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<div class="entry-date">August 07, 2012
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<div class="subheadlinestyle">Conservative English Officials Ignore
Lessons of 2011 Riots<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1272">http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1272</a><br>
</div>
<h1 class="title">Olympic Security’s Dual Motive: Conservative English
Officials Ignore Lessons of 2011 Riots</h1>
</font><font size="-1">
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by LINN WASHINGTON, Jr. </div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>One year after riots rocked 66 areas across England for five days in
some of the worst disturbances in that nation’s history, the issue that
initially ignited those disturbances – police abuse – remains an
unresolved problem.</p>
<p>Those August 2011 riots that produced five deaths, the loss of
hundreds of businesses and homes plus overall damage costs exceeding
$1-billion erupted on August 6th after police attacked a group
peacefully protesting outside a London police station against police
fatally shooting unarmed Mark Duggan.</p>
<p>Those protestors included family members of Duggan, a 29-year-old
black man who was one of eight persons to die suspiciously while in
custody of English police during just the first nine months of 2011.</p>
<p>While English officials swiftly slapped prison sentences on persons
arrested during that rioting, like 16-months for a 22-year-old man
accused of stealing ice cream, the official investigation into Duggan’s
death has progressed at a snail’s pace due largely to authorities and
the policemen involved in Duggan’s death erecting their respective
roadblocks.</p>
<p>No English police have received convictions for any one of the
thousands of suspicious deaths of persons while in police custody since
the 1969 conviction of two English policemen for killing a black man.</p>
<p>Last week Pam Duggan, mother of Mark Duggan, issued a statement
criticizing the authorities’ for failing to deliver “justice” to her
family. Duggan’s father died last month without seeing those involved
in his son’s death held to account.</p>
<p>“The past 12-months have been terrible. We still have no answers
about why my son died,” Pam Duggan complained in that statement.</p>
<p>“Thirty-one police officers surrounded Mark and he was shot twice.
Why has none of the police officers given statements one year on?”
Duggan wondered, regarding the death of her son in London’s Tottenham
section, where the rioting began.</p>
<p>Britain’s oft-criticized Independent Police Complaints Commission
(IPCC) is supposedly “handling” the investigation Duggan’s death.</p>
<p>The IPCC, last August, initially declared Duggan fired on an
officer, triggering police to shoot him, but the agency later
backtracked, acknowledging that Duggan had been unarmed.</p>
<p>While that August 2011 rioting produced professed soul-searching
among English authorities including various official investigations,
one year later, activists around London complain about witnessing too
little substantive change.</p>
<p>Community leaders fault the conservative elected officials
controlling London and England for failing to aggressively target high
levels of youth unemployment or effectively corralling police abuses –
twin issues that activists and analysts alike cite as underlying last
summer’s outbursts.</p>
<p>“It’s approaching one year since the uprisings last year and things
are getting worse: more poverty, more unemployment…Over one million
young people are unemployed in the UK with one in two young black
people unemployed,” co-chair of Black Activists Rising Against Cuts
Zita Holbourne said.</p>
<p>“In September students will pay tripled university fees effectively
blocking the poorest from participation in higher education,” Holbourne
said.</p>
<p>In late November 2011 the independent panel appointed by British
authorities to investigate the rioting found a “link between
deprivation and rioting” noting that most of the 4,000 arrested during
the riots lived in some of England’s “most deprived” communities.</p>
<p>“Most disturbing to us was a widespread feeling that some rioters
had no hope and nothing to lose,” declared the Interim Report from the
Riots Communities and Victims Panel.</p>
<p>While that interim riot report entitled “5 Days in August” listed
economic deprivations as an element underlying the widespread rioting
last August, Britain’s conservative led government continued with its
budget slashing ‘austerity’ policies, further devastating low-income
communities like Tottenham.</p>
<p>The same British Prime Minister David Cameron who has authorized
spending billions of pounds for preparing for the London 2012 Olympics
and bailing out bankers continued claiming insufficient funds existed
to address the worsening economic plights of Britain’s poor plus its
working and middle classes.</p>
<p>“I think there is no coincidence with the rise of this conservative
political climate, less emphasis on diversity and the worsening
economy,” 100 Black Men of London President Olu Alake said.</p>
<p>“There is serious unemployment among black men in London between the
ages of 16 and 30 but that is not a big enough issue for politicians to
examine.”</p>
<p>Ken Clarke, the Secretary of State Justice for Cameron’s government,
blasted rioters last August as a “feral underclass” who wanted material
goods without having a willingness to work to obtain those goods.</p>
<p>Yet, grass-roots leaders in Tottenham and elsewhere fault British
