The British Riots by Carl Jung - I think.

I find myself still reading about the varied responses to the riots. There certainly appears to be considerable polarisation. There are still those holding firm to the idea that anyone that took part in the riots has lost his or her right to be considered fully human and be treated fairly and punishments are the only answer Some of the comments are astounding and you really would think you were listening to Nazis talk about the Jews). And there are the others of us looking a bit deeper for answers. The best article I have read on the issue of harsh sentencing is this one:

Are the harsh sentences justified?

We were never all going to agree on this emotive issue (or any other come to that) were we? Consensus is a very slow thing and usually shown in subtle shifts in attitudes and ways of doing things - unless we are under a dictator of course!

I am now going to steal a bit of Carl Jung just to reiterate how the angle we approach things from affects our ultimate view.

We all have a dominant function - one of the following four:

Sensors see what is in front of them, they live in the now, they like to keep things real and practical and down-to-earth. They tend to like traditions.
Feelers make evaluative judgements and tune into the people element of a situation.
Thinkers interpret events and apply logic so it makes sense to them and
Intuitives extrapolate from the immediate, look to the future, see patterns and links and put everything into a big picture context.

OK so how did people with different dominant functions see the riots?
The Sensors will be able to give a very clear account of what actually happened. They will have observed all the details and will be quite pedantic if you were to suggest the riots started in the wrong place, for example. Sensors are reactionary. They don't like new or abstract ideas. They will be most likely to say, 'there was a crime, we always punish people that commit crimes'. Job done.

The feelers will have been appalled by the impact of these riots on individuals and be very angry at how some individuals behaved towards others. That will be their main focus. They won't have a definite idea about what is the right way to deal with what happened (they could be persuaded by anyone making a loud point) but they will want harmony restored and people protected.

The thinkers will read the logic of the situation and might fall on the side of 'punish them all', or might look for a little deeper logic. Whatever they do do they are likely to be firm about their beliefs. They are definitely right of course.

The intuitives cannot see the situation just as a string of events that just happened. They need to find reasons for the riots. They need to put what happened into big picture context and see so much more than just individuals committing a crime. They easily see reasons that might be too complex and seem too tenuous to others.

Of course this is a very simplified idea - other things do impact on how we see things (including our secondary, tertiary functions etc). Nobody likes to be predictable of course but these four responses describe what I have seen in a variety of places!