Riot-squad officers clashed with demonstrators amid chaotic scenes in Tottenham, north London, last night as a protest over the shooting of a man by police turned violent.as saying "…as the shooting of a man by police turned violent."
Seems like there have been a lot of riots in the UK lately. Are there external instigators here like there were in the Seattle WTO riots?This one sounds more like the inner-city riots in the US in the '60s: sparked by a specific instance of police violence, but probably reflecting a larger sense of disenfranchisement and grievance in the community.
London to me was like a donut. The center was wealthy, and very nice, and the surrounding areas were pretty downtrodden and awful.What kind of donuts are you eating, man? That's pretty much the opposite of the donuts I've been eating.
Imagine something that is a ring, where the inside is good and the outside is less good.My daugher, who's up way too late, says "Poptart." I pointed out that Poptarts aren't ring-shaped, and got an epic eye roll.
The police seem to have let it be known that they were shot at first, and that a police officer was injured. The impression was thus given in the early media reports that they killed the young man in self-defence. Whatever the officer's injury, he was only kept in hospital overnight. Later, the police claimed that the bullet miraculously struck the officer's police radio which, like a bible or a piece of the true cross, absorbed the shot. They say that in the seconds following this they opened fire in self-defence. An eyewitness, however, claimed that the young man was already restrained on the ground when the shots were fired.Jimbob, the British police often have a habit of releasing initial information to their journalist friends which reflects well on them, but turns out not to be true.
I was on the high road between 8.30pm-11.30pm.Guardian live blog.
I arrived after the police cars were on fire.
With that said things were reasonably calm - stand off
It became violent and escalated after a police officer hit a women with a baton.
She was v. distress and was running back into the crowd after being near the police line.
This angered the crowd and they proceeded to throw rocks bottle etc...
Regarding the bus - it was just the driven on the bus - he drove right it into the crowd - therefore had to stop - people got on the bus - the driver walked off with no trouble and took the keys with him. people asked for the keys but driver said no - no one challanged him
For the US members of MeFi? Think of this as the corner-boys of Baltimore on the TV show The Wire having a riot because one of their own has been shot by the police.I'm thinking that you completely missed the point of The Wire. Have you ever even seen The Wire? You think the point of The Wire is that drug dealers in Baltimore are shitty, lazy people who just need to get a bus ticket and a job?
Violence, after all, bleeds from every pore of the capitalist state: from dire impoverishment and starvation through to police brutality, all the way up to war. But this kind of violence is routinely excused: it's either necessary to 'keep us safe', or it's just the way things are.Excellently put. No one really questions when businesses or governments make harmful choices in the light of existing circumstances. A company lays off a third of its workforce -- knowing that this will inevitably mean hundreds or thousands of people suffering financially -- and just shrugs its shoulders and says what can it do? Riots should, realistically, be seen as a natural part of the cycle of poverty and abuse in the same way that layoffs, environmental abuse, and ripping off consumers are all just driven by the "invisible hand" of capitalism.
The kind of violence that we're told there's 'no excuse' for - the kind the newspapers focus on so angrily and relentlessly - is usually not even actual violence at all. It's setting a police car on fire - or, for that matter, smashing the windows of the Millbank Tower.
And the Hugh Routley pileon is starting to look a bit unseemly.He seems to be enjoying it your honour. Must be the purity of his reason.
Sandra Laville, the Guardian's crime correspondent, reports that reinforcements from Thames Valley, Essex, Surrey, City of London and Kent police forces have been called in tonight to prevent a repeat of the violence.Guardian live blog.posted by ArmyOfKittens at 10:51 AM on August 7, 2011
Her lawyers say statistical evidence implies that a black person is more than nine times more likely to be searched than a white person. They go on to say section 60 is "incompatible" with three articles of the convention: 14, 5, which protects the right to liberty and security, and 8, which protects the right to private and family life.
Others worry that a perfect storm of unemployment, the withdrawal of the Education Maintenance Allowance and a squeeze on programmes to help disadvantaged youths could bring more than just a rise in crime figures and result in a "lost generation".posted by catchingsignals at 11:09 AM on August 7, 2011 [2 favorites]
"The young people in Tottenham, they are not so much a community within a community, they are a community beyond the community, with their own rules, their own codes, their own hierarchy," said Symeon Brown, 22, who helped run a campaign to prevent the cuts in Haringey. "How do you create a ghetto? By taking away the very services that people depend upon to live, to better themselves."
