I'm surprised that the riots have been going for 3 days already and nobody has made a thread about it yet. Then again, I only learnt about it today. London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Croydon are all going up in smoke (to varying degrees), apparently. Reasons are as yet not fully identified but speculation has it that youth unemployment and dissatisfaction with the austerity measures are primary factors.
Anybody got any insights? Especially from the Poms.
Sometimes nobody bothers to make threads about current events. I ought to do more reading, since I am still not sure how this snowballed into the looting I've been seeing in the news. Opportunists abound.
sounds alot like those french riots a few year back when they burned about 300 cars in paris (and other city's) evry night xD
What year was this exactly? I'm trying to narrow down a search.
I heard that a riot happened in Tottenham, London because a police officer shot an innocent person. I'm also not entirely sure what the riots are about. I guess it's about time I started doing some research.
Riots have started because a guy has been hit and mortally wounded by a bullet coming from a policeman, apparently during a shooting. As far as I've heard, the guy was in a taxi, and we aren't sure as up to now whether he was innocent or not; the police claims he shot first, the riots show the people think otherwise. Well, didn't the protest start more or less peacefully? I'm not sure but it could be. And like in every riot, people muscled in that only wanted to riot or break windows or pillage or burn things. And then things got started, who knows?
most riots started off peacefully. only when people are demonstrating people dare to break things on their way. and after 1 comes a 2nd etc. etc.....
you could see this very good in greece a few months back. media was only talking about the riots in athene. but what they didn't say was the millions of greek that despised those rioting people and just wanted a normale demonstration.
I think a lot of people used the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan to start violent anti-police riots in Tottenham - from there it's spread further out into london and the south of England with what the media is dubbing 'copycat crimes'. The people responsible for these riots are (apparently) mostly young guys between the ages of 13 and 25 and a little bit of the looting/rioting is being attributed to the gangs of youths that operate throughout several areas of London who're using the chance to steal and destroy stuff to their advantage - more of the violence is being attributed to kids just doing it for fun though. To a degree I'm more inclined to believe that the latter is more likely the reason for the majority of the violence and not gangs or political/anti-police protesting.
I doubt there'll be a war of any type, it's too disorganized and random to be a civil war, they're picking looting targets with high-value stuff - not ones with any sort of political affiliation. This suggests that it really is just mindless criminality and thuggery rather than any sort of beginnings of a 'civil war'.
I doubt there'll be a war of any type, it's too disorganized and random to be a civil war, they're picking looting targets with high-value stuff - not ones with any sort of political affiliation. This suggests that it really is just mindless criminality and thuggery rather than any sort of beginnings of a 'civil war'.
Mark Duggan, 29, was in a car being followed by police during a covert operation on Thursday.
But Duggan, a known offender from Londonâs notorious Broadwater Farm Estate, became aware that he was being followed and opened fire on the officers.
He shot the officer from Scotland Yardâs elite firearms squad CO19 in the side of his chest with a handgun.
