The Roots of Britain's Riots

...Since jobs are unavailable at the moment, though, the undertaking is essentially an attempt to get possible troublemakers of f the streets and prepare them for a future that may or may not be promising...

...No longer does an American have to try to explain to smug Englishmen why Miami is a tinder box, or, how come crime is out of control in Los Angeles...

...With unemployment rates accelerating faster in the ghettos than elsewhere (about 10 per cent for whites in Britain, more than 30 per cent for black youths), these grievances have grown more intense, aggravated by the weakening of family bonds among Britons of West Indian origin: The native-born youngsters do not share the values of their less alienated foreign-born parents...

...But the immediate detonator for the riots was neither joblessness nor a growing feeling among black youths of being deliberately discriminated against...

...race riots in Detroit, Watts, Chicago, and other cities in the 1960s, and later in Miami, at no time were guns used by either side in Britain...

...Seizing the moment, Richard II, the boy King, shrewdly pretended to sympathize with his aggrieved rural subjects, and before they knew what was happening, they were being driven helter-skelter back to the sticks...

...It happened in Brixton, where a crowd of black youths quickly formed, convinced that the attempted first-aid treatment was an assault on the victim...

...they appear to have absolutely nothing to lose...

...It is unlikely that the upheavals Britain has faced thus far this summer will be so easily relegated to the history books...

...The Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi) migration was accelerated by the brutal expulsion of the large, long-resident Asian community from Idi Amin's Uganda...

...Yet Britain will need more than economic renewal tocope with the very real racial strains its officials are reluctant to recognize...

...A substantial black influx, mostly from the West Indies, was encouraged when Britain needed unskilled labor to man its transport systems and other public services in the 1950s and 1960s...

...The recent nonwhite immigrations have been of different proportions...

...The friendly, ambling bobby-on-the-beat, until now a British institution, has backup he never had and never really needed before...

...For the fact is that the nonwhite population in Britain has increased very substantially over the last two decades, injecting extraordinary heterogeneity into what was an overwhelmingly homogeneous society...

...Feeling deliberately provoked on their home ground, a large number of Asian youths gathered and attacked the pub, burning the place down and harassing police trying to defend the cowed skinheads...

...One swift change wrought by July's violence has been the transformation of the police's image in Britain...

...Urban authorities in Berlin and Zurich may have had to deploy small armies of combat police to battle unruly young people...

...Tipped off about a follow-up raid in Brixton, police armed with warrants who made late night raids in search of caches of Molotov cocktails seemed to be getting even by needlessly wrecking personal property—a matter that has come under close scrutiny and for which recompense will be made...

...People have not been made the victims of violence because of the color of their skins...

...Others attribute the spreading of the incidents to "copycatting" inspired by television's close coverage of the riots: Young people watch their counterparts in other cities make of f with TV sets and push-trolleys full of groceries from ravaged supermarkets, and seemingly get away with it, so many follow suit...

...The great Peasants' Revolt of the 14th century was squelched...

...Lest anyone doubt this, a special prison installation has been opened for convicted rioters...

...Congregating mostly in big city ghettos, they have often justifiably complained that they do not get the same quality of benefits available in less crowded, less impoverished whitecom-munities in the country...

...Distasteful as they find the task, the British have to carefully examine the racial aspects of their predicament if they are to avoid still greater eruptions...

...Her comments about the other incidents have amounted lo a recognition of the problem of joblessness among blacks, coupled with a strong insistence that the police must be backed to the hilt in maintenance of law and order...

...Prime Minister Thatcher was quick to separate Southall from the other trouble spots...

...The Times editorial echoed the conventional wisdom here thai more non-whites should be recruited for responsible positions, and the police are indeed trying to enroll qualified young blacks...

...Norman Gelb, a regular Nkw Leader contributor, reports from London for the Mutual Broadcasting System...

...Little was needed to turn the ill-will into a spree of lawlessness...

...There is, however, no denying that many innocent law-abiding blacks feel themselves mistreated, giving rise to a deep-rooted hatred of the police in their communities...

...The police have been the primary target of most of the riots...

...But (he idea of a methodical "affirmative action" program remains —despite Britain's fiery summer?very remote...

...Tension quickly built up in the area, fed by rumors that the police had killed the youth they had gone to help...

...Furthermore, a great many of the brick-throwers and looters have been between the ages of eight and 15...

...A case was publicized in London not long ago in which a black, who had the receipt for two toy cars he had bought still in his pocket, felt so intimidated during questioning after he was picked up with them in his possession that he confessed to having stolen them and was almost brought to trial...

...he protested...

...They also say that black youths regularly go purse-snatching and pickpocketing in "uptown" districts of British cities where the pickings are better...

...The youthful skinheads have, of late, aligned themselves with Britain's minuscule neo-Nazi movement...

...Nevertheless, every incident has occurred, or at least originated, in areas where there are large black communities, such as Brixton in London or Toxteth in Liverpool...

...Adistinction should bedrawn, too, between the rioting elsewhere and what occurred in the heavily Asian populated West London district of Southall...

