[ihasa]

It's called dumb kids given an excuse to smash and grab.

That probably covers most of it, in a nutshell.

[Christopher M.W.T]

It's interesting to see how "particular" ethnic groups react, usually always the sames "usual suspects"

Going beyond this compare the civilised behaviour of the Japanese earlier this year vs the barbaric behaviour witnessed in New Orleans.

Personally I think MOST of the blame lies with the liberal / open border immigration policies of the UK.

[eddie1960]

It would be wrong to blame this on austerity measures. It's a nasty brew of things, lack of aspiration as much as lack of opportunity. And nb the only person to have died so far is the father of four who's killing by police sparked the initial riot, which then spread by social media.

If the police were a bit hands off to begin with, it was probably to avoid fuelling the fire of resentment even more.

I can understand why they may have been hands off to some degree at the initial protest, it's the lack of presence since that i don't get. most of my friends in London feel they have been using it to make a point (I should point out my friends are almost all in their 50's and live in or near the affected zones and despise the actions of what in essence are rampaging youth gangs. this is no longer about the death of one man (who was after all carrying a repro weapon in a confrontation with police)
It really has gotten very nasty and as you said there are many core issues (I know both my friends who have kids in that age bracket were amazed when the twitter feeds etc came about. their kids have been using it to avoid trouble and warning their parents to avoid areas that look like they will explode)
It really has spiraled beyond anything i saw when i lived there
I don't think the austerity measures are the core, just a contributing factor since they impact the poor hardest. I hope things get under control soon

[Nass]

With 16k police around I would be genuinely surprised if London wasn't relatively quiet tonight. 16k is 16 forces of 1000, most of the incidents last night were groups of 100-500. So if they're mobile and fast they should be able to swamps troublespots. But, 16k police just isn't sustainable. And it's trivial to make a molotov cocktail. I wonder what the rampup has been for the fire service, they're very short on numbers too. These rioters arn't going to go away. There's a lot of kids around without money or prospects who are being squeezed ever tighter with funding cuts to community projects etc. We live in a gadget age and some of the young just don't have the respect for rules that our generation have. Nowadays consumers, including the yobbos, have communication and organizational tools that outstrip those the authorities use for the first time. All the ingredients are there for it to happen again at a convenient time of their choosing, or after some other incident. And when there are not 16k officers around to deal with it.

The Met (London police force) and regular police don't have the crowd control tools in their armoury to deal with this, nor the experience, nor even the numbers. They don't have CS gas, rubber bullets or watercannon like every other sensible country does. They're only just trialing tasers. And not so very long ago everyone was having a go at the police for their kettling tactics in dealing with the G20 riots. The police here just can't win. And meanwhile the thievin bastards are watching a blue-ray dvd on their new 46" 3D tv telly that they got hold of last night, biding their time, planning when to get hold of an iPad or ten.

I think we find out tonight if this is organized or not. With 16k police around, the authorities have had more than enough time today to get their manpower locations, armored vehicles and spotter helicopters sorted out. If unorganized, spontaneous, copycat, then yobs flock to just a few locations then they'll get outnumbered and beaten back after some horrible scenes. But if there is tactical, central planning involved, they'd disperse, ie incidents start at the same time and in 100 different locations, then the authorities will be forced to divide their forces, they won't know what to prioritize and they probably won't have the hardware (armoured cars) to cope.

Shops are shutting early in some of the worst areas and good companies are sending employees home early. There are a lot of police out on the roads today, even where I am 10m southwest of the capital, maybe they're on the way to help out. England is waiting with baited breath.

