Joyriding: back to the future

'The latest autonomous vehicle prototype by Toyota Research Institute (TRI) will have two steering wheels to prevent robot joyriding' (Sept 2017) apparently.

The article does not say why a self driving car needs even one steering wheel. We are meant to know that all current cars have one steering wheel and for current legal reasons the public road testing has to occur with a human driver who could take over. However, cars without steering wheels are planned. The term ‘joyride’ is used to jokingly consider the possibility that the car (robot) might take pleasure in driving and seek its own route, map its own future and find full automobility.

There is clearly the philosophy/AI argument here about whether machines can really think. My point it to consider the pleasure of driving and I’m going to crash the philosophy discourse and ignore whether machines can or can’t think and declare they are a long way off having emotions. But we do.

In my PhD I regularly compared the demonised joyrider with the ‘normal’ driver (a narcissistically small difference?). Both got pleasure from driving. I admit to my own pleasure in mastering car driving and was moved to quote poetry:

My horse he spurres with sharp desire my hart:

He sits me fast, how ever I do sturre;

And now hath made me his hand so right,

That in the Manage myseffe takes delight.

(Sir Philip Sydney 1554-1586, Sonnet 49 Astrophil and Stella)

This quote focusses on the pleasures of riding a horse well. Those pleasures have not diminished but remain class-based, which might explain the response of the authorities to the apparent increase reported in the Guardian (13 June 1997) of horse riding by young people In a working class estate near Cardiff. Gwent police are considering using the Town Police Causes Act 1847 against furious riding'. The headline is "Neighbours rein In joyriders of the Wild West of Wales" and PC Ewan Jones is reported as saying, 

A lot of these riders don't even have a saddle for their horses. We have clamped down on motor cycle riding and this is the result of that. Some, youths worked out that you don't need tax or documents for these animals.

What will be do when cars have no steering wheels and we can’t expect the pleasure of driving them. We don’t expect to be able to drive a train or fly a plane but much modern masculinity and the structures of wider society do expect we drive our own cars. I can’t imagine how early, and still some modern, motorists dealt with having a chauffeur drive them. Self-driving cars place all users in this apparently privileged but passive (feminised) position. Wired suggested You Won't Need a Driver's License by 2040 nor traffic lights etc.

In this article Google is said to be demonstrating their self-driving system to Senators by giving them ‘joyrides’. This usage takes us back to the earlier usage of the term simply to mean a pleasurable non-utilitarian journey.

Meanwhile we find UK motorists caught at ‘extreme speeds’ on quiet lockdown roads. That is using their own cars in which to joyride. You won’t be able to speed in self-driving cars. It is this loss of control (manhood/autonomy) that many drivers fear as owner and non-owner drivers seek many the same things.

Self-driving cars should also be more difficult to steal and would require cyber skills.

Joyriding N Ireland: dangerously conventional protests

Kilpatrick (1997) carried out her research into joyriding in Belfast in early 1994 and I missed her work in writing up mine. I cited many other’s work in both Northern Ireland and the Republic but mostly on the generics of joyriding. I avoided examining the specifics of the situation there as the Troubles (’68-98 according to Encyclopaedia Brittanica) were ongoing (and still very resonant today). I briefly touched on some of the differences for joyriding in Belfast (all the work seemed to be on this area) in my PhD. Not only might joyriders attract the attention of the police (then the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC) but also the British Army. They risked shooting by either if they crashed through - or came too close to - a checkpoint. In addition the loyalist and republican paramilitary forces actively ‘policed’ anti-social behaviour. The provisional IRA (pIRA) were known to ‘kneecap’ joyriders - that is disable them by shooting them in the knee - or deliver a punishment beating.

Yet despite these additional high risk factors for joyriders the descriptions in Kilpatrick are entirely in line with my, and others, findings. Her work with 15 juvenile offenders who had stolen cars or allowed themselves to be carried in such a car. They mostly did it for the thrill, usually in company, didn’t necessarily look for the added excitement of a police chase and might steal from the car and may graduate to fewer but more professional theft. Not only was Belfast the focus Kilpatrick points out some real differences in the narrowness of that focus, more than half the cars thefts in Northern Ireland were in Belfast with South Belfast (near the University) a particular hotspot with 85% being recovered (a high rate) and of those two thirds being found in West Belfast (a largely Catholic, republican area).