The poor have nobody to vote for. Nobody speaks for them in the halls of democracy. Their futures have been sold out from under them in the form of a crippling debt burden, PFI bills and unaffordable education (whether through tuition fees or the loss of EMAs). They have no reason to believe in a better tomorrow, and no means to influence it. They've been left to rot, and vilified as feckless scroungers into the bargain. Before you condemn them, answer this question: what do they have left but bottles and stones?posted by talos at 11:47 AM on August 7, 2011 [2 favorites]
Friend in Brixton reports there's trouble down there tonight, though not on the Tottenham scale. Nothing on the news about it yet so either they don't know or she's overexaggerating (either is possible tbh)The Guardian is confirming that.
But given that the police are sending dozens of vans full of riot squad to the scene, and given that at least one was witnessed speeding toward the riot with 'Knight Rider' music playing at top volume, I would not rule out the possibility of another killing.Is the Knight Rider thing a specific UK euphemism for police sirens, or is that sentence to be taken at face value? Because the latter would be all kinds of fucked up.
Clegg is twatting around being his usual useless selfWell, Clegg said there'd be unrest if a Tory government got in and started slashing everything to the bone. As people have pointed out on Twitter, at least that's one promise he's kept.
As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here's a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?Trapped in a cage, starved, cramped, their lives threatened, rats will turn on each other in instinctive suicidal despair and rage. And then the lab manager can comment on their inherent, stupid, viciousness...
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
British police shooting peaceful protesters in Derry in 1972 was unjustified, but that does not make bombing civilians in response OK.Oh, come on. Rioting kids in London aren't equivalent to the IRA. They may be equivalent to rioting kids in Northern Ireland, which there have been plenty of, but this is not an organized terrorist campaign.
That shop in Croydon is on a street that bears its name: Reeves Corner. Established by my [great-great-]grandfather in 1867. Now gone.posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 4:35 PM on August 8, 2011 [2 favorites]
Don't the London police use gas or other riot control devices (rubber bullets, etc) ?If the police had responded to that charge with gas or bullets the situation would've escalated out of control. If you watch the way they line up, they withdraw it's designed to not provoke (or scare) a much larger group of people. In fact the situation escalated when one of the police men became aggressive which invited a response.
Will and I were going to celebrate with a night out at 2 Michelin star restaurant The Ledbury. I had come to terms with the fact that it would be an expensive dinner, but boy, I had no idea how expensive.posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:30 PM on August 8, 2011 [1 favorite]
And as easy as it is to chalk it all down to the the masses being oppressed and deny that it has anything to do with upbringing you can't excuse the lawlessness.
I was brought up in a poor area of the country, with bad housing, rife unemployment and zero opportunities but I never kicked an old lady's front door in on my street and robbed her.
Yes, the masses are being ridden over roughshod by a typical Tory government.
Yes, the Labour party and their bailing out of the wealthy at the cost of the poor was and is a tragic, sickening thing to do.
But you don't take it out on your own community.
That is entirely down to a lack of civic pride and a huge, gaping lack of common sense.
Wait, Birmingham Library? Then can burn that down, it's alright, nobody will complain, honestly.Never been up to their actually pretty wondrous Archives and Manuscripts division then, I take it? It has some of the best materials for studying the history of socialism in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain. Oh, the irony in that.
As so often, Ken Livingstone couldn't resist jumping in with an attack on coalition spending cuts. Truly, he is the Boris Johnson of politics, opportunist to a fault.Huh? Surely Boris Johnson is the Boris Johnson of politics. I am confused.
"smash the rich" isn't going to get you anythingGets you on the News.
I got a call yesterday morning. The kids gave me a run-down of what had happened in Brixton. A street party had been invaded by a group of young men out to grab. A few years ago, the kids who called me would have joined in, because they had nothing to lose. One had been permanently excluded from six schools. When he first arrived at Kids Company he cared so little that he would smash his head into a pane of glass and bite his own flesh off with rage. He'd think nothing of hurting others. After intensive social care and support he walked away when the riots began because he held more value in his membership of a community that has embraced him than a community that demanded his dark side.posted by Catseye at 4:03 AM on August 9, 2011 [12 favorites]
It costs money to care. But it also costs money to clear up riots, savagery and antisocial behaviour. I leave it to you to do the financial and moral sums.
What should we do?Good question. Answering it is hard, proper difficult. Perhaps, and this isn't my usual sarcastic response, perhaps we should stop looking for answers from the same fucking people who got us here.
I'm ready to bet 20:1 that this emergency committee meets in whichever briefing room is available at the time, but this acronym was simply too cute not to use it.I'll take that bet.
