Tottenham Riots

I rode past Cabot, there were about five cops in riot gear with dogs outside, on the road that goes onto the M32. Oh crap...

 

Just got this from the BBC live feed 'The BBC's Tamsin Curnow, in Bristol, says police there have reported disorder in the last few hours. Shops and cars have been damaged in several areas, including the city centre, St Pauls, Stokes Croft and St Werburghs. Officers are now working to keep people out of the city centre, urging them to go home. Most of the damage was caused by about 150 people who moved around the city centre in small groups, police say.'

 

Interestingly the BBC now appears to be mentioning Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool as the only areas outside of London that are experiencing troubles.

 

'More on the situation in Bristol. A spokeswoman for Avon and Somerset police said a number of shops and vehicles have been damaged and several main roads have been closed "to allow officers to take control of what is currently a volatile situation".'

 

There's a video on YouTube from a witness in Bristol. Several people running away from riot police while throwing bottles at them. Would provide a link but I'm on my phone, search 'bristol riots 2011 august'.

 

i live just off Stokes croft, but I can only hear the police 'copter...

 

Martin Fricker, Daily Mirror

tweets: Turkish men armed with baseball bats are guarding businesses on Stoke Newington High Street #riots

^ lol

To be honest people criticise mainstream press for inaccuracy but there's just as much mis-information on social media and smaller news sites I don't know what to believe.

 

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150333636850851&comments[/url Army. NOW.

 

A video from Bristol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC2CJC4KtS8&feature=player_embedded

 

I don't think anyone would mind if the police came down extra hard on the rioters now? They've been asked nicely to remain indoors and out of trouble, we shouldn't have to ask twice. Hand out as many rubber baton guns as you can get and start putting dents in their faces, when they're discharged from hospital lock them up and give them the slipperiest soap..

I'd love to get one of these London rioters by the scruff and hold them infront of a PSNI lineup during a riot and ask them if they still want to go looting, the only reason half of these scumbags are out there is because they know they are at very little risk because the police have little choice but to pussyfoot around and do the best they can from a distance. It's really not on.

 

There's a few things going on here. I think some of the trouble is oportunistic, taking advantage of police overstretch, but I suspect there may be the issue that gangs in different areas want to be able to say the they got stuck in in their area just for bragging rights. Disgusting, sad, but probably true.

It's sad thet we've ended up with a layer of society that want to behave like this an don't care or think they can justify it. However it's wrong and unfortunately the police will have to get very tough which means that some people will get hurt that didn't deserve to. However damage to property does matter. People are going to loose their jobs because shops burnt out and some small shopkeepers (whose income isn't much at all in most cases) are going to be out of business and not knowing how to provide for their families. At the end of the day the rights of those people will have to override those of the people that are rioting, and also, those that are hanging around on the street with them and will be the first to talk to police brutality when they actually put an end to this.

I'm also pretty hacked off with those politicians that seem to want to excuse this in any way. You can be dirt poor, but you don't need to nick a new pair of trainers or a TV. I've been out of work before but I had to rely on my own resources, minimise my spending and get another job. I certaily didn't think I needed a new TV to sit in front of.

 

Question:
The french, the Germans, the US, etc have specially trained segments of the police force that come down HARD ont hese kind of things once the normal police force is pushed to its boundaries.
The French GIGN, for example is trained in non-lethal takedowns, and are often employed in prison riots. Their track record for sorting out issues in an agressive but non-lethal way si nothing shy of impressive.
They're also not considered army (as they fall under a special division within the national police force), and as such are conveniently at the police's disposal in situations exactly like these, without risking a conflict between civilians and the armed forces.
The Germans have the SEK/GSG9 for these reasons, and the US have SWAT teams specialised in riot control.
Does the UK have anything like that? Are they already being deployed?

 

I'm not talking about the morality of the situation, but about how it can be contained.

In the short term. In the long term you just escalate the situation. And you may run out of people prepared to shoot the bullets.

you recall incorrectly. I got a lot of flak for suggesting that the guy who got killed had some personal responsibility for how he positioned himself in that situation.

Sure; North Korea doesn't have any civil unrest either (but then it has a very different culture). But innocents will get caught in the crossfire and start bleating. I'm not sure that shooting people who are experiencing (and thus expressing) a massive disconnect with society is not going to create even more of such people.

These are, psychologically speaking, lost little children. Not in the aww-diddums, the poor things kind of sense, but in a Lord-of-the-Flies little psycho killers kind of sense. This has been brewing for a long while: government cut funding to community centres, to charities, to education, to the police force. It neglected the very industries that could have provided gainful employment to focus on financial services in a few square miles of London. Successive governments talk about "family values" while forcing both parents to go to work. A third of children in the UK live below the poverty line. They are the most unhappy kids in Europe. This culture is one of egocentricm, materialism and normalised inebriation and violence on Friday nights and during football games. Are you surprised it turned out this way?

The only way you can make people reconnect with their surrounding community is to do what I outlined and frankly hope it works. Then perhaps we should dump all that money that was going into the Olympic Games into community centres and initiatives. This generation is all but lost; better start working on the next one, and realise that shooting their older siblings and cousins is not going to be a great start in that.

 

@BentAnat: The most I've seen them do in this regard is deploy the black/dark grey heavy armored anti terrorist vehicles seen in ealing broadway tonight and enfield yesterday

^^^^^^ THIS

 

Bring in a curfew and arrest the parents of the kids doing this.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if there was looting tonight, and I wouldn't be surprised if they brought in the army tomorrow night.

 

And South Africa we had unit 19

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk

 

Downside to this is probably at least one parent is already in prison.

 

Bugger that... arrest the tykes and charge them as adults.

And now some goverment **** is forbidding the use of the water canon? **** them.

I'd have deployed armed police with rubber bullets and given them free fire orders.

Would have also pulled the army in.

 

To quote some lyrics: