London Riots Speak: UK Systemically Racist , Policing & Lack of Opportunity

London police said Monday that about 100 people had been arrested in a second night of rioting in London, condemning it as a "copycat criminal activity."
The violence, which broke out Saturday in the multi-ethnic northern district of Tottenham, spread to other parts of the capital on Sunday evening, with hundreds of youths looting, burning shops and attacking police officers.
Across the city, shops and businesses were targeted, as people, many of them teenagers, took advantage of a breakdown in law and order to loot.
Local media contained many eyewitness accounts of young people breaking into high street businesses and making off with goods.
An eyewitness reporting from the south London area of Brixton claimed that mobile phone shops had been especially targeted and that there was only a small police presence on the streets.
The weekend riots began when a peaceful protest led by relatives of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, who was shot dead on Thursday night by police in the Tottenham area of north London, turned violent.
Rioters attacked police, set two cars alight, burnt a double-decker bus and looted high street shops.
British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on Monday condemned the riots in London over the weekend, calling the rioting as "needless opportunistic theft and violence."
"It is completely unacceptable and the people who have suffered are those who have lost their businesses, shopkeepers who have lost their shops, families who have lost their homes and many people who felt very frightened in their own neighborhoods," Clegg said.
The government stood "side by side" with the victims in utterly condemning the rioting and looting, he said.
However, some have already started criticizing the government's own austerity measures, coupled with high unemployment and resentment of the police, for creating a "social division" which forced the police into conflict with communities.
"I am concerned that there is growing social dislocation in London and a threat that the police will be forced into escalating conflict with some London communities," former London mayor Ken Livingstone said on Sunday.
"We do not want to go back to the 1980s," he said, referring to a string of riots that swept across urban centers of Britain 30 years ago which affected largely West Indian communities in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds as well as the Brixton area of London.
Lack of jobs and prospects against a backdrop of racism in the wider society and aggressive and sometimes racist policing are now recognized by the authorities and experts as the triggers for the 1981 riots.
The weekend's riots in Tottenham and north London also came after a winter which saw five major demonstrations in London.
Four of those five demonstrations were organized by university and school students angry at reforms to funding for their education which would see them pay substantially more money.
These demonstrations led to clashes with the police, not seen on British streets in a political context for 20 years.
A later demonstration in early spring, by trades unions against coalition government cuts in public spending in order to reduce the huge public-spending deficit, passed peacefully, but small breakaway groups, often of anarchists or extreme political groups, engaged in vandalism of shops and banks in London's West End shopping district.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• London
• Rioters
• Speak
• UK
• Systemically
• Racist
• Policing
• Lack
• of
• Opportunity

[BREDATOR1]

try working you lazy fuckers... instead of smokin gangi weed ...

[Dungarth]

..Whites in Britain are systematically Racist!?!? I'd love to see you Blacks try and make a living out in Italy, Germany or Spain...you think Brits are racist!? ..YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET!!

[talkindurinthemovie]

WOOOWWW uk I am disappointed I really thought you were above this Americanized bullshit.... I really am ashamed of the world we are in.

[littledude4eva]

Its called capitalism, YOU WORK FOR WHAT YOU WANT, you dont get it handed to you by the world.Oh wait, thats how british society has taught our youth isnt it? It's hypocricy

[CatherineDeLancret01]

One way ticket back to their own countries.

[AnonDracula]

No, you're just systematically stupid :)

[honeymclean]

Is it coz I is black :)

[Porrameneitor]

respecta da yoof

[Porrameneitor]

fuck niggers

[MrBrendy58]

Forgot to say to you Teawead, When cops shoot an inocent man dead to me that's MURDER. If you or I did that we'd be up on a charge. I understand people get frustrated with the system, that's because the system's flawed, their attitude is "you're down, stay there", It's a f..ked up world buddy.

[MrBrendy58]

Sorry teawead, you're missing the point of what I said, I said if people hate the country that much they should go back to their country of origin, meaning, if the Irish were over there rioting then they should go back to Ireland, EVEN if they were English born, The world is in bad enough crisis without us burning people out of work, Live and let live bro or take it back home, Peace.

[teawead]

@MrBrendy58

So if you're born in Britain, you should go back to the hospital you were born in? Or back into your mom's vagina?