Hugh Routley: Closed community centres - serious question: why does this need to be provided by the state? Isn't it better for local people to form communities? (There's always a church/mosque/gurdwara/local hall/working mens club/pub-back-room to meet in) - but you need the organisation to come from within, not from above - surely?Sure, these kinds of things used to be provided by the voluntary and charity sectors (read: churches). Along with education, of course. They were brought under state control because charities were often financially stretched, and the results were ramshackle, uncoordinated, unfair, and uneven. Now the state doesn't want to pay for them any more, but the churches that may once have provided these things are not the overwhelming presences in urban communities that they once were. And they're hardly likely to come back, no matter what the utopian nostalgists in the Red Tory movement might think. So who has the time, the resources, the energy, and the moral authority to establish and maintain these community institutions, if not the state?
carter: Wot, no Clash CDs?Ah, here we go. Movers and shakers, MP3 downloads. The Smiths, "Panic," up 3721%.
"My colleague Vikram Dodd writes about the Independent Police Complaints Commission's initial ballistics results on the shooting of Mark Duggan, which triggered Saturday's initial riots in Tottenham.posted by catchingsignals at 9:51 AM on August 9, 2011
The results show:
• The bullet lodged in the police radio is a "jacketed round". This is a police issue bullet and, while it is still subject to DNA analysis, it is consistent with having been fired from a Metropolitan police Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun.
• The firearm found at the scene was a converted BBM "Bruni" self-loading pistol. This is not a replica; the scientist considers it to be a firearm for the purposes of the Firearms Act and a prohibited weapon and is therefore illegal.
• The handgun was found to have a "bulleted cartridge" in the magazine, which is being subject to further tests.
• At this stage there is no evidence that the handgun found at the scene was fired during the incident. The FSS has told the IPCC that it may not be possible to say for certain; however further tests are being carried out in an attempt to establish this."
It's all so eerie.Yes. There were rumours flying around at work today, so much so that Communications had to put out an email to all staff denying that anything was about to take place in this (non)-city. It was eerily calm on the way home tonight, save one police car dashing down the V10 towards Bletchley. No kids on the streets in the theatre district or around Iceland. Unheard of. Just an eerie, deserted calm. Now we've got twitter reports of police deployed to the rougher estates around here; 60 hooded youths on Queensway; a blurry twitpic of police in riot gear somewhere in Bletchley, apparently. Oh great.
Ghost Town is a prophecy that sounds like an aftermath. The ghost town it describes, gutted by recession, is the terrain before a riot ("people getting angry") but you sense it will be as bad or worse after the anger has erupted. Hence the song's circularity: it begins as it ends, with a spectral wail that could be either a cold wind or distant sirens. When the riots did break out, the Specials found the experience frightening rather than vindicating.posted by scody at 1:01 PM on August 9, 2011 [7 favorites]
...What's happening now isn't a protest or, as Darcus Howe put it, an "insurrection" – it's a nervous breakdown. The motor isn't a political cause but a mood. Politics is in the background, in the pervasive frustration and anxiety of an alienated underclass: record levels of youth unemployment, widening inequality, social services (especially youth services) slashed to the bone, the Education Maintenance Allowance scrapped, a damaged relationship between the police and the community, and collapsing faith in a seemingly indifferent political class. But the immediate outcome makes the lives of residents – many of whom are every bit as deprived as the rioters – even worse than they were last week and opens the door to an authoritarian response.
...A riot is neither a solution nor an unforeseen calamity but a problem brought to the surface: a manifestation of social angst and official failure. As the global economy shudders, that kind of angst is not a localised phenomenon and this will not be the only explosion.
...they're co-operating with the local police (and cheering them on) and are not looking for trouble (just staying on guard). Keep up the good work, and stay safe.Other friends seem to be rather more cautious - I think there's a lot of worry about the group being essentially hijacked by the BNP (who do have a small but noticeable presence around here).
On the other hand, there appears to be a group of white racists running about the Enfield area, looking a lot like the looters from earlier nights. I haven't seen them cause any trouble yet, and there are plenty of police in the area in case things kick off.
"A final thought. One reporter pointed out that in Clapham where the shopping area had been picked clean, the only shop left unlooted and untouched was the book shop."posted by ericb at 2:59 PM on August 9, 2011 [4 favorites]
For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.Do we prefer that the poor endure their suffering in a noble and dignified way, so that we can appreciate their suffering in all of its tragic beauty and feel charitable?
