with riotous crimes for the way the images of them looked, inadvertently highlighting the way the crime of participating in a riot is discursively constituted by law, as well as aesthetically constituted and selectively enforced by the police.
It is significant, too, that the documentary lingers on the idea that cameras seemed to encourage the rioters. Much to the horror and derision of police and media spectators, the cameras that were ubiquitous among the rioters did not appear to serve as a deterrent to their actions; the rioter’s vanity and shamelessness apparently offers reason for their representatives to regard them with contempt, and teach the documentary viewer to do the same. Footage presents pundits instructing their audiences to interpret the photographs as evidence of the rioters’ brazen actions and general shamelessness. We are shown images of a young man posed in front of crushed windows while brandishing a hockey stick and men posed in front of a flaming police car as if the destroyed objects were their trophies. The montage suggests the (shamefully) pride-filled visual economies of these image (see Poole 1997; Sekula 1981; Linnemann 2017).
A particularly significant beat in the documentary is when it offers a sober narrative break from the footage of the flames and broken glass to profile a fellow documentarian who was present at the scene. “Did I riot when I was there with my camera?”, he asks, presumably repeating a question that was put to him. The question accomplishes much. It evokes the camera’s seemingly inexplicable power to contribute to the carnivalesque frenzy. It additionally implicates the documentarian as a participant in the riot, rather than removed from it. It also allows the documentary to stage a performance of disavowal by a person who was at the riot and taking pictures, but not rioting. Sweeping his hands down and away from his body, literally pushing away the scenes from his memory, the documentarian rebukes the rioting; he confesses to feeling so aghast and powerless that he was tempted to smash his own camera. The man’s disgust with the riot, with his own camera, is a reminder to the documentary’s audience to assume a similar moral stance when taking or viewing images of the riot.
Only one rioter, in an anonymized interview, admits that when he was first identified as the subject of an iconic, meme-worthy riot image, he was momentarily embraced by his teenage peers for being a “legend”, though he said he regretted his decision in the aftermath. He had also decided to offer a public YouTube apology after that riot image had gone viral. His account, which admits to the audience that he had participated in a visual culture on social media around the hockey riot’s images that had not been explicitly punitive and perhaps was even gleeful, is an outlier of the film. It is a moment that piqued my curiosity because it hints at the existence of a popular visual culture that perplexes, and perhaps unsettles, the dominant police visuality of the riot. The posing rioter is dangerous in their ironic pantomime of a mindless and rabidly aggressive rioter because it suggests that that a sports riot can be an irreverent, even playful, space, rather than an anti-social one.
Even with the interviewee’s admission, his words are contrite. He takes care to reiterate that although this playful visual culture existed, he almost immediately recognized that what he did was shameful and inappropriate, suggesting the success of the police and vigilantes’ punitive visuality of the riot. The documentary’s viewers are privy to this and other interview scenes, which show how the doxed rioters have learned to see themselves through the eyes of the police and their collaborators — as deserving of scorn.
All considered, the documentary is an artefact that confirms that the policing of alternative visual cultures around riot sousveillance was a priority of public order policing during the 2011 Vancouver hockey riots. Although the documentary denies that it offers the viewer pleasure in the consumption of riot images, many of these images would not have existed without the laughs (and lulz) of at least a few creators and consumers, and these wrinkles in the affective context of these images are what make the documentary worth revisiting. I believe this film, as it concerns surveillance scholars, offers a text with which to consider the relationship between public order policing and social media and to consider critical and historiographic questions related to how sousveillance becomes socially and culturally meaningful.
References List
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— — — . 2017. Digital Vigilantism as Weaponisation of Visibility. Philosophy & Technology 30(1): 55–72.
— — — . 2019. Revisiting Privacy in Public Spaces in the Context of Digital Vigilantism. In Surveillance, Privacy and Public Space, edited by Bryce Clayton Newell, Tjerk Timan, and Bert-Jaap Koops, 141–156. Routledge.
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