Sounds like you have a bunch of racist bigots on the Police Farce, over there......
The underlying cause By Arif Azad | From the Newspaper (17 hours ago) Today THE recent riots in London that subsequently spread to other British cities were triggered by the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, who hailed from London’s black community, by the Met police’s Trident unit on Aug 4. As in the past, suspicions arose over the police account of the shooting which, the force maintained, was resorted to when it was fired upon. With family mistrust of the police account deepening, tensions escalated into an explosive confrontation when the Tottenham police station reportedly failed to give plausible answers to Duggan’s grieving family and its supporters. Violence erupted into a seemingly unending round of riots. By Aug 8, riots were being reported from Hackney, Walthamstow, Ealing, Woodgreen, Peckham and Croydon. Skirmishes between police and youth were soon reported from Birmingham and Liverpool which degenerated into a familiar looting spree, with police reportedly standing by. The extent and scale of the riots forced Prime Minister David Cameron to cut short his vacation and announce a slew of measures to control the rioting in an emergency session of parliament. In fact, these riots have not erupted out of nowhere. They are only the latest in a series that dates to 1981 when the first serious and sustained race riots occurred in Liverpool and Brixton in London (the Notting Hill race riots in 1958 were on a smaller scale). In these riots, and other sporadic ones, high-handed policing of local communities was perceived as the spark. The 1981 Brixton riots resulted in a major inquiry led by Lord Scarman which found that anger against the harsh policing methods of ethnic minority communities was a major trigger. The Scarman report, a landmark in British race relations, also indicated urban deprivation, unemployment and widespread discrimination as the underlying triggers. Although it stopped short of recommending positive action, the report proposed better ethnic policing practices in addition to urban regeneration and employment- enhancing schemes. Yet these recommendations failed to make any positive impact on police-ethnic community relations. As a result, mistrust between the police and local communities continued to grow. In 1997, the Macpherson inquiry was set up to inquire into the police investigation of the murder of a black teenager Stephen Lawrence. It found a widespread culture of institutional racism embedded in the structures of the police, thus rendering the latter’s operation discriminatory. Several years after these inquiries, not much seems to have changed in the way ethnic minorities are policed as exemplified in the recent bout of race riots. The perception of black and ethnic minority communities as being over- policed as suspects and under-policed as victims has come to prevail in ethnic minorities as a consequence. Figures from various sources seem to back up this view with one source asserting that black and ethnic minorities were nine times more likely to be stopped and searched as compared to their white counterparts. However, more germane to the current debate is the growing number of deaths of members of ethnic minorities in police custody or police shooting as compared to the situation regarding the whites. Writing in the Guardian, Nina Power, an astute commentator on criminal justice and policing issues, has suggested a figure of over 400 deaths of members of black and ethnic minorities in police custody since 1990. Yet no police officer has been convicted. This figure does not include those who died as a consequence of racially motivated violence. How have the ethnic and black communities reacted to discriminatory policing and the racially motivated violence of the far right? Black and ethnic minorities have responded by forming community defence groups led by members of suffering families. In my research on this model of family-led campaigns, I identified 84 family campaigns for justice running alone in 2006. The thread that binds these family campaigns is the uniform demand for transparent and sensitive ethnic policing and improved family-police communications on the direction of police investigation in the case of a) racially motivated violence; b) death in police custody and police shooting; and c) death in suspicious circumstances. On Aug 6, the family of Mark Duggan was continuing in the tradition of family-led community campaigns when together with its supporters it gathered outside the Tottenham police seeking the answer to the simple question of how Duggan came to be shot. When the family, supported by the community, was turned away without being seen by senior-level police officers the vigil turned violent. With pre-existing, adverse social conditions that include a number of factors like unemployment, pared-down youth services and substandard sink estates, this inadvertent and insensitive snub to the dead man’s family lit the spark that erupted into flames of violence engulfing Tottenham, that has witnessed previous riots, and other parts of London, and spreading to other British cities. One grieving family’s anger at being unjustly treated tapped into wider social pathologies, leading to copycat riots in other boroughs with similarly depressed socio-economic profiles. The race riots call for sober reflection on what went wrong. Given the multiple and complex conditions and mindsets underpinning the current riots it would be unproductive to treat the violence as a purely law and order issue as is apparent from the official response. The need for looking at wider social triggers and underlying causes has never been more urgent if race riots are to be contained in the future. The writer specialises in public policy issues. arif_az...@hotmail.com On Aug 11, 3:06 pm, nominal9 <nomin...@yahoo.com> wrote: > I hope so.....long past time to oust that Rupert Murdoch Puppet > Government of PM David CameROON and His Bobby BuFFOONs... > > Cheerio... > > HAR -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to epistemology@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to epistemology+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
