London's Burning

[DanaC]

The police said he had a gun and fired at them first. Now it would seem he never fired a gun at all. And some witnesses have suggested that the gun which was found at the scene was actually found inside a sock. If that's the case then he may not have had it in his hand at all.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by DanaC

and the bullet in the radio is from a Police issue gun.

First of all, since when did beat cops in the UK start carrying guns.

Second, police issue bullet in the radio? Where these guys part of some sort of exchange program with the Chicago PD?

[TheMercenary]

Follow the axiom of Military Intel reports.... the first report is always suspect.

[Big Sarge]

has anyone noticed the racial aspects of this? seems the victim was black and supposedly the majority of rioters are too. seems similar to the riots after the rodney king incident.

btw if somebody points a gun at me, don't expect me to wait to see if it is real or not!!

[grynch]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I'm thinking this might be a bad idea to burn down your neighborhood stores and loot and rob from the very business owners that serve your community. Those business people should do what they did in Watts in the riots in LA in the 1960's, close up shop and let the place turn into a slum.

of course it's a bad idea, but I've got another (bad) idea... why don't you go out into the street and tell the rioters what they are doing is wrong.

report back to me in the morning please.

[grynch]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

has anyone noticed the racial aspects of this? seems the victim was black and supposedly the majority of rioters are too. seems similar to the riots after the rodney king incident.

btw if somebody points a gun at me, don't expect me to wait to see if it is real or not!!

Sarge, that was true for the intial riot(s) but now there is a very mixed race crowd.. mostly kids from what I see on TV, many simply out for a bit of... what was kid on TV called......fun.

[DanaC]

How can this be happening in England? At some point that's a question that requires some attention.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...ngham-14471405

Three men killed in Birmingham.

Pictures from around the country. These are tiny pockets but they are happening in several major cities. The picture of Salford makes me want to cry.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14471098

I saw a couple on tv being interviewed. They'd come here from Sri Lanka in the early 90s and built up a grocery store. Thye had building's insurance, but not contents insurance (maybe they were only just keeping in profit and couldn't afford it, i dunno.) and their store has been looted of everything. Including the tills. They've lost in excess of £50k and are now ruined.

They showed on the news yesterday people being helped out of burning buildings, one person seemed to be leaping from the flames.

Some of the rioters are as young as 10 and 11.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by grynch

Sarge, that was true for the intial riot(s) but now there is a very mixed race crowd.. mostly kids from what I see on TV, many simply out for a bit of... what was kid on TV called......fun.

I can kind of understand what they mean by that. I think we dismiss this as simple criminality at our peril. And just because they can't necesarily articulate their grievance doesn't mean there isn't one. Whatever they think it is that they are doing, they are definately expressing something that runs very deep and has been boiling under the surface for a while now.

About three or four months ago, my ward colleagues and I were discussing a local housing estate in our ward. We were considering ways in which the various partner organisations in the area could try and off-set the growing sense of alienation and helplessness that was starting to set in. It feels like a powder keg, and one of the things that makes it feel that way is how the young people of the estate are starting to behave. There's just an intangible sense of escalation in tension. An electricity in the air, part hopelessness, part excitable destruction.

Obviously we were discussing some more concrete issues, and expected issues as the cuts start to bite and people start losing their homes and as unemployment starts to rise alongside shrinking assistance programmes. But we'd all noticed that frisson.

I was 18 when the country went into recession and the housing boom bust. I'd spent the previous few years being educated in a system that was underfunded to the point that pupils had to share text books, 3 to a book. With the flow of classes intermittently disturbed by teacher strikes. I watched tv as a kid and there were always strikes. And people shouting at each other across picket lines. Police attacking miners, miners shouting at scabs. The army on fire-fighting duty in the Green Goddess, because the Firemen were on strike. Far-right parties marching in town centres and their bootboys spraying swastikas on walls.

Major miscarriages of justice and the police implicated in racist, or homophobic killings. Trust in the police was not high. You trusted the guy who walked about your neighbourhood, but the organisation was not trusted and the racism of the institution was pretty widely accepted.

There were no jobs to go to. What jobs were on offer were awful, low-paid, insecure and hard fought for. And politicians on the telly were all sternly telling us off for not having one.