Mulcahy (2013) adds some further Northern Ireland specific facts/suggestions. The heavy armour on police and army vehicles made chases less than feasible and considerations of public policy counselled against them. He mentions a suggestion that the youngest member of a joyriding team might act as a ‘sandbag’ (to absorb bullets) by lying on the parcel shelf.

Some of this situation is captured in this account of a joyrider who was kneecapped (O’Docherty, 1993). Johnny McGivern had stolen more than 100 cars and had signed a document presented by the pIRA promising not to steal any more cars. He did and he and his friend received a public beating with a baseball bat and chair leg. He stole another car and was arrested by the legal authorities but the station where he was being held was bombed and he was released for his safety before being formally questioned. He continued to offend and was eventually shot in the leg by the pIRA as were 58 others that year. Such joyriders were seen to be anti-social to their own community through theft of cars and dangerously displaying them but also as potential informers if they came within the orbit of the security services. The young men didn’t see themselves as political or particularly criminal. They were not ‘hoods’ (ie gangsters) (McCullough and Schmidt, 1990).




The Extern organisation tried to work with and for such young men with an Auto Project offering car mechanics and banger racing (set up in 1981!). Their research McCullough et al (1990) sets out how car theft then was less of a problem than in the rest of UK or Ireland (South Wales said to have a particularly bad problem) but joyriding in Belfast was seen to be a particular problem. McCullough and Schmidt (1990) interviewed joyriders and those who work with them. They too focussed on Catholic West Belfast. They note young women did steal cars or more often allowed themselves to be carried in stolen cars ‘but the number is relatively insignificant’ (1990,2).

They establish a timeline in which accounts of joyriding in Belfast the start in the late 60s when paramilitary groups encouraged teenagers to steal cars and antagonise the Security forces by burning cars to use as roadblocks or diversions. As these tactics increasingly annoyed the communities in which they lived the pIRA turned against them and instated informal punitive sanctions. So the joyriders proclivities were enrolled in republican/nationalist protest against British rule. Acting against them formed a part of the pIRA’s localist politics. Thought there is some suggestion that more cars might be stolen after a punishment shooting as a ‘collective act of defiance’ (1990,8). This might be seen as ‘protest’ joyriding.

In an earlier post I talk about Greene’s suggestion that some young black men in New York/New Jersey were engaged in ‘protest joyriding’. One might argue that the specifics of Belfast during the Troubles meant that this too was a protest. That is the joyriders were taking on the authorities or the paramilitary forces. I would argue that both Greene’s and Belfast’s joyriders are still deeply conventional despite doing illegal and potentially dangerous things. Parker argued in his early study of joyriding in Liverpool that (Parker 1974b) "While joyriding is a delinquent action, it is motivated by respectable and conventional desires.” I concluded in my PhD from a green perspective that ‘Car use continues to be respectable and conventional but its taken-for-granted nature is now being contested’. That is the joyrider is presented as very different to the respectable owner driver but given the bad driving and ecological damage of that car use I see that as doing ideological work to bolster the current consumerist car culture.

Pascal Menoret seeks to argue that the joyriding he observed in Riyadh constituted a revolt but that can wait til another blog. Much of his ‘joyriding’ was ‘drifting’ in cars they or friends owned.

References

Kilpatrick, R., 1997. Joy-riding: An addictive behaviour. Hodge, J.E., McMurran, M. and Hollin, C.R (eds) Addicted to crime, pp.165-190.
McCullough D and Schmidt T (1990) 'Joyriding in West Belfast', in Car Theft in Northern Ireland., Recent Studies On a Persistent Problem CI RAC Paper no 2 Dave McCullough, Tanja Schmidt and Bill Lockhart Belfast: The Extern Organisation.
Mulcahy, A., 2013. Policing Northern Ireland. Routledge.
O'Docherty Malachi 4 April 1993 The Independent ‘It was one damn good car: In hospital after a kneecapping, and just before he died, Johnny McGivern wrote about his life, in stories introduced here by Malachi O’Doherty’ available at https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/it-was-one-damn-good-car-in-hospital-after-a-kneecapping-and-just-before-he-died-johnny-mcgivern-1453233.html accessed 16 May 2020.