[eddie1960]

i was reading they may deploy plastic bullets as well. I think your right about lack of respect for rules from this generation to some degree. I think a good percentage at it's core is being driven by gang activity. i'm reading that the actual crowds are not huge just destructive thieving yobbos, which i don't think represent the majority of youth in the areas.
It is a difficult scenario for the police, community policing tactics that have worked so well for them in the past 20 years diffusing some of the strife from notting hill brixton etc is useless in the face of this type of thing, but if they go in Hard they will be criticized as well, really a no win thing. While not a fan of G20 tactics (we had issues with it here in Toronto as well) I think they could have used a water cannon or 2 to help disperse and control the initial action the got out of control. Unfortunately apparently they didn't have one.
I hope they go in hard enough to help end it but don't go so far to the other extreme that they create new problems
I think the public including many in the affected areas at this point is ready to support some more serious action.
the use of technology here has been quite astounding, though not a total surprise i know at G20 here that is the tactic the Black Bloc used as well

[mikemike]

It's interesting to see how "particular" ethnic groups react, usually always the sames "usual suspects"

Going beyond this compare the civilised behaviour of the Japanese earlier this year vs the barbaric behaviour witnessed in New Orleans.

Personally I think MOST of the blame lies with the liberal / open border immigration policies of the UK.

I think that is a quite off color comment, even for P&R.

Japan and Katrina have very little in common because when you think about it, with Japan it was sudden while with Katrina (or any hurricane) looting is always recognized as a huge risk because the city mostly evacuates. Only a small portion of the population stays behind and of that group, there contingency of opportunistic criminals looking to loot that represents 10-20% of the people remaining in the city whereas they represent less than 1% on a normal day. So when you look at Japan you still have that other 99% of the population to keep the bad guys in check.

[jeffkrol]

Aye.. there be the austerity dragons...................

[magkelly]

I'm a little bit worried about a guy I used to date and his family over there. We're still good friends. So far there hasn't been too much going on where they are. He's in Islington, but I think he's worried. I emailed him last night. He's trying to play it off like it's nothing in his emails, but I am not too sure he's okay. I think he's a bit shaken. He's out a lot at night, work, so I am wondering if he saw some of it and doesn't want to tell me just how bad it is over there.

We had some riots here a few years ago for similar reasons. A lot of property was burned and it led to some more bad stuff, bad feelings for a long time later. I hate the idea that London is going through that. Times are so bad everywhere and violence only makes it that much worse...

[eddie1960]

Rim stepped up an co-operated with the police (very uncharacteristically since they guard user privacy very well)
They were then hacked by a group threatening to release employee addresses to the public so rioters could take revenge.

BlackBerry Blog Hacked for Helping Police Quell London Riots | PCWorld

After vandalizing the BlackBerry blog website, the hackers, who call themselves TeaMp0isoN, posted to the Internet an open letter to RIM, which makes BlackBerry smartphones, explaining the motivation behind their actions.

[Related story: Londoners Take to Social Media Outlets During and After the Riots]

BlackBerry Blog Hacked for Helping Police Quell London RiotsCourtesy of The Guardian"You Will _NOT_ assist the UK Police because if u do innocent members of the public who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and owned a blackberry will get charged for no reason at all," they wrote unfettered by rules of grammar and punctuation, "the Police are looking to arrest as many people as possible to save themselves from embarrassment..."

"if you do assist the police by giving them chat logs, gps locations, customer information & access to peoples BlackBerryMessengers you will regret it," the hackers threatened. "We have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g - Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc."

"now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters...," they continued, "do you really want a bunch of angry youths on your employees doorsteps?"

[deadwolfbones]

A bit more eloquent than my original post, cribbed from a guy more eloquent than myself (three separate posts on the same theme—long, but worth reading):

Sadly I think I am being optimistic. I mean insofar as nobody seems to be willing to look at this from the perspective of a healthier society v an ever-more "productive" one. Deep in an extremely severe world recession - of confidence, of actual productivity, of massive interrelated, unsustainable debts sold as "investments" of one kind or another, assume positive futures - I think the dialog these days is agonizingly dishonest, desperate to cling to a continuity of vantage, that they're writing From A Distance and Things Are This Way when the reality is the distance is as uncertain as the destination. I am more concerned at the LACK of concern for radical changes to ensure we don't lose this generation. We are frighteningly far along in TOTALLY IGNORING EVERYONE UNDER THE AGE OF 30 because of economic and political crises/concerns. Any suggestion that the agenda should be modified to help spread the wealth on an AGE basis, not just a mean income basis, is ridiculed because hey kids just need iPhones and headphones and hoodies and a corner to crash in. If you tell kids those are their requirements, how are you ever going to tell them they need to work for a living. How are you going to help them find value in the process of working if you tell ****ing Standford grads "EHHH STIPEND FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS THEN MAYBE YOU CAN FILE SOME SHIT FOR ME". Fully three years of top-tier law students are being put on the shelf, given incomes comparable to retail store managers. And explicitly, through that treatment, that GUESS WHAT, YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL THIS WORKS ON MY TERMS.

