Image via Wikipedia
Twenty six years after PC Keith Blakelock was murdered on the Broadwater Farm estate, riots have erupted in the same area after a man was shot dead by police.
Tonight there are buildings and vehicles burning and looting has taken place in the centre of Tottenham with reports of around three hundred people involved in disorder.
We do not yet know if the man who was apparently killed by a police bullet on Thursday was himself armed, but there are reliable reports that a police officer was struck by a bullet in that incident and he only escaped injury because it was his radio that was hit.
We are already being told that this is an area of ‘deprivation’ and a friend of the dead man’s family is reported as saying:
“They’re making their presence known because people are not happy,….this guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.”
When she says ‘he was involved in things’ she means he was a criminal. There will be an enquiry to establish whether the police acted properly when they shot Mr Duggan. It may be no surprise that his friends and relatives do not have confidence in that, but it is very telling that some of them think it is OK that a person was involved in crime and that they are justified in taking to the streets before they know whether he shot at a policeman.
The people who are attacking police, destroying property and looting shops are not doing that because they are starving, oppressed or suffering from discrimination. They are doing it because they habitually hold their communities in fear and they think they can get away with intimidating anybody who tries to establish order and safety on the streets.
The sad truth is that a quarter of a century after Keith Blakelock’s murder, the police have made no progress in breaking the grip of violent crime infesting the estates of north London. It is impossible to stop the drug dealing, prostitution, unlicensed drinking and intimidation that is controlled by criminals. There are two main reasons for this.
The first is that people will always pay for sex when they want to and people will always get high. Trying to stop these things by making them illegal has no more effect than telling the tide not to come in and outlawing activity that cannot be stopped just passes that trade over to very nasty crooks instead of it being conducted with reasonable safety. The second problem in this specific area is the failure of the police and the local authorities to deal with black criminals. This is partly due to fear of the political consequences of doing it and largely because there are too few black people in policing and running the community.
We will be bombarded with requests for enquiries into poverty and deprivation in the area. Rather than producing masses of hot air and wasting time and money on post mortems of the riot, the real need is to immediately establish zero tolerance of the real crime which destroys residents tranquility and peace of mind.
Get in hard and fast on every mugging, burglary, assault and theft. Stop graffiti and littering. Ensure that habitual offenders are prevented from damaging this community any more. Do that well enough and people will stop being afraid to speak out about crime. They will become more interested in keeping their area nice and they will want to have careers in the police, fire service and other jobs that some are seeing as enemies at the moment.
Criminal gangs are not born out of poverty or deprivation, they come from fear and alienation. Fear must be driven from the streets so that decent citizens can safely build communities.
Related articles
- Tottenham in flames as protesters riot (guardian.co.uk)
Posted by malpoet 
