fiercebunny | (no subject)

(no subject)

I've been reading about the London riots since I got home from work this evening. Gobsmacked that something like that could happen, in a world capital, particularly London, of all places. I hope everyone there is staying safe. These are scary times.

One link that I see floating around quite a bit is this Guardian article from September of last year, where the Home Secretary defends cuts to the police budget. Yeah, that apparently worked out real well.

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Been sitting here trying to remember what stopped the riots where I live.

They installed curfew, called in the National Guard, Army and Marines. That did it.

As long as they sit on their hands it will continue over there. I can not believe they have not initiated curfew. No innocent person would be out when all that is going on as it is. Not intentionally.

It's just weird to read about it, it's so much like what happened in LA right down to the head of police not being around when it started. You would think after what other cities have suffered through they would have a clue as to what it's going to take to stop it.

I'm really surprised that it took so long for any government officials to comment on it, but apparently quite a few, like the Prime Minister and the mayor, were on holiday. It reminded me a lot of how Bush took awhile to respond to Katrina. Hello! Your capitol is ON FIRE. It should not have taken the PM four days to call his vacation quits. The longer the government waits to do anything, is just inviting crazy/racist vigilante groups to take charge instead.

And as for them learning from other cities, I think their heads are willfully in the sand. In that link I posted, the Home Security chief mentioned that NYC did police budgets cuts and that turned out okay for them. I don't think that's really accurate statistically. (Not to mention New York's reputation for crime back in the day before they amped up the police force.)

Ugh, I can't imagine how scary it must be to live through a riot. Those were scary times.

Only time in my life that I had a gun in the room by me. Thank goodness it didn't get that bad.

Yeah there seem to be a lot of excuses as to why this is happening but that doesn't stop what is happening right now. I can't help but also think of Japan after the quake. So many people lost so much including young people, the government has been not so great yet nothing like this happened. If they wanted to riot in Tokyo after the quake they could have since there wasn't hardly anyone around and a lot of the police had gone north to help. Same with cities like Sendai where they didn't even have power. If anything it's a cultural thing where people do not have respect for others and do not get that by destroying property of others they are hurting themselves.

Now just how much money is going to be available for the poor now that they have to pay for all the damage and cost of police due to this?

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