London's burning

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the stop-and-search based on skin colour dramatically increased in the UK and has been going on for a long long time, it's no secret that the British police can be incredibly racist actually, and have been known to target and provoke the black communities...

a mate of mine was stopped a few years back, he's black, and he was driving his dad's Mercedes, not speeding or driving dangerously or anything, just tootling around London in his dad's swish car, and he got pulled over by the cops (this happened to him more than once)... he told them it was his dad's car and the policeman laughed in his face and said "pull the other one!", and my mate just sat there chuckling while the policeman went back to his patrol car and made all the checks and sheepishly came back to my friend to say he could drive on... these kinds of things have been going on for so long and it drags you down and you get so sick of it... look at de Menezes, blown to bits by the British cops in the tube a few years ago, just because he fit the so-called stereotype of a suicide bomber due to his appearance! it's just as bad as those people refusing to board a plane with Muslim passengers recently... it's just sad and disgusting...

my heart really goes out to this guy, i've seen this shit happening, i've experienced discrimination myself based on my appearance, told to "go home" even though i was born in the country... i don't condone the violence but there is some reason behind it all that has never been addressed properly...
 
interesting article in stop and search in the UK here:

Stop and Search in the UK: It’s Not Over Yet | Open Society Foundations Blog - OSF

Stop and Search in the UK: It’s Not Over Yet
July 12, 2010 | by Indira Goris
Since elections this spring, the new UK government has launched a series of reforms to protect civil liberties, including the elimination of national identity cards and child fingerprinting, and increased constraints on surveillance powers. Last week, Home Secretary Theresa May announced the latest reform: no longer will British police forces be able to stop and search pedestrians unless they have reasonable suspicion of terrorist involvement. While the British government should be commended for abolishing the use of these controversial “section 44” powers, so named for the segment they fall under in the Terrorism Act 2000, it nevertheless has much further to go before it brings other stop-and-search powers in line with the principles of liberty and equality.

The British government’s elimination of section 44 powers was prompted by the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Gillen and Quinton v. United Kingdom. In that case, the European Court analyzed evidence that showed the extent to which police officers used stop and search under section 44 and found that there was a clear risk of arbitrariness in granting such broad discretion to police offices. The court ruled that continued use of these powers would interfere with the right to private life, leading to humiliation and embarrassment. The court was especially concerned about the impact of these powers on ethnic minorities, especially the black and Asian communities.

However, while British police will no longer be able to use section 44 to conduct stops and searches without reasonable suspicion of terrorism, they can still rely on other equally arbitrary powers. These include powers granted by section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which allows police to stop individuals without reasonable suspicion “in anticipation of violence,” and by schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows stops in ports and airports for counterterrorism purposes. Police use of these powers has given rise to similar problems as seen with section 44: arbitrariness, abuse, lack of monitoring and safeguards, and a disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities.

There also remain significant problems in stops carried out under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) stops, otherwise known as “ordinary stops and searches.” Figures released in June 2010 showed an increase in the number of black and Asian people stopped, and revealed that black people were seven times and Asian people two times more likely to be stopped by police than white people. The persistent high levels of disproportionality have prompted the Equality and Human Rights Commission to threaten legal action against the five worst-performing police forces.

Despite these troubling patterns of disproportional impact on Black and Asian communities, the Home Secretary announced in May that she intended to scrap stop forms and reduce the burden of stop-and-search procedures in order to reduce bureaucracy. Yet, eliminating data on stops that do not lead to searches, and reducing the data that is captured on stop-and-search practices, will make it impossible to monitor the efficiency and fairness of stops overall. Unconstrained and unsupervised use of stop and search powers will feed mistrust, resentment, and alienation among the communities most likely to suffer from discrimination. This, in turn, will lead to decreased levels of citizen cooperation with the police, and further erosion of the police-community relationship.

If police are using stop-and-search correctly, they should have nothing to fear from transparency. And if they aren’t, the sort of data that motivated the European Court to strike down section 44 must be made available so that we can address the system’s flaws.

Britain helped pioneer stop-and-search monitoring and for several years has served as a model for other countries trying to tackle police discrimination, with clearly positive results. As other EU countries are beginning to recognize this problem and are looking for best practices, abandonment of routine stop-and-search monitoring in the UK could have a negative impact across the continent—it doesn’t all end with section 44.
 
Among the first batch of people who went before courts today relating to Clapham Junction stuff last night were a graphic designer, several uni students and someone from the army. Like I said, it's not a race thing. It is mostly a socio-economic thing. But overwhelmingly, it's a fuckwit thing.
 
The rioters are disgusting creatures..never been happier to live in an area largely free of 'the richness of diversity' than right now with these disgraceful events.

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I think name calling of other forum members is not attractive.

It brings nothing to the discussion.

If one disagrees with a statement or premise, they should address the points they disagree with by writing a reasonable rebuttal.
 
you're being very monosyllabic there Earnie! :lol:

I'm tired. A group of predominantly white kids and predominantly white police kept me up till 4am last night.

Anyway - at least we can all agree that both Cameron and Johnson are boobs? Cameron has absolutely no sense for PR, which is perhaps odd, given his only real world job was in PR.
 