...Clusters of youths out on the street with absolutely nothing to do, day after day, month after month, are bound to be unsettling even for Britain's well-ordered society...

...An English friend was particularly upset by reports that American newspapers were describing the outbursts here as race riots...

...It is widely asserted that Britain's crippling unemployment rate must carry much of the blame for the troubles...

...In short, the gut reaction of the Conservative government has been to clamp down, to deploy police units to nip potential destruction of property in the bud, and to show the participants they can't get away with that sort of thing?not in England...

...In the past, England easily accommodated comparatively small groups of refugees: Huguenots avoiding religious persecution in 17th-century France, loyalists from the American colonies unhappy about the victorious American Revolution, Jews, Poles and others fleeing the Nazis or Communism...

...Angered by the limitations imposed on their earnings and movements after the bubonic plague had decimated Britain's agricultural work force, they plundered, burned and generally engaged in mayhem...

...When whites have participated (a few of them with anarchist revolutionary aspirations, most of them hooligans out for loot and kicks), they have been joining in on what blacks have started...

...At the same time, the Tory Government is embarking on a major program to train unemployed youths for jobs...

...Yet unemployment has long been a recurring experience in parts of the country without violence ensuing, even where the jobless situation has been most desperate—in Scotland, Wales and northeast England...

...As for their treatment of suspects, they contend it is far gentler than in other countries and offer as evidence the fact that most official complaints registered by the public against police misbehavior in Britain refer to alleged rudeness, rather than roughness, of police officers...

...Asavestigeof British imperial days, these former colonial subjects carried passports entitling them to residence in Britain (that has changed now...

...In addition to being easily distinguishable as people from other places, they came in such great numbers within so brief a time span (nonwhites have risen from 2 per cent to 6 per cent of the population since 1960) that they quickly put a severe strain on Britain's already hard-pressed social services...

...Black youths dislike and fear the police...

...They have suffered hundreds of casualties from bricks and Molotov cocktails...

...Unquestionably it is a factor...

...The London Times has noted that "one of the most effective measures in the USA [to promote racial harmony] has been to promote qualified coloreds to positions of obvious authority—in the Army, the police and above all the public service—so that the colored community can identify with those who take decisions as well as those at the receiving end...

...That has become practically a Continental habit...

...The police insist that their reputation for discriminatory treatment of blacks is undeserved, that they are just as tough on whites behaving suspiciously...

...But it should be pointed out that unlike the U.S...

...Stand-by riot helmets are being introduced, as well as water cannons and armored vehicles for crowd control...

...She rushed there to deplore the racism of the outsider with the shaved heads who had invaded the peaceful and industrial Asian district, and to assure local community leaders of her total support...

...It could be that much of the simmering tension in Britain's ghettos will not cool until economic recovery becomes a reality and the unemployed youths of the country, particularly blacks, have something to do besides roam store-lined streets—or sit home and be tantalized by television shows depicting all the good things life has to offer that are beyond their reach...

...But the British were astounded last month to find their own hitherto peaceful cities a stage for looting, Molo-tov cocktail barrages, and fleet-footed squads of masked rioters attacking un-derequipped police...

...In a sense he was right...

...They claim they are regularly stopped, questioned and searched for no reason at all, and often brought back to the police station for more thorough grilling...

...The black gardener of my neighborhood public park was stopped and hauled of f to the police station for questioning because a police sergeant could not believe that the sportscar he was driving belonged to him...

...Then their hapless leader, Wat Tyler, was stabbed to death by the Lord Mayor (politicians tended to be even more demonstrative than New York's Ed Koch in those days...

...These groups were all eventually anglicized or scattered across the British demographic landscape, identifiable here and there as quaint, non-threatening curiosities...

...As of this writing, relatively few people (mainly bobbies) have been critically injured, and only one person has died as a consequence of wounds suffered...

...To some degree, no doubt, this is true, but it cannot explain the nature and extent of what has been taking place either...

...There were whites rioting too...

...There the trouble developed when a group of "skinheads" arriving for a local pub gig molested and insulted Asians on their way to the same pub...

...The Manchester police station, manned by 13 officers, actually came under assault...

...Instead, the British are trying desperately to decipher what has happened in their land for so long justifiably famous as a haven of tranquility and decorum...

...They point to statistics showing that the crime rate in Brixton, with its large black community, is higher than anywhere else in the country, and that the situation is similar where there are other black concentrations...

...The next night a black man was stopped in Brixton on suspicion of drug dealing, and the resulting fracas inaugurated Britain's worst summer since the German blitz...

...In London, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, Birmingham, and elsewhere, the British arecon-fronting developments unprecedented for them in recent times...

...They seem especially anxious to rule out the possibility that what they have been experiencing is a racial explosion...

...The violence was triggered by abysmal relations between young blacks and the police...

...Although they may well find themselves out of work one day if the British government does not soon start to manage the national economy better than Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has so far, it cannot be said that they are driven by that particular anguish now...

...Ironically, the initial riot on July 3 arose from an effort by two policemen to give first-aid to a young black who had been found stabbed in the street...