Who's lobbying for the kids on the other end of this? They can't speak for themselves because they get told "Buck up you little pussy you gotta pay your dues this is how it works I made my bones when you were playin' Nintendo". Thanks, *******s: I WANT TO MAKE MY BONES TOO, BUT YOU WON'T ****ING LET ME. There's such an easy slide there of self-exclusion from the situation, terming ambitious kids "entitled" - 1) because entitlement is a serious affliction in the <30 set but 2) because if you write EVERYONE off in those terms, you don't have to feel guilty for ****ing them out of the opportunity YOU HAD to kick ass when things were flush.

I've just never felt such a disconnect between surface society (media, adults, the gainfully employed), and youth in my life, because of the accident of being born in 1975 and basically seeing nothing but Good Times. I was too young to have any experience or even really much memory of the terrible recession we had running from 75-82, and Black Monday was an issue in the financial markets, it was quickly over. The early 90s recession, with the LA riots and all, that was a really bad time and it felt like we just needed to get a Democrat in and everything would be fine. And bizarrely it kind of was and I was a teenager so it felt like a solution and that was a blip and now, you know, life is grand. And I spend my late teens and get-my-first-job 20s in probably the best employment and compensation market for young people in the history of the entire world, the late 90s.

What I've realized since the 2008 crisis is that all of this was just a generational stroke of luck, and that for kids born ten years later than me, who are now 25, life is a huge bucket of shit. I mean even rich kids, even pedigreed kids, that I see coming into trading desks and analyst roles, jobs that pay well, these are jobs that you didn't go to ****ing Harvard Business School or Yale or Oxbridge, even the LSE for. Those were the jobs you *skipped* in going to the Ivies and the big networking unis in the UK. But now all that huge theoretical work and the better part of a decade accumulating loads of debt to get this degree is rewarded by a job that was once a way to give a kid from the mail room a shot.

Maybe you're so rich that it doesn't matter, and this is just a way of continuing to swim in that same pond, keep the club together, and you're ok with how horrifically, nakedly vile that is, how aristocratic. I'm in a position of sort of servicing this class - I see it, I'm not from that high-born class, but neither am I distant from it. And in this position, I feel so much more outrage, not because, in the words of Noel Gallagher "IT'S IMPORTANT THAT I'M WORKING CLASS" or that I could even hope to identify with the economic struggles people a couple rungs down from me on the earnings ladder face. Or that I would want to, I've worked my whole life to bring my salary up, to afford the things I have, but I afford them, just. I can't buy them on a lark, I don't own anything particularly luxuriant, and went into debt to build the best house I could. Everywhere else, I am in a position to spend intelligently. But like 90+% of the ****ing planet isn't even in that comfort zone. I can't pledge allegiance to the systems we have because I don't think they afforded me the opportunity to earn a solid salary - I think I did, and the systems we have afforded the 1%-ers the opportunity to keep being 1% of the population. I don't see how you need to make much more than I do. Everything that occurs in the income brackets above me is total ****ing largess and waste.