I think name calling of other forum members is not attractive.

It brings nothing to the discussion.

If one disagrees with a statement or premise, they should address the points they disagree with by writing a reasonable rebuttal.

Fair enough.

Yes you are, but in this country 80% of the crime is black.

You managed to actually get this perfectly wrong. 80.6% of arrests in the UK are white, 7.6% are black.

http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/mojstats/stats-race-and-the-criminal-justice-system-2008-09c1.pdf
 
I can tell you that in Manchester it is mainly 'white' youths doing the damage here.
 
I think name calling of other forum members is not attractive.

It brings nothing to the discussion.

If one disagrees with a statement or premise, they should address the points they disagree with by writing a reasonable rebuttal.
Thanks deep.
 
"Figures released in June 2010 showed an increase in the number of black and Asian people stopped, and revealed that black people were seven times and Asian people two times more likely to be stopped by police than white people."
This is a longstanding issue in the US as well; for example, according to the Dept. of Justice black Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to have their cars pulled over and searched, even though searches of white people's cars are more than twice as likely to turn up illegal possessions (usually drugs). Blacks are also more than three times as likely to have force used against them (gun drawn, grabbing etc.) when pulled over. Having said that, studies comparing ordinary citizens' responses to policemens' during video simulations where one 'shoots' at (if armed) or not (if unarmed) young male targets of various races have consistently found that police do lots better than most of us at resisting their unconscious racial biases, so, as much as we might like to think in terms of some corrupting 'police culture' that the rest of us are happily free from, the evidence doesn't actually support that.


I don't doubt that trends like these are a contributing factor to these kinds of events; I do think though that a predominant focus on them risks dangerously neglecting the alienation from and disregard for even their own neighbors and communities, let alone state and 'greater society,' young people involved in such acts are demonstrating. To me that's usually the most disturbing part of riots, other than the violence itself.
 
I can tell you that in Manchester it is mainly 'white' youths doing the damage here.
Sounds like things are actually worse in Manchester than in London at the moment? Unsurprising I guess, considering the hugely increased police presence in London.

From the Guardian:
Earlier in the day Greater Manchester police sent 100 officers–-four public order units-–to assist in London. While Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, who organised the reinforcements, said such assistance had been planned to ensure other forces could cope with violence in their own areas, it was clear that the city could have used the extra officers.
 
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The only issue in London at the moment seems to be that the EDL are out and about in South London looking for trouble. That could turn very nasty. Otherwise - absolutely nothing happening, all seemingly in Manchester and elsewhere tonight.
 
It all seems the more pointless what is going on up here. There was an interview with one of the 'youths' in question on Sky News and it was just depressing with all this 'it's to show the police what we can do' nonsense.

I have a few friends who live in the town centre and they seem genuinely terrified with unconfirmed reports of people roaming Oldham Street with axes.
 
That's unbelievable irvine. I can't even form words.... this is meant to be civilised society

It actually all kicked off as a racial thing. So to say its not racial just shows you haven't read fully into the situation. It all kicked off because a police officer shot dead a black man. His family wanted a peaceful protest, but gangs took it to violence and riotting.
Now its just turned into chaos, no one even knowing why their rioting. It's just ludacris.

I'm a thousand miles away but this is one baffling post.
 
It all seems the more pointless what is going on up here. There was an interview with one of the 'youths' in question on Sky News and it was just depressing with all this 'it's to show the police what we can do' nonsense.



sometimes a riot is just a riot?

kind of funny how the American right wing blogs are trying to tie this to Obama, and that these are "austerity" riots brought about by global economic collapse that's totally his fault.
 
It's just odd, I mean i've seen a number of riots, they are pretty hard to avoid in Belfast. They can be pretty senseless but you always kinda know that they were specifically against something no matter how daft it may be, and it was never directed towards their own community. Here it's more just because they can.
 
The original protest had a point/purpose, then it flared up, became a riot, and then turned into uber destruction and then looting. Once it started to spread the following night, it was starting at the destruction stage. Once it was clear the London police were stretched and unable to cope - all live on tv, all info flowing online, even looking out your window and seeing van after van of police heading out of your neighbourhood and a long way north - it was like a bat signal up over all of London. "They're not here, they can't cope anyway, all those kids got iPhones, I saw it! Let's go get some fuckin' iPhones!" And off it went.
 
I see a sentiment repeated on various sites, that I can't help agreeing with: It's possible to both condemn the violence but still be interested in exploring the underlying causes.

What makes this sort of thing happen? It's easy to say "thuggery" and "mob mentality" or what-have-you, but maybe this person has a point. Maybe they're full of shit.

Panic on the streets of London - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

I can't pretend to understand the class or race issues that are underscoring all of this (or at least being focused on in the media) - I'm a white American from a middle-class upbringing. All I can do is watch in horror and read with the fascination that comes from being safely thousands of miles away.
 
And a letter to the editor (these are from the Herald Sun, Melb): "is what's happening in London the result of failed multiculturalism? Is this where we are headed?"

:doh::scream::banghead:
 
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