An elderly man suffered life-threatening injuries when he was attacked by rioters after he tried to extinguish a fire they had started in a bin, it is understood.Wow. Is that the usual standard of the Telegraph? Because seriously, if you say "it is understood" in the headline, does that mean you can just make shit up?
craichead, try reading the link, which cites an eyewitness.Well, yeah, it cites "Jim," who arrived at the scene after the attack and "only found out later that they had jumped him." But Jim doesn't say the guy was elderly. Jim says that he had gray hair, and the article says that his age is unknown. Jim also doesn't say that his injuries are life-threatening. The only mention of his condition is:
Commander Simon Foy, of Scotland Yard, said: ''It was quite a grave assault and his condition is causing us some concern.''Even given British understatement, I don't think you can take from that that the guy's injuries are life-threatening.
He was perhaps the first thinker to identify the perversity of the kind of progressive thinking that expects the oppressed to conform to a preconceived model of resistance or revolt. According to the progressive norm, genuine victims of injustice will be ennobled by adversities, strengthened by misery and purified by suffering. They will bear witness to their authenticity by playing a starring role in the good old drama of democratic resistance to oppression. And they will gratify their patrons by bringing new vigor and militancy to the part, and perhaps a dash of cathartic revolutionary violence, not to mention unimpeachable moral authority. If Foucault had a mission in life, it was to discredit the progressive model of the perfect rebel.I'm not posting this because I have anything particularly Foucauldian to contribute here, or because I have any reason to agree with the author's initial proposition there that Foucault was first in this or other regards. However, I think the words themselves in this summary are apt for today's context. There is something greatly perverse, both in those who refuse to accept a social context and causality for the rioting, and in those who accept it but complain about the rioters' lack of political objective and their apparently indiscriminate criminality.
What happens to a dream deferred?posted by tzikeh at 12:41 AM on August 10, 2011 [11 favorites]
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
it's crazy that people are smashing up their own communities. My hunch is that she's right, and that the people rioting in Hackney are from Hackney, and the people rioting in Clapham are from ClaphamWhat do the "communities" of Hackney and Clapham offer these kids which makes it crazy to loot and damage them? I'm pretty sure that lovely well-spoken blonde woman who's Florists was smashed up doesn't consider herself part of the same community as the "feral kids"
The victims, who were aged between 20 and 31, were part of a group of men who had gathered in the local area to protect shops used by all sections of the local community ...posted by unSane at 4:20 AM on August 10, 2011
Several cars then drove past the group which was guarding local stores ... and the occupants shouted abuse before one vehicle returned and mounted the pavement at "tremendous speed" and hit the men, throwing them into the air.
According to witnesses, the car, containing up to four men, then sped off.
I said elsewhere that I'd often wondered what happened to the 13 to 20% of kids who walk away from school with no qualifications and very limited numeracy and literacy skills ... Each year's 13 to 20% largely end up on benefits or in jail or in the grey area between the two, claiming what benefits they can and supplementing that income with criminal activity. This is not a recent development; those kids at the bottom have always been there ... These kids often have virtually no social skills. By that I mean they literally cannot sit in a room and hold a conversation with someone other than those in their peer group. That doesn't matter. They don't have the skills to fill in a job application form, they have nothing to put on it if they did, so no one is going to sit them in a room and give them an interview, unless that someone is in a blue uniform, and they are recording the interview.posted by unSane at 4:48 AM on August 10, 2011 [24 favorites]
... We kick up to twenty percent of our kids out of school illiterate, innumerate and socially dysfunctional, then we import people to the lowgrade jobs those kids cannot do, so the immigrants can pay taxes to pay the benefits that just about keep that underclass quiet. The last government merely consolidated the neglect of the previous ones. All governments of all hues since the seventies have failed to address this problem; the only difference between them is the narrative they have fed their respective voters about it ...
They are not part of the society the people reading this belong to. Rioting last night gave them a sense of power and control, over the police, and over their neighbours ... What these riots - which aren't demonstrations, but parties got out of hand, with fires and prizes - is the degree of alienation from their own communities, their inability to acknowledge that they are part of any community. They also don't see themselves as angry or even oppressed, because they cannot look beyond the circumstances they are in and the peer pressures around them. And it is about bad parenting, to the extent that when the 13 to 20% become parents they have no aspirations or responsibilities for their children to inherit. That won't change if you treat merely them as victims, and enhance their sense of entitlement to trainers and TVs, nor if you treat them merely as criminals and process them through a judicial system that encourages recidivism.
but maybe Belfast's kids have had enough of civil unrest over their lifetimes.Or maybe they don't have as much pent-up anger and frustration, because they've already done their annual rioting thing for the summer.
