to move up and down
Six times the usual number of police to patrol London’s streets Friday
British police prepared to flood the streets on Friday to ensure that weekend drinking does not reignite the rioting that swept London and other cities this week, shocking Britons and sullying their country’s image a year before it hosts the Olympics.
Steve Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said 16,000 officers, instead of the usual 2,500, would remain on duty in London in their biggest peacetime deployment — a measure of the perceived public order challenge.
Even in normal times, alcohol-fuelled street disorder is commonplace across urban Britain at the weekend. (Photo: Peter Nicholls/Reuters)
‘You will pay for what you have done’: Cameron
Prime Minister David Cameron, facing a defining crisis of his premiership, promised on Thursday to crack down on street gangs as a national priority and said rioters behind Britain’s worst violence in decades would be hunted and punished.
“The fightback has well and truly begun,” he told an emergency session of parliament, acknowledging that police numbers and tactics had been inadequate at the outset of the violence which spread from London to other major cities.
“As to the lawless minority, the criminals who’ve taken what they can get, I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done,” the prime minister said. (Photo: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)
If the London rioters were protesters they wouldn’t look so happy
It is the joy on display that is so unsettling. People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists, and homemade signs.
But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.
It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight.
Photo: Hundreds of messages of support from the community of Peckham are posted on a looted storefront in south London, August 10, 2011. (Chris Helgren/Reuters)
We have a hunch that Amazon.co.uk might wait a few weeks before filling the orders that caused these items to surge more than 5,000% in popularity in the last day.
Man shot during London riots dies
British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Tuesday police will crack down hard to quell a wave of rioting and looting across London over the past three nights — the worst violence in the British capital in decades.
Related:
Third night of violence sprawls across London
Photos from third day of rioting
Live coverage from Reuters
Photos: London’s riot-shattered streets
Tasha Kheiriddin: Creating a smash-and-grab society
Where’s your broom? London cleans up after third night of riots
Creating a smash-and-grab society
As the smoke clears, it appears the London riots were less the product of mass rage at his death than calculated thuggery. Duggan’s family had organized a peaceful demonstration, which was then hijacked by anarchists and criminals for their own purposes: Smash, grab, loot, burn. Regrettably, it didn’t take much for normally law-abiding citizens to partake in the Lord of the Flies spirit that ensued
It doesn’t matter if you’re overthrowing the government, installing a bigger government or just lining your own own pockets. The result is the same: a chaotic society where we’re all entitled to “free” electronics or a cradle-to-grave safety net, even if we have to burn down the neighbourhood to get them. Not a place where I would choose to live — and where, I suspect, the silent majority of Britons don’t want to dwell either. (Photo: Dylan Martinez/Reuters)
Photos: London’s riot-shattered streets
British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would recall parliament from its summer recess for a day on Thursday after rioting swept through London for three consecutive nights.
Photo: A man clears up in a supermarket in Ealing in west London, August 9, 2011. (Toby Melville/Reuters)