Meanwhile, the consumer culture was in full swing. The gap between the haves and have nots was at an all time high (now massively expanded). Tv and movies, adverts and schoolfriends, all high-lighted that gap constantly. Shiny, shiny, success and happiness cheek by jowl with hard-edged poverty. Somewhere in the middle where most of us lived things just felt really insecure.

At 18 was a bit of a nihilist. I wanted to tear it all down. Fuck the whole thing up so it has to be built anew. I'd have been watching these reports with a kind of horrified satisfaction back then. It would have felt right. Like, the world really is fucked up, and now we're just seeing what that really looks like. Because this is what it actually feels like.



And I remember the sense of escalation and *thinks* energy and invincibility and rightness that enveloped me when the poll tax demo turned into a riot. Scary at first but then, completely right.

This may not look political. And to many of the individuals involved it may not feel 'political'. But it is. It isn't the articulate political expression of a demonstration against political policies, it's more of a primal yell.

[Trilby]

Excellent analysis Dana.

[SamIam]

Thank you, Dana, for helping those of us across the pond to better understand what's happening.

[footfootfoot]

Dana, from the little I can gather about life in England it seems that there is a huge gulf between the haves and the have nots, there also seems to be a fairly strong degree of learned helplessness among the lower class. I can imagine that after a point if one feels there is no hope or point or chance of improving one's lot, then it's every man for himself and god against all.

again, I base this on nothing but inference.

[Big Sarge]

Interesting photo I came across....

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by richlevy

First of all, since when did beat cops in the UK start carrying guns.

Second, police issue bullet in the radio? Where these guys part of some sort of exchange program with the Chicago PD?

Beat cops are not armed in the UK. The police who shot and killed Duggan, were members of the elite CO19 unit of the Met Police. There are special units who are armed and able to respond to situations where an armed response may be needed. This is actually probably one reason why the country gets very upset when the police kill someone by mistake. It happens very rarely, but every time it does it is a massive issue. Unfortately the police press machine does itself no favours in such instances. Their first strategy is pretty muich always both to heap laurels on the bravery of the police concerned and effect a character assasination of the deceased in order to place the blame for the death onto the victim. Those close to the case know instantly that this is not the truth and the anger starts at that level. Then the details start to come out and the gulf between the intial reports and the reality sparks national anger and concern.

The Menenez killing was a classic example.
Initial reports said that they'd been watching him for some time, that they knew he was likely to be carrying a bomb, that he had been wearing a hoodie and a backpack, that the police went into the subway station after him and shouted at him to stop, and that on hearing that warning he ran and vaulted the ticket barrier, rushing onto the platform and boarding the train that was there.

The police followed him onto the train dragged him from his seat and put several bullets into him before he had a chance to set off any device.

The only part of that story that turned out to be true was the bit about him being dragged from his seat and shot several times. No hoodie, no backpack, no shouyed warning, no running, no vaulting ticket barrier, no suspicious behaviour on the part of Menenez whatsoever. The house they'd been watching as part of an anti-terror surveillance operation was subdivided into flats, and they followed the wrong resident.

Interestingly, the photo that featured on the front pages of most of the newspapers and which had been provided, I think, by the police, darkened his skin tone.

Anyway, back OT:

Here. I found a really interesting article about the situation on the New York Times website. I found it interesting because I like to see how events here are viewed over the Pond. But it also discusses the whole riot response and armed/unarmed policing issue.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ront-lines/?hp

As British officials promised to end days of widespread riots with “more robust policing,” and 16,000 officers fanned out across London, American readers might be surprised to learn that most members of the force charged with ending the rioting remain unarmed.

Of the more than 32,500 officers in London’s Metropolitan Police Service, just 2,740 were “authorized firearms officers” at last count. Outside the capital, the entire territory of England and Wales is policed with the help of just 4,128 more armed officers.

It's not entirely fair to say they are 'unarmed', as they do have batons, but most of them have no firearms.

[sexobon]

All this trouble, just because the Brits refuse to wear tin foil hats while solar flares generate interference affecting the minds of susceptible citizens. I watched the videos of the riots and noted that not one rioter was wearing a tin foil hat. The facts of the matter are evident.

[Big Sarge]

As you can see in my profile pic, I'm always prepared for solar flares!!!