5-year-old boy caught driving on Utah highway was heading to California for a Lamborghini

This story from the USA contains a number of themes of interest: joyriding; differences in US and UK car cultures and media coverage of crime.

The follow up by the same reporter adds further layers of interest after the event with a more local news website (5-year-old caught driving on Utah freeway takes safer luxury spin a day later) adding further layers .

Nominally under the care of his 16-year-old sibling (taking a nap) whilst their parents were at work, the five-year-old took the keys to the family SUV and drove a few miles on local roads before joining Interstate 15. Apparently, the boy is obsessed with cars and had asked his mother to buy him a Lamborghini. She refused.

His crime was detected by a State Trooper when he observed the car swerving and only doing 32mph in a 70mph zone. He had $3 on him. The parents were reunited with their child and their car. The County Attorney’s office will consider whether the parents should be charged. The second article specifically calls this a joyride. Indeed, I was only baited to click on the article by my curiosity to see how it was portrayed.

The second article also moves the story on to the next day when a local Lamborghini owner gives the boy, his mother and sister a trip around the block in his car. He acknowledged, ‘even though the joyride was dangerous, and he doesn’t want to encourage similar behavior, he wanted to cheer the boy up’.

In the third local article this legal trip is also called a ‘joyride’ and we are treated to a picture of the boy on his mother lap in the car.

I don’t know Utah motoring law but surely this is dangerous even if legal.

More interestingly still we discover that owner ‘took his own maiden joyride at age 12’!

No vehicles were damaged and the whole thing is treated as a light human interest story with a warning to watch your children. I would share Trooper Morgan and his colleagues belief that, ‘the child may have secretly hit the road before Monday’s experience’.

In my PhD (1997) I speculated and hypothesised reasons why young black men may not joyride in the UK. How do things stand now?

In my PhD I speculated and hypothesised reasons why young black men may not joyride in the UK. Here’s a little chunk of Chapter 3. How do things stand now?

Information gleaned during fieldwork suggests young black men were involved in 'displaying'

on Blackbird Leys, yet despite the media's normal treatment of black people and crime there

was nothing made of it. There were no 'black joyrider runs down blond-haired girl' headlines

like the 'black mugger' headlines of the early 70s (Hall et al,1978). Where available, figures

suggest (Procter and Townsend, 1994) and observation suggests that young black men do

not attend motor projects. If true, there might be a number of reasons this might be: first that

this represents a real lower involvement of black men in joyriding or second, and not incompatible with the first reason, that if involved they are sent to custody or receive other community penalties. Graham and Bowling (1995) found - though not statistically significant - a cumulative male self-reported participation in car theft as follows: White (4%); Black (1%); Indian (2%); Pakistani (8%); and Bangladesh! (3%).

Reasons for lower involvement might be: first a different relationship to the car amongst young Afro-Caribbean men, that is they may be keen on cars but not for the short-term gratification offered by joyriding or displaying. That is, it may not be 'cool' or 'phat' (hot) to joyride. When the police stop you, it is important to be the owner of the car and have all the documentation in order. It enables you to maintain a 'cool pose' (Clatterbaugh, 1990).

Moreover, like new clothes the car is to be seen, to be appreciated by your friends. Bayley (1986) notes that "cars were a form of display" (pl) that "The cars provided the costumes. " (p2) and "For some people, owning a new car is the nearest they will ever get to perfection in an otherwise flawed and soiled life." (p4) You cannot cruise the block if the police are chasing you. 'Respect' is earned not by short-term flashy display of a car but the long-term use of a car. Joyriding may not be a way of doing masculinity but a way of doing white masculinity. Back (1994) notes how young white men adopt music and clothes come from black styles. The reverse does not appear to operate in respect of cars. Moreover, Graham and Bowling's (1995) findings on different patterns of drug use between different groups indicate different attitudes to drugs. For instance, 12% of white males reported amphetamine ('speed'!) use at some time against less than 1% for blacks.

