There is an interesting article by Theodore Darlymple in the Spectator on the riots.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/7157308/its-fun-to-smash-things.thtml
Darlymple worked for years as a psychiatrist in the British prison system and probably has pretty good insight on the mindset of the rioters. The short version is we are dealing with a lot of barbarians that like to smash things and steal stuff.
Cite? Best I can tell, this claim is horseshit. It appears to be based entirely on one extremely shaky 30 second clip, shot on a mobile phone, of a crowd of police doing…something. It’s impossible to tell what, exactly. At no point in the video do you actually see the police beating anyone. In fact, the only reason anyone can even being to ascertain what might be going on is that the woman recording the footage is angrily accusing the police of beating a girl. Now, we have no reason to believe that this woman can really see what’s actually happening. Shit, we’ve no reason to believe that she’s even sober. Furthermore, if the police were attacking a teenage girl, there’s no reason to believe that the response was disproportionate. We can’t see the girl. If she even exists at all, she may have been armed, she may have attacked the police.
Here is the (very NSFW) clip. As you can see, it’s hardly conclusive evidence of anything.
Even if true, and there have certainly examples of the above on this board, that doesn’t excuse you from taking responsbility for the idiocy of your OP.
I’m getting very tired of certain people justifying blatant propagandizing by claiming someone else did it first. Stop trying to claim that the cases you cite are anything other than footnotes to much greater outrages that any person with a sense of consience at all, which I will assume you are, would agree are more important to address.
If the greater outrages are the police murdering people with impunity, beating people for fun and having people thrown in jail for months for nonsense crimes, then yes. If it’s some little toe-rag setting a car alight or robbing himself a new set of trainers, then no.
Hmm- how many people have the police murdered? There is one case open to question.
How many places were torched and people assaulted?
In the middle of the Judicial holidays no less!
From what I have read in the paper, the High Court and the Court of Appeal are going to be kept busy next term; overturning some of sentences; which seem to have forgotten several statutory considerations.
Crown Court powers for sentences are theoretically the statutory maximum, but under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003; the discretion is structured and limited,
“Got away with” implies some effort on their part. Evasion. Getting away, if you will. Telling the sarge you beat a young lass with your stick and getting a pat on the back requires some other description.
Given that the Guardian blog linked above provides evidence that it is indeed the case that people do get six months for stealing a bottle of water, would you like to join with me in expressing outrage? Or was “No-one gets 6 months for stealing some water in this country” meant to be followed by “more’s the pity”?
In the UK, however, that’s exceedingly rare. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a policeman being done for murder while on the job, while I’ve heard of at least half a dozen police shooting unarmed men in just the last few years. Beatings too. And deaths in custody.
Yes, I know all those liberty-loving Americans love nothing so much as to exult in someone being thrown into prison. Ideally some buck nigger who looked the wrong way at a white woman, who can be put away where he’s no longer a threat to the lack of profits being made by private prison companies.
We are. And then there’s the rioters, too.
Okay, there you go, BBC broadcasting an account of it. That’s where I heard it from, and there’s no reason to disbelieve it. The police haven’t even denied it.
I’m so glad that you are here to give advice to the High Court based on newspaper hacks.
Again with the propagandizing. You know as well as I do that dozens of structures were burned, many of them residences. And since when is burning someone’s car a trivial event?
Again, stop trying to minimize the events of the past week to bolster the case you think you have. No one is buying it.
For all you big fans of the government response here, more good news!
A woman is to be evicted from her council house on the ground that her son was arrested, but not convicted, in the riots. Tory Wandsworth council to blame, there, rather than the courts.
Collective responsibility, a sort of modern Frankpledge, doesn’t it make you all warm inside?
And plenty more to come. Cameron is stupider than I thought, and is currently getting advice from China as to how to suppress social networking. Amazing how this libertarian, free-markets-is-free-peoples gang always seem so enthusiastic to get in bed with the Chinese. And underage rent boys, but that’s for another thread.
Tomorrow, we round up the children of the rioters and rape them to death in front of their parents. Or, more officious government parlance, we institute a robust psychological disincentive to further civil unrest.
Stop trying to minimise the decision of the authorities to throw the book at people who have committed minor offences, or none at all, by trying to attribute to them responsibility for greater crimes they had nothing to do with. People are buying it, because they’re a bunch of crazy blood-thirsty idiotic hoodlums.
Quite. Be sure to alert us when this begins.
Oh perish the thought that I could ever be construed as to give advice to their Lordships.
Just simply pointing out that several sentences seemed from newspaper reports to have failed to apply the tests laid down in law; you know the custody threshold in the Criminal Justice Act 2003; the sentencing council guidelines; little things.
Hey, if you are punishing people for breaking the law; you should not let little things like…the law… get in the way.
Yep. Newspaper reports are all about the law. All about justice.
Not about selling newspapers.
I’m doing nothing of the sort, moron; people can read my posts for themselves. Likewise, they can read yours as well, and I should remind you that you do not appear to have yet cited a case in which someone was sentenced for no offense at all.
I find it frankly bizarre that until just this week you apparently had no idea, none at all, that a certain degree of reactionary behavior might occur over an event that any sensible person would recognize was manifest in its unfairness, not to mention completely counterproductive to any potential sociopolitical point that might be buried somewhere in the chaos.
I thus must say that in the pantheon of outrage over unjust things that happen in this world, the cases you have mentioned so far are pretty small beer.
And that’s that last I’ll be feeding you, my son.
What’s wrong with eating fruity pebbles and watching cartoons?
looting and participating in rioting are not minor offences.
So that sort of makes the rest of your “argument”…er…bullshit.
I’d suggest you stop making a fool of yourself but to be honest you are providing a degree of entertainment. A bit like a cat running into a plate glass window. But beware, like the cat, if you just keep doing the same thing over and over again our amusement will turn to boredom, then concern, then pity
Just so you know.
The sentence handed down to Nicholas Robinson does seem to me to be rather harsh. From what I can gather, he wasn’t involved in actually breaking into the store but entered it afterwards and took a case of bottled water worth £3.50 (about $5). I can only assume the courts want to make an example out of as many people as they can.
Bet your ass it is. The Sikhs weren’t out grabbing random people off the streets and threatening them with swords. They were defending their businesses and property from rioters and looters. If any looter got skewered, I’d say the onus was on him, not the defender. If you don’t want to get stabbed, don’t try to loot. Very simple equation, really.
I was wrong, but not completely. I was forgetting a 6 month sentence actually means he will probably serve half of it. I still think that’s too much for that particular crime. I tend to think the fact he carted off a case of water means he just did something stupid on the spur of the moment, rather than being a hard-core looter. Even in Lidl, it’s possible to find things that are more valuable. Hopefully, the sentence will be reduced on appeal, we’ll see what happens.
Do you not understand how bigoted that statement is? You are dehumanising Police and Judiciary in exactly the same way the more extreme right-wingers are doing to the unemployed.