The riots in London began on August 6, two days after 29-year-old
Mark Duggan was shot dead by police who were attempting to arrest
him. He was carrying, wrapped in a sock, a blank-firing pistol that
had been modified to fire live ammunition. Both shots fired were by
the police. These are the facts, as reported later by the Independent
Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).
Unfortunately, the IPCC didn’t tell Duggan’s family and friends any
of this. According to the protesters who gathered outside the local
police station two days later, many of his relatives had first learned
that he was dead when they saw his picture in the news. They said that
Duggan’s fiancée had had to call the IPCC to identify the body, not
the other way around. Later that night, they said that the police had
attacked a 16-year-old girl who was part of the protest. Two nearby
police cars were set on fire. Four days later the riots ended with large
sections of London still smoking, five people dead and an estimated
$160 million in property damage.
I’m going to be frank here: the police badly mishandled the situation.
They shot a man who never fired his gun; they didn’t give the family
the information they had a right to know; they didn’t respond to the
people who showed up to protest about it. And what’s more, they did
this in an area of London where distrust of the police is practically
a cornerstone of the culture. As a young man interviewed by “The
Guardian” said, “We all know the police and the lengths they are
willing to go to. We don’t believe their stories about how he died.”
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| Justyn Iannucci |
Did no one see how this could go wrong? Did no one realize that
this is the district of random stop-and-searches by police, of cameras
on every corner? This is the domain of Operation Trident, a police
unit that deals very specifically with black-on-black gun crime. Did
no one think that this might be a district that should be handled very,
very carefully?
Apparently no one did, because the riots were inexplicable to
the politicians. The deputy mayor of London stated that “Criminal
elements were to blame for the trouble,” which to me indicates a
remarkable lack of insight. Yes, breaking, burning and stealing are all
illegal, but that sort of thing isn’t to blame for the trouble. The rioting
is the trouble. The commentators who declare that these riots were
entirely criminal in origin are mistaking effect for cause. The riots
weren’t caused by criminal opportunism, and they weren’t caused by
Mark Duggan’s death, though that was certainly the catalyst.
As Professor Gus John from the University of London said, “Many
of those young people who you’ll have seen in the footage [of the
riots] would have been people who have been regularly searched by
the police, some of them resenting that massively.” In other words:
these riots, while tragic, very much needed to happen. The politicians
are very carefully misunderstanding the message here, for their own
political reasons. But for the rest of us it’s obvious: a riot is a wake-up
call. The fact that this could happen at all — that a police action could
lead to such a violent reaction from the community — tells us all
we need to know about the relationship between the people and the
supposed authorities charged with protecting them.