Other figures for drug use and crime more generally show equivalent overall offending rates so, these differences in patterns of offending suggest different attitudes to the practical and symbolic components of crime. Whilst in no way conclusive, the contention that young black men may have a different relationship to the car is supported by the lyrics of 'rap' songs like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's 'Summertime'. Several verses make passing reference to cruising in, or looking after, cars. One verse combines all these themes:

Chillin' in a car they spent all day waxin'

Lean to the side

But you can't speed through

Two miles an hour

So everyone can see you

(1991. A Taylor/C Smith/ R Bell/Hula/K Fingers/W Smith Zomba Productions)

Alternatively, young black men may have an equal propensity and opportunity to take cars but do not do so for fear of discriminatory policing catching them at a greater rate than white colleagues.

Work in California (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1985) suggests that young Hispanic Men in gangs have a different relation to the car. Instead of the speed and immediate excitement they prefer a Lo-rider; a car deliberately lowered to hug the ground which ischromed and tricked out with lush fittings. It is driven very slowly round the neighbourhood to flaunt ownership and style. They could not be driven at speed whilst in the lowered position and would not be. The point is to impress your friends and irritate your enemies by driving

around very slowly with the window down. Non-hispanic groups prefer to customize cars by raising the back-end and emphasising speed through coachlines and flame graphics that suggest the dragster or the hot-rod.

Only the American studies mention race though the smaller studies by the probation service in this country routinely monitor race. Neither address the issue. The American studies mention race to disprove the favoured status' hypothesis and the probation studies mention but do not dwell on race as an issue. Thus Davies (1993) mentions that 4.2% of West Midlands Probation Service women motor off ending clients were black as were thirteen percent of male motor offenders. There is no discussion of what this means. Is this low or high for the area? Moreover, as Davies examines both motoring offences and motor theft offences together it is not possible consistently to pull out the full facts for car taking. The numbers for the combined totals are such that the numbers of black joyriders would be too small for useful statistical treatment. It is however important to consider the issue of black involvement in car taking.

The question then is do young black men joyride? Full ethnic monitoring of the Criminal Justice System will, in due course, reveal the extent to which there is differential involvement in - or policing of - car crime. This would still leave unresolved the question of joyriding given the difficulties of defining it set out in Chapter 1. Even, if a greater or lesser involvement in car crime could be shown it would still not indicate whether young black men took cars for the same reasons as young white men.

Some facts are known about black car use, for instance of Afro-Caribbean women only 10% use cars as the driver and 45% as a passenger. The figures for Asian women are higher on both 22% as drivers and 64% as passengers (GLC 1984 and 1987). The stereotype of the young black man, and sometimes the fantasy of those young black men, places him behind his shades, behind the wheel of a BMW (Black Man's Wheels). It is not clear whether this is a racist usage or an ironic appropriation by those young men, taking and driving away the initials but not the product. In another context the initials stood for Baader-Meinhof Wagen, as this left-wing terrorist group favoured these vehicles in undertaking their terminal critique of the bourgeois society that produced them. The proper meaning of the initials is Bayerische Motorenwerke.

Whatever the reason for joyriding - drift, status frustration, sub-culture, unemployment or class warfare - these will be shared by many young men and women. Theoretically then, young black men should be as involved in joyriding as young white men. Even with official statistics it would be difficult to be sure but the absence of media finger-pointing, anecdotal evidence, the findings of McGaghy et al (1977) and monitoring by and observation at motor projects raises the possibility that joyriding is largely a white phenomenon.

I’ll try to update some of this but also confess to missing Greene’s (1994) ‘Naughty by nurture: Black male joyriding is everything gonna be alright’.

Greene’s work is a rebuke to my assumptions but think that differences between UK and US are partially an explanation. Elsewhere in my PhD I’d argued for differences due to cheaper cars, lower age of driving and even absence of roundabouts but should have reasoned that the absence of black men in UK literature and motor projects was part of that difference.

