Alternate headline: “David Cameron hatches bold plan three days late.” Just to clarify, the water cannons will be used against rioters, right? Because, British criminal law being what it is, sometimes it’s hard to tell who the police think the bad guys are.
Many of these brave people [defending their homes and shops] have been threatened with arrest by the same police who stood by on successive nights and watched feral gangs of hoodie-wearing youths loot and burn stores. For some mysterious reason of institutional culture, London’s Metropolitan Police have seemed far more concerned with protecting their monopoly on law enforcement than with actively enforcing the law against marauding teen vandals and thieves.
They were particularly energetic in their confrontation with “vigilantes” in the predominantly white working class North London district of Enfield yesterday where a significant number of men, some of them allegedly members of the infamous fan club of the Millwall soccer team, had gathered to protect the community. Police in riot gear moved in force to disperse the crowd, displaying far more determination than they had shown against the rioters.
It is hardly surprising that vigilantism is on the rise given a) the disastrous failure of the police to protect the homes and businesses of ordinary people over the weekend, b) the authorities’ strange complacency about the destruction of property, and c) their strange obsession with not using baton rounds, tear gas or water cannon no matter how much damage and injury those non-lethal tools might save.
Said one shop owner, “I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses.” I’m not sure what’s more surreal, the fact that cops are still reluctant to use non-lethal force when people are literally being run over by rioters in cars or that, by standing by and doing nothing, they’re forcing people into the very sort of armed self-defense (a.k.a. “vigilantism”) that the British state abhors. That’s the flip side, in fact, to the navel-gazing about what the rioters want. What their victims want is immediate forceful action to restore order, and if the state can’t or won’t provide it, they will. Nice to know that that instinct is alive and well even in the UK, even after decades of conditioning to the contrary.
Three clips for you. The first, of Cameron, starts to heat up halfway through. The second is self-explanatory. (“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”) And the third is proof that maybe British cops have reached their limit after all. Exit quotation: “Across much of London on Monday night, if someone had decided to break down your door and rape your daughter, there would have been nothing to stop them. There would have been no one to call.”
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