London Riots Continue Into Third Day

Violence affected several areas of London over the weekend, apparently sparked by the shooting death of a man by police. Host Lisa Mullins talks to The World’s Laura Lynch in one of the affected boroughs.

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Male Announcer: The following was recorded at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.

Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World.  British police are struggling to contain the spread of violence going on in London.  The riots began Saturday night.  They erupted amid community anger over the recent shooting death of man by police.  The rioting continued in the British capital yesterday and today young people with baseball bats smashed shop windows and hurled objects at police officers.  What’s more, skirmished between police and young people have now broken out in Britain’s central city of Birmingham. The World’s Laura Lynch is in London now.  The escalation, Laura, apparently is no longer an issue just affecting London.  What are you hearing?

Laura Lynch: Lisa, it quite frankly is getting quite hard to keep up with all the places where the violence is breaking out.  I don’t know if you can hear in the background, but right behind me right now there is the sound of a siren.  I heard quite a few of them in the last few hours.  The violence started to breakout again late this afternoon in eastern London, then we heard about problems in two neighborhoods in the southern parts of London, and now further south of London there are several shops set ablaze. All of these instances of violence seem to have one thing in common and that is confrontations between young people, mainly seen as young male teenagers, and the police.  They’re throwing bricks at the police and rocks, and anything they can get their hands on.  And when they’re not doing that they are looting stores or setting things ablaze. It’s hard to see this as a protest movement of any sort as much as it is young men trying to make trouble and trying to get goods out of stores, walking away with whatever they can. Now that it has gone up to Birmingham we’re seeing much the same thing happening up there.  And so for the police this was already a challenging time and it’s becoming more challenging as the hours go on.

Mullins: Well, as you say it seems to be opportunistic and kind of copycat activity right now, but what sparked this in the first place?

Lynch: What sparked this initially was last Thursday when a young man was killed by the police in the community of Tottenham, a very deprived community in north London.  His family staged a peaceful protest outside the police headquarters in Tottenham on Saturday, saying they were not receiving enough information about why he had died and how he had died. Now that was already going to increase tensions in a community where there are still lingering tensions between people and the police.  He was a black man.  They’ve always been somewhat suspicious of police, and so that seemed to be what triggered off the riots in Tottenham.  And they were severe.  There were a number of businesses destroyed.  A building that was created in the 1930s that was seen as a heritage building is now going to be demolished because it simply cannot be kept standing. People have been evacuated from their homes.  I was up there today and I know a lot of people there were dismayed, were angry at what they had seen happen to their community, and were struggling to come together to send out another message.  I met a minister there named Segun[?] Johnson who looked around and said he was just dismayed at what he saw.

Segun Johnson: We’ve never seen anything like this in the last 20 years.  It’s a destruction of life and of businesses.  And we believe that this is not a true representation of the silent majority, they are just criminals, but definitely is not the London that is waiting for the Olympics to happen.

Mullins: Well certainly police and government officials have to have that same worry that the minister mentioned there, the Olympics are coming up in 2012.  You’ve gotta think also a lot of people coming to London as tourists this summer.  And particular reason for  concern for them?

Lynch: Well, I think so, I mean London’s image is everything.  This country lives on tourism and to an extent the rest of the country does too.  So of course this kind of thing looks terribly bad.  And for the police who admit they have a huge policing task ahead of them next year, trying to meet this challenge is all the more important.  And I think you’ve seen that kind of concern manifested today in the fact that the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has announced that he’s cutting short his vacation to get back here and try to contend with this.  As well, the main minister responsible for policing in the government, she was come home as well.  So great concern here that they have to get this under control, not just for the safety of the people, but the image of London because London is not looking very good right now.

Mullins: All right, The World’s Laura Lynch on the violence in London and elsewhere, thank you very much, Laura.

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