Sadly, Greene was battered to death before publication of his article.

He sets out the many discriminations young african-american men labour under; some, a minority, respond by committing crime. Greene, speaking of Newark, New Jersey notes a ‘protest joyriding’ as paradigmatic. His description of high speeds, screeching tyres, doughnutting and the police chase could come from any description of joyriding. He seems to be on the same page as me in noting, ‘these cars are like those the media dangles as the vehicles to manhood, happiness, and self-worth’ (1994,75).

Moreover, he finds, ‘the media has created the impression of an epidemic of out-of-control young Black men engaging in auto theft’ (1994,75). Which helps me confirm there was no such coverage in UK that focussed on the race of joyriders, i.e. they were presumed to be white. Though I have a partial realist concern when he also says, ‘the media has seized on joyriding and treated it as if it is at the same level of seriousness as other car-related crimes such as car theft or carjacking’ (1996,75).

His own description of joyriding involves car theft but as a robbery carjacking is a notch up in seriousness. It is of concern that media elided the two.

He was writing against a background in a fall of reported auto theft in New York and New Jersey. Unusually New York separated out carjacking from other forms of robbery; just over 2,000 gunpoint robberies a year in 1991 and 1992 and an estimate of 19,000 nationally in 1991 and 21,000 in 1992 (about 1.1% of all auto-thefts . Having a gun as a persuader may explain why, ‘contrary to the impression created by the media, carjackings rarely result in any physical injury’ (1996,79). I’d like to know about any mental and emotional fallout.

He seems fairly unfazed by putting ‘usually untrained drivers on the streets for short durations’ (1996,80) though in my work noted that on way to displaying (and often ruining and possibly torching) the car they drove well enough to avoid detection. I pointed out in my work how bad much driving by owner’s was and felt media demonization was in part to make them feel better. But even today (admittedly in covid19-times) the USA is different. For instance, ‘Nearly 20,000 Georgia Teens Are Issued Driver’s Licenses Without a Road Test’!

He points out, as did I, the history of middle-class white involvement in joyriding. He rails against conflating any rape of woman whose car is jacked as robbery of the car not assault on her. Also, the ethnicity of car jackers not known as bundled in with all robbery.

He complains extensively about the media but provides few examples beyond a ‘review’ of an episode of a CBS series 48 hours called ‘Steal That Car’ (9 December 1992). Black and Hispanic street level thieves were shown and a white professional thief, a white victim and white police officers all feature. We are told rare carjacking deaths and rapes get parsed with joyriding as autotheft.

Greene likens protest joyriding to rap music as providing ‘context and meaning to the behaviour of those who do not accept the legitimacy of their own oppression’ (1996,85). His arguments and footnotes almost suggest such expressive ‘protest joyriding’ is constitutionally protected free speech!

Knowledge of the events that have led to the Black Lives Matter movement makes me very dubious about his claim that Black joyriders when cornered by the police for the misdemeanour of joyriding, ‘these youngsters scatter on foot, knowing the police cannot shoot feeing non-felons’ (1996,87).

About half a million cars were stolen in the USA in 2018. Full details here. Neither joyriding nor carjacking get a mention.

The Crime Survey of England and Wales ending March 2019 shows 27,455 victims of car crime with 4% of vehicle-owning households being victims of car crime (theft from, theft of an attempts of an from) but only 0.4% of theft. Rather randomly, and assigning no significance to it here, 15% of Arab vehicle owners and 7.5% of Buddhists. Men and women seemed equally at risk, but men owned car at twice the rate (or were registered as keeper). The large variety of ethnic self-descriptions available show the majority have higher rates of victimisation. The unemployed seemed to have higher rates of vehicle theft (0.7%) against the employed (0.5%). As indices of deprivation and disorganisation also tend to higher levels of vehicle theft, we might favour this as an explanation over insurance fraud but either potential explanation would need examining.

He contrasts ‘protest’ from ‘traditional’ joyriding in that the protestors are confrontational and don’t seek to avoid detection. In discussing protest, he brings in the ‘double’ scripts of black life (WEB DuBois, Souls of Black Folk):

Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.

