VIDEO: London riots and looting spreads elsewhere
August 9, 2011 02:41 pm
LONDON — The rioting and looting that convulsed poorer sections of London over the weekend spread Monday and early Tuesday to at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area and broke out for the first time in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, in what the police called the worst unrest in memory.
Violence also erupted in several other cities, including Liverpool, Nottingham and Bristol, as well as in three towns in the county of Kent, southeast of the capital, the police said. An enormous fire consumed a large warehouse in the Enfield section of London after a similar blaze ripped through a furniture store in Croydon.
In one incident, three people were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder for trying to run down a police officer with a car as he tried to stop looting in Brent, north London, the police said.
“Last night was the worst the Metropolitan Police Service has seen in current memory for unacceptable levels of widespread looting, fires and disorder,” Scotland Yard said in a statement tallying a further 200 arrests overnight, bringing the total from three nights of unrest to over 450.
So many people had been detained, the police said, that all the police cells in London were full and prisoners were being taken to precincts outside the capital.
Londoners awoke in some areas to the sight of fire hoses playing on rows gutted buildings. Some civic activists in stricken areas used social networking sites to urge people to join clean-up efforts in streets where small businesses from hair-dressing salons to shops selling baby clothes had been looted. A video posted on YouTube showed a rioter rifling through the backpack of a dazed and wounded pedestrian, then tossing aside his booty on the sidewalk.
Prime Minister David Cameron, apparently caught off guard while on vacation with his family in Tuscany, reversed an earlier decision not to cut short his holiday in the face of plunging world financial markets and boarded a plane for home to lead a meeting on Tuesday of the so-called Cobra committee of senior officials that deals with major security issues. The name is an acronym for the committee’s location in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.
For Mr. Cameron’s government — indeed for Britain — the rapidly worsening situation presented a profound challenge on several fronts.
For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government’s spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country’s poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.
In some areas, rioters moving quickly and nimbly on foot and by bicycle seemed so emboldened that they began looting in broad daylight, while in others they raided small shops and large stores free of any restraint by the police. Newspapers on Tuesday showed images of hooded and masked looters swarming over shelves of cigarettes or making off with flat-screen televisions.
On Tuesday, the violence seemed to be having a ripple effect beyond its immediate focal points: news reports spoke of a dramatic upsurge in household burglaries; sports authorities said at least two major soccer matches in London — including an international match between England and Holland — were likely to be postponed because the police could not spare officers to guarantee crowd safety. The postponements offered dramatic testimony to the pressures on Mr. Cameron and his colleagues to confront the dark shadow that the rioting has cast on plans for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
That $15 billion extravaganza will have its centerpiece in a sprawling vista of new stadiums and an athletes’ village that lie only miles from the neighborhoods where much of the violence in the last three days has taken place. With the Games set to begin in barely 12 months, Britain will have to satisfy Olympic officials that there is no major risk of the Games being disrupted, or ruined, by a replay of the rioting.
With television footage of the riots beamed around the world, “London looks lawless and in some areas it is,” Des Kelly, a sports columnist, told BBC radio early Tuesday.
Beyond these challenges is the crisis that has enveloped London’s Metropolitan Police on which security for the Olympics, and the immediate hopes of quelling the rioting, depend, The New York Times reported.
Violence also erupted in several other cities, including Liverpool, Nottingham and Bristol, as well as in three towns in the county of Kent, southeast of the capital, the police said. An enormous fire consumed a large warehouse in the Enfield section of London after a similar blaze ripped through a furniture store in Croydon.
In one incident, three people were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder for trying to run down a police officer with a car as he tried to stop looting in Brent, north London, the police said.
“Last night was the worst the Metropolitan Police Service has seen in current memory for unacceptable levels of widespread looting, fires and disorder,” Scotland Yard said in a statement tallying a further 200 arrests overnight, bringing the total from three nights of unrest to over 450.
So many people had been detained, the police said, that all the police cells in London were full and prisoners were being taken to precincts outside the capital.
Londoners awoke in some areas to the sight of fire hoses playing on rows gutted buildings. Some civic activists in stricken areas used social networking sites to urge people to join clean-up efforts in streets where small businesses from hair-dressing salons to shops selling baby clothes had been looted. A video posted on YouTube showed a rioter rifling through the backpack of a dazed and wounded pedestrian, then tossing aside his booty on the sidewalk.
Prime Minister David Cameron, apparently caught off guard while on vacation with his family in Tuscany, reversed an earlier decision not to cut short his holiday in the face of plunging world financial markets and boarded a plane for home to lead a meeting on Tuesday of the so-called Cobra committee of senior officials that deals with major security issues. The name is an acronym for the committee’s location in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A.
For Mr. Cameron’s government — indeed for Britain — the rapidly worsening situation presented a profound challenge on several fronts.
For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government’s spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country’s poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.
In some areas, rioters moving quickly and nimbly on foot and by bicycle seemed so emboldened that they began looting in broad daylight, while in others they raided small shops and large stores free of any restraint by the police. Newspapers on Tuesday showed images of hooded and masked looters swarming over shelves of cigarettes or making off with flat-screen televisions.
On Tuesday, the violence seemed to be having a ripple effect beyond its immediate focal points: news reports spoke of a dramatic upsurge in household burglaries; sports authorities said at least two major soccer matches in London — including an international match between England and Holland — were likely to be postponed because the police could not spare officers to guarantee crowd safety. The postponements offered dramatic testimony to the pressures on Mr. Cameron and his colleagues to confront the dark shadow that the rioting has cast on plans for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
That $15 billion extravaganza will have its centerpiece in a sprawling vista of new stadiums and an athletes’ village that lie only miles from the neighborhoods where much of the violence in the last three days has taken place. With the Games set to begin in barely 12 months, Britain will have to satisfy Olympic officials that there is no major risk of the Games being disrupted, or ruined, by a replay of the rioting.
With television footage of the riots beamed around the world, “London looks lawless and in some areas it is,” Des Kelly, a sports columnist, told BBC radio early Tuesday.
Beyond these challenges is the crisis that has enveloped London’s Metropolitan Police on which security for the Olympics, and the immediate hopes of quelling the rioting, depend, The New York Times reported.
