Looks like those racist islamophobes on Chinu's thread were wrong to label the British riots as caused only by Arabs and blacks. Seems the rioters are blacks and whites and pretty much anyone ... the common element seems to be underclass:
'The Police Did Nothing'
Meet Kamran Raif on his first night of security duty in London.
By ANNE JOLIS London
Kamran Raif sits in front of the smashed windows of his brother's store in north London. It's Tuesday night, your correspondent needs soda and this is the only 24-hour grocery within a mile.
A can of Red Bull at his side and fists jammed into his parka, 29-year-old Mr. Raif watches and waits. Like most of London after the previous three nights of mayhem, our stretch of Islington is tense but still.
The night before, at approximately 9:30 p.m., between 30 and 40 teenagers broke into the shop and left with all its liquor, cigarettes and cash. Mr. Raif, his brother and a handful of customers were inside at the time.
"I saw them coming and started to lock the doors, but they kicked through the glass and forced the doors open. All the customers ran to the back and my brother called the police," he recalls.
The storefront comes with a metal shutter, but the lock had been broken since Mr. Raif's brother bought the business four years ago. They never felt the need to fix it until this week.
Once inside, the looters snatched six-packs of Supermalt from the shelves nearest the entrance and hurled them at the cigarette and alcohol cases behind the register. They appeared to be 16 or younger and sober to Mr. Raif. He doesn't know if they were kids from the neighborhood, but despite their hoods and balaclavas he could tell "from their hands" that his looters were mostly white.
"They were very shameful. It was a horrible experience."
The police never did appear, although they followed up nine hours later with a phone call. "Everything we pay here—taxes, rates, rents—it's all so expensive. And we can't even get the police when there are people robbing our shop." Mr. Raif pauses as a string of patrol cars and a fire truck speed down the street, heading north to a rougher neighborhood. "They were busy. I know."
By mid-morning Tuesday he and his brother had cleaned up, restocked and reopened.
"We got the metal shutter fixed too," he says, raising one eyebrow and glancing up. Neither of us mentions the Molotov cocktails and sledgehammers that have made fast work of similar barricades since Saturday.In Brixton, in Hackney, in Croydon many of the Raifs' peers have been ruined and won't be reopening.
"I've been here 12 years," says the Pakistan native. "I've never seen anything like it."
So what's the problem? Welfare cuts, racist police, the "rich"?
"Please," he laughs. "We're all poor.
"Look, my point of view is this: It started in Tottenham, on Saturday, when a man got shot by the police. People protested, and then some people went and burned down a police car. And the police did nothing. They burned down more police cars, they burned down a bus, they burned down a building—and the police did nothing. They needed to respond. Instead the police retreated in Tottenham. So this, whatever you call it, it started as something against the police. The police did not show the strength to push back, and it spread. And that is why I'm out here now like a security guard."
As we speak, "it" is spreading to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Wolverhampton. Elsewhere in London, locals have formed vigilante groups and are patrolling their own streets.
Home Secretary Theresa May earlier on Tuesday had defended the government's use-of-force policies, declaring that "the way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities."
Consent, and the most surveillance cameras per capita in the free world. It's been a terrible week for Westminster's brand of compassionate panopticism. This is what happens when consent breaks down. Cameras will eventually help the authorities round up some of the perpetrators, but they failed to prevent the lawlessness in the first place.
As for the Raif brothers, they have no army—only a shop to run. "Things are already hard. If we close down, where's the money going to come from? We stay open. We see now it's at our own risk. But this is our business."
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