All good stuff but most people will now be well acquainted with the language he discusses and the trainers and fashion styles. Obviously, I’m back with him when he says, ‘I will discuss that part of American popular culture which emphasizes a connection between materialism, masculinity, and the possession of a car’ (1996,89). But depart a bit when cites Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road on the significance of cars. First he overlooks their appeal to young white men and ignores Springsteen’s lyric mentioning ‘the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets’. Secondly, he cites the Honda Accord and Acura Legend as popular cars with the American public and joyriders. I find it difficult to think of those as ‘cool’ or ‘sexy’ cars so feel their availability might be more of an influence. But I’m in no authoritative position to contradict him.

The joyriders I spoke to and those mentioned in the literature were aspirational in their desires but stole the easiest. To shame the motor manufacturers the Home Office from 1991 published an index that compared the numbers stolen to the numbers on the road. Those suggested the Honda was a low risk car. I can’t reconcile the figures but What Car say ‘52,288 cars stolen in the UK in 2019 – one every nine minutes’. With only 40% returned. The Ford Fiesta is most sold and most stolen.

He tells of being pulled over by a white cop when driving in his Acura Legend (!) and ponders how it might have turned out if his son had been driving. This reminds him to think of the wider less fortunate majority of black youth. He only gives footnoted recognition to his failure to address the very similar problems faced by young black women.

He spends much time critiquing various policing and sentencing crackdowns before proposing school and community-based access to and education about cars and driving. He also wishes young men were less interested in gold chains and cars. He is more forgiving of rap quoting lyrics from Everything's Gonna to Be Alright by Naughty by Nature throughout.

Play Ethic bigs up my videogames work

On the Play Ethic blog I’ve been done the enormous honour of a full engagement with my work on (video)games and criminology. This is by way of a response.

I came to criminology late having first gone to teacher training college then getting stuck in the Home Office for nearly 20 years as an administrator/policy person. I might cite the emphasis on play in child development that the Froebel College gave as an inspiration. I did some sociology there but couldn’t see my future teaching primary children – though I did help at my son’s primary school.

My parents were a fraction off conventional and whilst I loved learning, still do, hated school with its petty rules. The Head said I grew a beard I said it grew, secondary sexual characteristic, I just not good at or inclined to cut it. Still have beard or stumble as can’t often be bothered to shave and no good at it – curly follicles.

Through education, thank you OU, I now find myself teaching criminology and media at Uni. As part-timer in non-research intensive college I can research whatever access to computer permits or serendipity prompts. My son is interested in computer games, we discuss them and I’ve tried them but not over keen – my vice is writing.

I was aware from both criminology and media that games were that latest thing – from a translated Bible, US horror comics to women attending University – to have been blamed by sections of the media and the moralistas for the end of the known Universe being trundled of to Hell in a cliché. Much of this was poorly conducted politically motivated psycho bollocks but clearly some effects were evident – if only their attraction.

Sometimes the shocked commentator would allude to the amount of sex or crime (and indeed sex crime) in the games as if that enough to condemn them. Some criminologists had started to look at internet crime and even in communities in cyberspace, but none at the actual criminal content or even the rule-based nature of these games and third spaces. My paper attempts to kick start the process but does so ludicly. The lack of ‘academic’ rigour meant a rewrite before it could be published but two versions are online to compare at my site (closer to the first draft called JPlod after our constables and Douglas Coupland’s novel) and on BSC website.

The paper and response also talk about joyriding – the subject of my PhD – and I’m going to return to it for a conference presentation this year. It seems that the practice still continues, the media still use the term but seems less exercised by it now but little has been written theoretically about it. There is, though, a developing sociology of mobility which takes in auto(mobility) so I shall enjoy playing with that.

Obviously as a car driver of nearly 40 years I am ambivalent about cars but the green and safety arguments usually keep my joydriving (as the ads promise) in check.

I also see some playfulness in the battles against CCTV, the avoidance or accommodation strategies of those under its gaze and even in the joystick heaven that is a full 40 screen digital colour tilt, pan and zoom system. We’ll leave side that the money might be spent better.