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Tottenham riots

funkaholic

By funkaholic
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pcock Grand Master

pcock

Posted
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at least with gremlins you can just try your best to stamp on their heads without remorse, if it angry neds you have to deal with in the cinema then you're fucked.

 

actually i think the sensation of a small gobliny head getting squished by my foot would probably institutionalize me.

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BCM Grand Master

BCM

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apparently tooting is also in for a bit of rioting...tooting's getting far too close to me for my liking. fuck it. might get down there...

 

edit: i'm getting the following t shirt made: LOOTING IN TOOTING 2011.

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Guest Gary C

Guest Gary C

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I would love it if all the Twitter and Blackberry chat has been a decoy and all these youths have just been texting and calling each other and then turn up unexpected somewhere.

 

This will end with the death of a child.

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pcock Grand Master

pcock

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its good to see britain getting stuck into rioting anyway, ive always been quite jealous of vikings and normans and whatnot with their looting and pillaging.

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perunamuusi Grand Master

perunamuusi

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interesting interview from a few months ago in Vice re: Parliament square riots and the future of crowd control....

 

 

 

What did you make of the Parliament Square riots?This was the fourth student riot, and for the first time I felt that the police had been put under serious physical pressure. I could see they had lost their confidence. They had that thousand-yard stare of a Khe Sanh marine whose perimeter is about to be overrun. At the G-20 and rounds 2 and 3 of the student riots I thought the police had been too violent. I also thought that they weren’t seeing what was around the corner. I’ve covered two wars and about ten riots all around Europe over the last 15 years, and I’m looking at the officers who are wasting the underfed, softly spoken students and thinking: “Well, you’re maybe laughing under your gelcoat-layered public-order helmet now. It’s all very well being able to bully a schoolgirl while you yourself are protected by a shield of thermoplastic body armor and 16 GA carbon-steel-reinforced chest plates. But what’s going to happen when you’re faced with a mob of 300 rooting-tooting urchins on the cuts-shredded estates of Liverpool, Southeast London, and Bristol? That’s going to be a different matter.”

 

How do you mean?I was recently in Liverpool with a man called Stephen French, one of the guys who started the Toxteth riots. He and two other young black men tried to stop police from getting heavy-handed on one of their friends, and things escalated into one of the worst riots of the 20th century.

 

That’s Stephen French from the article we did about the Norris Green gangs a couple of years ago [“Mersey Infanticide,” V15N9]. What’s he been telling you?Well, he does a lot of grassroots community work, often dealing with young gang members in places like Norris Green. He told me that when the government cuts really start to bite into working-class Britain, the demonstrations and the riots will make today’s thing in Parliament Square look like a Punch and Judy show.When they start repossessing people’s council houses and the benefits are taken away and the health centers close down?Yes, we know this is going to happen. And the young people in these places are going to be as “upset” as the students. The feeling, among experts, politicians, and even police officers I’ve spoken to, is that the British underclass of this country is going to rise up against the authorities like nothing we’ve seen since the Brixton or Toxteth riots of the 80s.

 

I was a kid during those riots—I remember being terrified.But that’s not the important bit. The problem is that many of these “youngers” are proper ruffians and scuffians—they are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, handguns, and IEDs, which is pretty much standard gang fare in many postwar urbanizations across the country these days. It may sound frightening, but the question then is, how are the police going to deal with what can technically be called an armed insurgency? Even jobless brickies know how to get hold of a gun these days, because, simply put, they are out there in large numbers.Gang culture is deep rooted on these estates, and the unemployed are swelling their ranks. What’s different is that people today are not afraid to use serious violence, especially against a system they blame for obliterating their future.

 

Sounds scary. Do you have any more evidence to back this up?Read the papers. The police are also gearing up for the threat. I’ve been scouring them all and looking at Police Authority reports, and I can read you out some basic facts if you don’t believe me.

 

Sure…I’ve been researching this story with the help of contacts from both the police and anarchist organizations. What I’ve learned is that the Metropolitan Police have bought 13 armored personnel carriers called Jankel Guardians that weigh about six tons each. They also have sniper platforms in them.

 

Sniper platforms?Yep. There’s also evidence that they’ve acquired a surveillance drone and some ballistically protected, army-style Land Rovers—the kind they use in Northern Ireland and Iraq. All across the country, law-enforcement agencies are buying weapons systems used in Afghanistan, including Heckler & Koch G36 machine guns. They’ve got a range of more than half a mile and can fire 750 rounds per minute.

 

If the police had had those kinds of guns at the riot today, there’d have been a bloodbath.There’s more. In Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, there will be paramilitary-style training centers where police officers will be taught by the SAS. There have also been sightings of police officers wearing civilian dress but wearing blue caps marked “Police” and carrying modified Heckler & Koch rifles that are exactly the same as the SAS use.

 

For the benefit of our American readers, what is the SAS?The Special Air Service. They are Britain’s—and some would say the world’s—most elite troops. You call them up as a last resort when things have gone totally pear-shaped and you need somebody to come in and kill everybody all at once. They make the Special Forces look like traffic police.I read about this kind of stuff briefly, but the papers said it was because they were training their forces against “Mumbai-style attacks,” meaning Al-Qaeda operatives who would come into our shopping centers and slaughter shoppers.Hmm. Do you believe that Al-Qaeda is going to attack shopping centers in Birmingham and Leeds, or Liverpool for that matter? Do you even believe that Al-Qaeda exists? Drones and Snatch Land Rovers are tools of oppression. Land Rover was castigated in the 70s for supplying the apartheid regime in South Africa. What’s different here and now? Isn’t it more realistic to think that now the police themselves are losing a sizable proportion of their force and they’re teaching themselves to deal with an increasingly unhappy British population by learning military tricks and accumulating military hardware?

 

Who else did you talk to about this?I also spoke to a professor called Stephen Graham, who’s an expert in cities and society at Newcastle University. He reckons the military ideas of counter-insurgency learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are relating increasingly to domestic policing in the UK.

 

How so?Well, look at the newspapers. You’ll see that armed-response units are being increasingly called out for relatively minor offenses. And that’s because the authorities are increasingly viewing cities as threatening spaces where everyone is a target.

 

Cities as opposed to what?Stephen also told me that in 2011 the civil disturbances will be more widespread and not confined to ghettos. It’ll be the poor white suburbs as well, because those places are already on the breadline, even before the cuts. There’s a tension, a real hatred now of the police antigang units, which is similar to what we had in our day. The main difference now is that in the poor areas where the government cuts are going to hit the hardest—those areas are armed to the teeth.The problem is that when you militarize the police, activists see them as fair game—as the enemy. That’s bad news for the 50 percent of officers who want to serve the common good and uphold the law—like the police medic Stewart who gave me a bandage after I was attacked by a load of fucking Facebook teddy-boy students and those scruffy twat benefits scroungers from the Whitechapel Anarchist Group.

 

 

http://www.viceland.com/int/v18n1/htdocs/caam-on-you-faggot-cunts-664.php?page=1

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Guest Iain C

Guest Iain C

Posted
Posted

More or less business as usual in Bethnal Green... Currently enjoying a scotch and soda in the Approach pub, which has locked and chained its beer garden this evening.

 

Lots of police vans whizzing around in the direction of Hackney though.

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Guest disparaissant

Guest disparaissant

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  • ITV Reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
  • Young Londoner: You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?
  • ITV Reporter: ...
  • Young Londoner: Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

he went on to point out that the last time there were riots in the area, in 1985, afterwards they got a pool.

 

welp.

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