AnarchE in Germany: The London Riots

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog. I haven’t traveled anywhere super exciting (unless you count an unexpected foray into the underbelly of Wimbledon last weekend) and to be honest, the entire blog thing has slipped my mind. But the shameful acts of last week during what will probably be forever known as the “London Riots of 2011” have got me thinking.

For those of you know may not know the whole story behind what caused the mayhem to kick off, here is a quick synopsis. Sometime on August 4th, a man named Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police in Tottenham. As with most police shootings, there are varied accounts of what actually happened that day. According to some, Duggan opened fire on the police and they defended themselves. According to others, Duggan merely waved a gun around and the police shot him. Either way, when the dust cleared there was a dead man near Hale station in Tottenham, and he was killed by a police bullet.

Rational questions to ask after such a thing would be:
Why did he have a gun?
Why were the police chasing him?
Why were armed police involved? In England, only a select specially-trained few police officers have the right to carry and use firearms. These police officers are usually part of covert teams tackling drug dealers, weapons dealers or other high profile, dangerous criminals. They aren’t regular police, and so the fact that they were after Mark Duggan means Mark Duggan was most likely involved in things he shouldn’t have been.
Here is a direct quote from a news article just after the shooting -

An IPCC spokesman said that at around 6.15pm yesterday officers from Trident, accompanied by officers from the Specialist Firearms Command (CO19), stopped a minicab to carry out an arrest.
'Shots were fired and a 29-year-old man, who was a passenger in the cab, died at the scene,' he said.
The attempted arrest was part of a pre-planned operation under Trident.

Operation Trident was set up in the 1990s to improve relations with London’s black communities and to address issues like gun and drugs crime. So the officers after Mark Duggan were most likely investigating some sort of weapons issue, or the sale of illegal drugs. They weren’t stopping him for jaywalking, or a parking ticket or any number of other innocent misdemeanours.

What then happened next defies explanation. A small group of concerned citizens, led by Mark Duggan’s family members, visited the police station to demand answers. Unfortunately, in today’s litigious society, police officers are not allowed to comment on an ongoing investigation. This lack of comment was interpreted as stonewalling and so the family was demanding answers. I’d like to stress that at this point, everything was done peaceably. People were upset, but there were no threats of violence. According to reporters on the scene, the atmosphere was more of grief and disbelief and confusion.

So what caused the riots to kick off? A 16 year old girl threw a rock at police. I don’t want to denigrate the fine men and women of London’s police force, but if they had shut the situation down then, using whatever force necessary, then the city would not have burned for 4 days. Instead, they were ill-equipped to deal with what quickly became an angry mob. The rioting began by throwing things at police, at police cars, and setting police cars on fire –and quickly spread to full-on destruction and looting. This is what the High Street looked like in the morning.

As the police allowed the situation to spiral out of control, the rioting youth quickly realised there were no longer any boundaries to their actions. They could throw bricks! They could light busses on fire! They could break into retailers and take whatever they wanted – and no one would stop them.

You would think that would have been the end to it, right? Morning comes on the 5th, police restore order in Tottenham, and London goes about it’s business? Not quite. Despite painting themselves as “poor and disadvantaged”, most of these youth seem to have cell phones and Blackberries and so the rallying cry quickly went out. I can imagine some of the text messages –

“Hey, we looted the sh!t out of Tottenham and no one stopped us!”
“Really? We should do that here! I’ll call some friends, I could use a new iPad!”

I’m simplifying, but that is pretty much what happened. The evening of the 5th saw the rioting spread to other neighbourhoods, and so on the evenings of the 6th and 7th. A great map can be found here. Within 24 hours any pretence at fighting social injustice was wiped away as scores of opportunistic youth used this situation to destroy and rob indiscriminately. Businesses were destroyed (the 126-year old Croydon Furniture was burned to the ground, along with the dreams and livelihood of its owner), innocent bystanders attacked, people killed. And for what?

