BBC coverage is here.
So what’s going on? I’m an American with no idea about the local issues involved.
Its a mostly ethnic area; with high crime and unemployment and lots of police resentment. It seems to have started after some local no good doer was shot by the police. Resentment boiled over.
What’s a doer?
WAG: He meant “no-good-do’er”.
right from the horse’s mouth: London riots: Tensions behind unrest revealed - BBC News
See how nice it is when the media clearly explains who is the SOB du jour? One might have stereotypically suspected the Pakistanis, but fortunately the good spin-doctors tell it like it is, in starkest black and white.
Is the summer weather in north London hotter than usual? Or have young people been looking for an excuse for awhile now?
Moved from IMHO to MPSIMS.
It’s mainly young blacks who resent the police and this has afforded them an opportunity to vent and riot.
Operation Trident were involved in the shooting (they’re a unit set up to deal with gun crime in the UK black community).
I assumed it had a strong racial angle when I heard “Tottenham” and “Brixton”, but now I see there was trouble in Enfield. I used to work there - that at least used to be a solidly white area.
Clegg is calling it “opportunistic theft”. I was living in Toxteth (or Liverpool 8, as we called it) at the time of similar riots in the early 80s. It certainly looked like “opportunistic theft” at that time, albeit carried out mostly by the black population.
Ain’t diversity grand?
Diversity is grand, but honestly why the fuck were folk looting a branch of Carpet Right? 
Don’t you have to really work at it to get shot by police in the UK? I mean, the typical policeman doesn’t carry a firearm, so to get shot by cops, don’t they have to go find guns or policemen with guns to shoot you?
Seems to me that there’s a lot less potential for wrongful shootings with that system than the US one.
UK Police are armed; but as you said these are special officer (I am unsure if the PSNI are armed; I know that the RUC and RIC were), and if firearms are needed, they will be deployed post haste. The area that the incident happened has a high rate of crime, large amounts of firearms in circulation plus the individual in question was known to carry firearms. So you would have had a lot of armed police in the area anyway.
And no you do not have to work at it, as the ghosts of Jean Charles Menzies and that Scottish guy with a chair leg can attest.
And it’s all kicking off today. Mass vandalism (verging on a full-on riot) in Hackney, Peckham, Lewisham, and moving outside London. Apparently some disturbance in Birmingham and rumours that Leeds (well, Chapeltown) is boiling over. Lots of disaffection turned into violence.
I really don’t wish for the old days of having a Magistrate read the riot act followed by a volley and bayonet charge from the militia; but I do think the police could have been more active in dispersing the looters.
It’s weird about the looting, I was just reading about the riots at the Wisconsin State Fair, hundreds of rioters were just attacking people exiting the fair for no discernible reason. Apparently mobs that big have been happening in Boston, New Jersey, Philly, and other places this year, but with little or no media coverage. Makes me glad to live in a rural area.
Shoot first, ask questions later.
I passed through Chingford this morning on the way to work. A men’s wear shop had the windows smashed and the security shutters ripped open. On the way back I noticed all jewellery stores/pawnbrokers were shuttered.
Police shootings are pretty uncommon here, and actual exchanges of gunfire are even rarer.
And look at all the problems you’re having.
I wonder if the case of Ian Tomlinson has made the cops on the ground a little reluctant to step in unless specifically directed to do so? Which senior officer wants to put their neck on the line?
If I were a Met cop right now, I know what I’d be doing. Zippo. Unless me or my colleagues were under direct attack.