They’re rioting for the same reason people riot when their team wins/loses the big game: it’s fun to smash things and you can loot some sweet swag.
Hey, that’s not fair! We’ve had quite a few riots over the past 20 years or so, and several of them were race related!
Seriously though, what do you think black people should be doing? Are you suggesting they should be rioting more?
That’s not true. The independent police complaints commission issued a statement earlier. There’s no evidence yet that he fired at police, but certainly he had a loaded (illegal) handgun.
As for the riots, all this stuff about job prospects and heavy-handed police is BS; my brother works in the bull ring in birmingham and was telling me about mobs mugging and beating ordinary people as well as all the looting. That’s making a political statement?!
What it’s about is that there’s a proportion of people in our society – like all societies – that are thugs. The difference now is that with FB and blackberry such people can very quickly mass.
We’ve had three sets of riots in fairly quick succession – tuition fees, the financial crisis and now the duggan shooting. In all cases there were some peaceful protests but some anarchists who show up and use the whole thing as an excuse to kick off.
Not only should we use plastic bullets, water cannon etc, we should set up a rapid response force that can quickly do the same thing when the next wave of riots inevitably start.
That’s the sort of thing mobs do. Regardless of how good the original reason for people getting angry, once the mob violence gets going it just turns into smash-burn-and-loot.
Yeah but the proportion of opportunists here seems very high.
And I dispute that there is a good reason for this set of riots.
It’s awful that a father of four was killed by police but the presence of a loaded handgun gives reason to suspect that they probably had cause to. I wouldn’t personally join even the peaceful protests (though I might do depending on the findings of the investigation).
Even in the US mere possession of a handgun, even an illegal one, is not considered justification for summary execution. It might given the London police cause to arrest, but shoot him?
Only if he was actually a threat to police is there any basis for justifying a shooting here, and even that could be questioned. Actually SHOOTING at the police is a different matter, but as noted, it has not been *proved *that the man Duggan was doing any such thing.
Well American police have shot and killed people if they though say someone was reaching for a gun (or something like a gun).
I should clarify what I meant. I’m obviously not saying that summary execution is fair for carrying a gun.
The first factor is that carrying a loaded handgun is a very serious crime here – I think it can get you up to 5 years IIRC. So, the chance of someone just carrying a gun for self-defence is pretty unlikely. He wasn’t on his way to buy baby formula.
Secondly there’s all kinds of scenarios given that he had a gun – he pointed it at the police, at other people etc. Given the rarity of officers shooting anyone in this country* I think it’s likely that something like this happened.
But of course, few details have been released yet.
- Obviously the cockup with the brazilian electrician stands out but that was an extraordinary event and a very different situation.
It would also mean that those rioters would be equally armed, however. I’m not particularly confident that people who would be prepared to loot and firebomb would be averse to violently using a gun, either.
Sounds like a good way to escalate a short term riot into a long term insurrection/terrorism problem. Especially since these are people who are quite likely to not believe the cops when they say they shot people for rioting.
One difference - perhaps still not a big enough one - is that the rioters are out there doing bad things in public. It would be technically feasible to capture their activity and summary execution on a single continuous piece of video footage, .
As I say, not really sure that’s enough to make it a good idea, but “can’t we shoot these idiots?” does seem to be crossing the mind of many a frustrated observer at the moment.
It began as revenge for the shooting of black drug dealer Mark Duggan. From sonsofmalcolm blog:
Paintball guns on full auto, balls loaded with water gel containing silver nitrate (stains skin for weeks) and a trace of butyl mercaptan (stinks worse than a skunk, tough to wash off). That’s the mildest suggestion I have at the moment. The notion of an array of public portaloos in Trafalgar square, with arrested rioters pilloried below them for two days, isn’t even the nastiest.
Did you have to include the “black” part?
This is racial violence. It’s blacks attacking white people and looting and burning white property, just like the racial assaults on whites at the Wisconsin state fair, the flash mobs of young blacks in various cities who gather to attack whites, Hispanics and Asians, the gang assault on two whites and a Hispanic on a Marta train in Atlanta, the gangbangers who forced the police to close the Chicago beach on Memorial Day, and a lot of other incidents. Is there no one of you on this board who has the backbone to acknowledge this fact and say it aloud in public?
If you want to be truthful, yes.
Yes. And some of them have been charged with homicide for doing so and have even gone to jail for it. There is a penalty for the police screwing up when the system works properly. When people don’t trust it work properly you can get riots.
Why not? Was he not a black man? Should we pretend race doesn’t exist so we don’t have to wonder whether or not it might be a factor here? Are you saying race relations in the UK are so perfect that there is zero chance that could be a factor?
While there is no doubt that the US mob violence you mentioned has a definite racial component with black culprits and white victims, it is not so clear cut in the UK. The crowds there seem more integrated, with victims likewise of various ethnicities. Racial issues in the UK are not the same as in the US, even though there are some similarities on a few points.
Only because that is relevant to the motivation here. I understand the police involved were from Operation Trident which is a unit set up to deal with gun crime in the black community. And the rioters have predominantly been from that community (or were initially).