leaders like Cameron and Clarke for failing to address festering
problems underlying those August 2011 outbursts involving mostly
under-35-year-old participants of all races.</p>
<p>“The establishment has not always reached out. They’ve done things
in the wrong way,” conflict engagement specialist Ken Hinds said. An
activist in Tottenham, Hinds heads the Stop-&-Search Harringey
Monitoring Group.</p>
<p>Stop-&-Search in Britain is like the Stop-&-Frisk in
America, where police conduct warrantless searches on streets that are
often abusive in nature and inordinately ensnare the
innocent–especially, in the U.S., young men of color.</p>
<p>While both British police Stop-&-Search and U.S. police
Stop-&-Frisk disproportionately target non-whites, British police
also pounce on poor whites with the street search practice.</p>
<p>“Black people are 32 times more likely to be stopped and searched by
police than white people,” Zita Holbourne, the BARAC co-chair and a
trade union activist said.</p>
<p>That interim riot report referenced Stop-&-Search as “a major
source of discontent with the police. This concern was widely felt by
young Black and Asian men, who felt it was not always carried out with
appropriate respect.”</p>
<p>That report cited the context of the “historic backdrop of antipathy
between some members of the black community and the police…”</p>
<p>In 1985, for example, in Tottenham, where Duggan’s death occurred,
the death of Cynthia Jarrett during a police raid at her residence
sparked the ‘Broadwater Farm Riot.’</p>
<p>Participants in that 2011-riot-sparking police station protest about
Duggan death had marched from the Broadwater Farm government housing
development.</p>
<p>The final riot panel report issued in March 2012 found disturbing
concerns about police, with many people thinking police are “corrupt”
and “dishonest.” Over half of people the panel surveyed had no
confidence in complaint procedures against police. “These are worrying
statistics,” the final report stated.</p>
<p>That November interim riot report questioned “whether the issues” of
Bankers’ bonuses, expense scandals by members of Parliament and a lack
of personal responsibility had combined to create “a moral vacuum in
society” as reflected in the criminal, violent, non-caring behaviors
displayed during the rioting.</p>
<p>Simon Woolley, Director of Operation Black Vote, said definite
double-standards exist in how the British system handles transgressions
by the lower and upper classes. OVB is one of Britain’s most prominent
civil rights/human rights activist organizations.</p>
<p>Rioters received harsh sentences demanded by governmental leaders
like one 18-year-old receiving 33-months for posting a Facebook message
that produced no violence. Yet those convicted in the Parliament
expense account scandal received sentences of 18-months or less.</p>
<p>“Who is worse, kids who steal $50 sneakers or politicians who commit
expense account fraud to buy $8,000 flat screen televisions?” Woolley
said.</p>
<p>“If kids are animals what are politicians who should know better?”</p>
<p>While looting and destruction characterized the overall rioting,
there was a political aspect to much of it. Some of those Tottenham
protestors and others initially burned police vehicles, public
transport buses and offices of government entities along with torching
many of the betting parlors filling that lower income community, which
some residents consider parasitic.</p>
<p>Walking down the Tottenham High Road three weeks after the rioting
ceased, one activist said, “Look around. See that government office was
burned and the betting parlor next to it was also burned but across the
street the butcher, restaurant and supermarket were untouched. Clearly
there were specific targets. This was not a mindless outburst but very
precise.”</p>
<p>Empirical and anecdotal evidence from the initial outburst in
Tottenham evidenced an uprising that contradicted riot reactions from
top British leaders like Prime Minister Cameron who angrily declared
rioters represented “mindless criminality, pure and simple.”</p>
<p>Journalist Darcus Howe, a respected elder in Britain’s
Afro-Caribbean community, received an apology from the BBC last August
after a BBC interviewer created a stir by indignantly slamming Howe for
his terming some rioting an “insurrection” by young people upset with
police abuses and economic deprivations similar to the Arab Spring.</p>
<p>Some in London see blocking possible riots as a second unexpressed
motivation for the massive military/police presence arrayed for 2012
Olympics security – a presence that includes over 25,000 military and
police personnel plus thousands of others doing security.</p>
<p>Some activists see the security build-up, which includes jet
fighters, war ships and helicopters carrying snipers, as aimed at
intimidating London residents outraged by festering ills as much as at
deterring potential attacks from foreign terrorists.</p>
<p>“The police are muting the idea of another uprising happening this
summer,” London activist Omowale Rupert said.</p>
<p>Rupert, a member of London’s Pan-Afrikan Society Community Forum,
said police are using the Olympics “as an opportunity to bring out more
guns and stoke up baseless notions of ‘terrorism.’ It is a massive
crowd -management exercise.”</p>
<p><strong><em>Linn Washington, Jr.</em></strong><em> is a founder of
This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849351104/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion</a>, (AK Press). He lives in
Philadelphia. <br>
</em></p>
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