I'm no expert, I just have some friends abroad I've known since I was younger and so much rage at the differing expectations they deal with culturally and wrt their families as we get older. It's just completely ok to be in your mid-thirties and "getting started" with work-life in most of Europe. And if anything there is less pressure to do so since the economic blowout. It's just envy you know I wish it was ok for me to live at home and scrap for beer money and make music, write, bullshit blag my days away, but the US has this hangover from the Greatest Generation that you get into the workforce ASAP to increase national productivity and pull our standard of living up, DOT DOT DOT, but the reality is without real production, living in a service delivery/consumer society with a glaring tier of elite bourgeois media dickbags beating each other off on a daily basis and only advertising and delivery devices as their revenue, that mindset no longer applies. Entrepreneurial success today is not starting or growing a company, it's flipping one, and rather than a company it's an advertising conduit in 90+% of cases. One of the only real US companies to come out in the last ten years, Tesla - paid for by PayPal. Service and advertising. If we're - well no, we have an entire generation that is being offered depressed incomes (through salary, opportunity and external inflation) and expected to go through these motions, get in the mix ASAP. But the older generations are survivalist and flattening their career tracks out to map their requirements, to maintain their exaggerated standard of living. We're coming out of the most illusory period of prosperity (95-07) in American history. Nothing in the last ten years has occurred without increased money supply, incentivized by the government as corp/VC tax breaks (Megabank conglomerations, .com boom) or raw capacity (current QE phase). I'm hanging on, I'm in a good earning bracket (not too little that I can't enjoy a plush lifestyle, not so much that I cost more than I provide), but I'm constantly struggling with what's happening to kids in their 20s. It's a ****ing mess.

That said, it's only worse if the expectations are out of whack. If parents who can afford it would embrace the reality - that none of this is their child's fault, that internship after internship is simply whoring them out as slave labor - and let these kids live at home, cost and hassle free, as long as they're productive, creative and thinking in some way, that generation has a chance to ride this out without feeling like the working world is a ****ing scam and having zero faith in the entire construct. Don't force them to pretend things are ok, that they can and should be able to make it out there because you did - there has never been a bigger disconnect between expectation and reality than these kids are being subjected to.

[Clavius]

The situation is the same here in Holland. People who work have to get sidejobs, next to their jobs, if they want to be able to pay all the bills. If you want to support a family, father and mother should have 2,5 jobs at least. Whilst at the same time, lots of perfectly well schooled young adults, but also more experienced people, are at home and unemployed and very much willing to have a job.

"A weird situation" is a understatement. Something's gotta give.

[StepOne]

Those "kids" are worse than animals. Playing by the no rules of anarchy should be treated as such. Police, military should go by force, water cannons, rubber bullets, gas, whatever. The debate about what we do now with a generation that can't find ideals and motivation etc., lack of jobs and immigration is important, but these things should not be let to happen. I saw on TV a woman (40-50 years) butt-naked and robbed by the protesters, asian tourist beaten and robbed, and i'm sure there are many more cases like those. They don't have jobs but use Molotov's on businesses? Great, i'm sure from tomorrow these "kids" will be welcomed to work in any business in UK!

[Nass]

"recreational looting" is the term that's been used in the UK and I think it's about right. Not specifically anarchists or gang warfare, but relatively ordinary young people who see open shops on tv and think they want some of the shineys too. Sure, some of them are the urban feral wannabeGangsta type, but the minority. Poverty and deprivation is definitely overused a bit - they're people - mainly young people - wearing $200 sneakers and using $500 smartphones.

A problem in my country is that the police don't have many tools to deal with this. Relatively few are firearms licensed, and things like CS gas, rubber bullets, watercannons arn't used. But I think that maybe shifting a bit, public attitude towards this is hardening.

Vigilante initiatives are also on the increase, many communities are choosing to protect themselves.

Another problem in this country is the way that the police can't just go in and beat the crap out of yobs. The yobs are all protected by their human rights and know it. Especially when they're minors. And especially minors on their first offence, they just get told off and that's about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are legislative changes soon that change that a bit.

[Clavius]

Another problem in this country is the way that the police can't just go in and beat the crap out of yobs. The yobs are all protected by their human rights and know it. Especially when they're minors. And especially minors on their first offence, they just get told off and that's about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are legislative changes soon that change that a bit.

That shift has been going here in the Netherlands already. Slowly the police is given much more freedom over here. Although, they themselves are still in the process of getting used to it. And the Human rights organisations too, they still play their old cards, but now those cards are worthless.

This shift was initiated by the hardened eastern European criminals that were flocking to our country, totally flabbergasting our policeforce. They were even hiring touring cars to tranport their gangs over here! Like it's some sort of holiday.

[Nass]

heh, not sure if you know but I'm actually a dutchman living in England. ja ik ben nederlands. Worst of 2 worlds.