Lessons in London’s Looting

After the fairy tale wedding of a few moonlights ago, the world watched in shock & disbelief as anonymous looters rapaciously ravaged UK stores stealing shoes, clothes & electronic devices.

I have walked through these high streets looted in Croydon & Clapham in south London & I also felt the outrage at this senseless brutality & mayhem. I used to window shop in these stores and eat in some of the restaurants lining the streets now turned to ashes.

The rioting looters wearing ski masks & bonnets burned buildings & attacked defenseless working class neighborhoods, too. The looters did not belong to any one pigmentation & color or racial background: they were just kids which were either middle class & wealthy. There was no statement of ownership or signature to the riot; there was no unifying ideology except that these looters were self driven and acted as a mob.

The rioters were called a mob because they were not organized & their participation was instantaneous. But, a mob is also part of the larger society and it is an indictment that something is deeply wrong in Great Britain now.

For now, the causes of this mayhem can be attributed to a conflation of many things. But, the framing of things or theories to explain all these is addressed to the big society not just the governance apparatus. In short, the solutions are indicated for all social institutions.

For instance, is it the primary role of government or is it the role of family to make sure that our children are able to distinguish between right & wrong? Surely, the discipline of children & the re-establishing of a new system of values are clearly the role of both the educational system & family.

London residents waited uneasy & were quick to blame the London police whose tactics proved inadequate as the riots were initially treated as a public disorder issue rather than as an issue of criminality. It is said that it was not about the number of the police responding to the riot but it was about the way the police were deployed.

Police tactics are different for crimes against public order such as rebellion & illegal assemblies because these crimes must be conflated with civil & political rights or the right to petition government for redress of grievances. Also, the riots with looting were sparked allegedly by an incident of police brutality that resulted in the killing of a young boy in the north of the United Kingdom. Still, everyone was in consensus that no police brutality can ever justify the breakdown of order that shortly followed.

The parliamentarians from all political parties immediately huddled in the wake of the riots & resolved to start somewhere in addressing order & the breakdown of discipline. The magistrates are now swamped with hearing the cases of the more than a thousand youth arrested. The oft repeated query by the judges was, “Where are your parents?” Prime Minister David Cameroon is now urged to look at his social policy & scale up his “inner city” small project from the periphery and make it a national central project for working class neighborhoods & defenseless minorities.

The Prime Minister is also proposing for a national citizen service. In turn, the Labour Party was heard as saying that these instant and simple judgments will lead to wrong solutions. So, there is a call for a deep inquiry into this social problem manifesting as riots & looting & breakdown of discipline & the corresponding restoration of responsibility by various social institutions so that this mayhem may not happen again – especially that the eyes of the world will be focused to London again for the Olympics in 2012.