As London struggles to recover, there is no clear answer. I was lucky. I live in SW London – still within the M25, but nowhere near “troubled areas”. The closest the rioting came was Colliers Wood – about 2.5 miles away on the map, but worlds away in terms of socioeconomic status and the class of its inhabitants. True to form, the rioters chose to attack their own neighbourhoods – and the high streets near them (in England, the “high street” is akin to the US outdoor mall. They knew the main brands would be there, and easily accessible). I have never understood this. Why destroy where you have to live? If you want to stick it to the man, why not go to where the Man lives? I was fully expecting to see rioting break out around Chelsea, Notting Hill, Kensington, Hyde Park and all the other places where rich Brits live. Instead, it stayed pretty much in the low-income areas.

I never felt truly scared during all of this – just really sad. Sad for the ignorant children doing this, sad for the lives they were destroying, and sad for this country I now live in. I don’t know at what point England lost its cojones, but until she grows a pair (I know, I’m mixing all kinds of metaphors and such here), nothing is going to change. England has become so weak, she is at risk of just being overrun by criminals. Police have no authority. Border control grants anyone and their terrorist half brother asylum. Customer service SUCKS and no one protests or fights back. Tax rates are ridiculously high if you earn even what can be deemed a decent living, and most of that money goes to fund substandard health care and lazy people who won’t work. And yet the English just calmly take this abuse. Oh, they complain, and moan and “whinge”, but I don’t see any one of them actually pushing back, fighting back, demanding change. And it is truly sad.

I have struggled now for nearly 20 months to figure out why England gets under my skin so much – everyone I meet in the US thinks I’m so lucky to be living in London and isntitfabulousohmygodLondon! Sadly, I don’t think it is all that fabulous, and I’m counting the days until my visa expires and I either have to go back to the U.S. or to somewhere else in Europe. But I finally realised what it is. Those of you who know me know I abhor weakness. Hate it with a fiery passion. I’d rather someone have a strong opinion/presence/whatever and be wrong than be all weak and subservient. Well, England is weak. The country that used to run most of the world is now like the kid on the playground with glasses, braces and a big “Kick Me” sign.

It is so hard for me not to join the line of people kicking the crap of it!

Even the people I work with (very nice English folk) and friends of mine (also very nice English folk) have admitted that if we had some U.S. –style policing over here, the riots would have been shut down with a quickness that would have made everyone dizzy. There are a lot of things wrong with my home country, but one thing I can say about the men and women in blue – they mean business. Screw whistles and billy clubs – they don’t play and will put a cap in your ass if you don’t act right. I’m not advocating that for every situation, but sometimes, a bit of ass-kicking is exactly what is needed.

Everything seems to have calmed down – for now – but a key hole in UK security has been uncovered. How long before it is exploited again? The youth now know that they can pretty much run wild with very few repercussions, and that there are nowhere near enough police to stop them. And even if there were more police, a whistle isn’t going to do much against bricks, Molotov cocktails and fists.

The big questions now are: how will England clean this mess up? how will they fix it? And what will this mean for the Olympics? My fear is that uber-Liberal England will think that providing more benefits to these ignoramuses will fix the problem. I say, if you are an adult, and haven’t worked in 2 years, I’ve got a job for you. It’s called boot camp and then Afghanistan. That would solve two problems with one fell swoop.
Of course, such a measure would never happen here in England. It might offend people’s feelings and of course, what about the children?? (never mind that the “children” were out looting with the rest of them, some of them as young as 6 years old)…

I’ll try to be more diligent about this blog and keep people up to date on how things progress…
On a positive note, I finally figured out how to buy renter’s insurance (aka “contents insurance”… and it is NOT easy to buy due to the crazy ass questions they need answers to – like I know the degree of slant of the roof of my apartment building!), so I’m covered in case they burn my stuff to a crisp.

Federman out.

Some good articles about the situation:

AnarchE in Germany

Saturday, August 13, 2011

The London Riots

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