4. ‘Classic’ crowd psychology is currently used as the theoretical basis for public order training in
England and Wales. This theoretical position is outdated, unsustainable scientifically and it is
critical that training is updated to reflect contemporary theory and evidence.
Then again, there was looting in London following the Great Fire of 1666, and, despite the mythology, there was looting in London during the wartime Blitz. Go back and read Dickens: Criminals, both immigrant and "native" British, have taken advantage of opportunities to loot in London during more peaceful times, too. A peculiar confluence of circumstances—a mob angry about a police murder, a sudden bout of warm weather, an unprepared police force distracted by scandal, and, yes, the astonishingly widespread availability of BlackBerry smartphones among the underprivileged—might have allowed them to do so again. Beware of sweeping political generalizations in the wake of these riots. We don't know whether we have just witnessed a "new" phenomenon, or a more mobile and technically adept version of a very old one.posted by BobbyVan at 1:56 PM on August 10, 2011 [6 favorites]
"If you're looking for an outlet to serve your bulk iPhone shopping needs, London's Craigslist can't help you just this minute. The case of 40 16GB iPhone 4's that popped up on the embattled city's section of the Internet's classified yesterday — following the third night of riots — has been 'flagged for removal' and is no longer on the site."posted by ericb at 3:25 PM on August 10, 2011 [2 favorites]
So what’s it gonna be? Let’s make a deal, mate. Everything must go, pa’tic’ly as them sirens’re gettin’ closer by the minute. I’m sorta what they call a motivated seller. Buy now before me and Gez ‘ave to do a runner.
"[E]veryone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.How can rioters be banned from social media?
Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.
So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
‘We have to accept that we were not prepared for the consequences of our actions,’ said a senior looter in Ealing, west London. ‘I took the decision to kick in the windows of my local Comet and help myself to a couple of MacBook Airs in good faith, but I might have done things differently if I had known this would lead to Boris ‘the Mayor’ Johnson descending on the neighbourhood within hours, spreading chaos and confusion and terrorising local businesspeople in Latin.’posted by memebake at 1:54 AM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]
[W]hat’s most shocking is that the quality of our history teaching has become so debased, and the basic standard of our historical knowledge is so poor that Starkey can arrive unprepared and behave like a lazy undergraduate trying to derail a tutorial because they haven’t done their homework ... And that tactic was followed almost to the letter by David Starkey last night. I’m not saying he’s lazy. He might be incredibly hard working but rather dim.posted by Grangousier at 12:13 PM on August 13, 2011 [1 favorite]
To understand the mayhem on our streets look no further than a set of figures on literacy rates that came out a week before the riots began. Teaching a child to read and write is not difficult or expensive. Poorer countries than ours manage to do it. The statistics in the UK are staggering. A full 63 per cent of white working class boys, and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below. How does that translate to violence on our streets? Humiliated in lessons, 14 of the young men I interviewed either dropped out or were excluded. They then spent their time hanging around on the streets – only turning up to school to sell drugs or stolen goodsIts hardly a secret that inner city comprehensive education in London is pretty bad, so I find this part of her argument pretty compelling.
Illiteracy is a life sentence. Studies show that about half of the prison population has a reading age below that of an 11 year old. Of the South London Gang I met three years ago, all bright but only semi-literate, three are now in prison. Bigs, the former leader of one of Brixton’s most notorious gangs received his first prison sentence at 15. As he told me: "Other people go from school to university. We go from school to prison. I thought I would be dead by 30."
The IPCC's alleged failure to keep the family informed was part of the reason why relatives protested outside the police station on Tottenham High Road last Saturday. For around four hours, the crowd waited for a senior officer to speak to them before a teenage girl was allegedly attacked by police after verbally abusing officers. Shortly afterward, a group peeled away and set fire to two police cars, the start of the riots that would sweep across England.So that's the protest and the start of the riot.
Scotland Yard stopped attacks by rioters on iconic sites across London hours before they had been due to take place after managing to "break into" encrypted social messaging sites, it has emerged.posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 9:03 AM on August 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
... A full 63 per cent of white working class boys, and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below.I'd love to see this kind of testing on politicians.
The Crown Prosecution Service has issued new guidance on lifting reporting restrictions in youth cases – including episodes of rioting and public disorder.Story here. They really will attempt anything, however shameful, rather than address any actual causes.
The updated guidelines were issued after Home Secretary Theresa May said that under-age rioters should be named and shamed and urged prosecutors to ask judges to overrule the right to anonymity.
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