Angry White Men in Riotous Tottenham.

I Predict a Riot!

The riot in Tottenham has been all over the news since last night, though it initially had to compete with the recent polar bear attack in Norway especially at the Mail's website. Perhaps it is because the source of the rage was not adequately covered at all, the death of just another black man at in a city of over 7 million people was insignificant. Even though it was the police who fired four rounds into the mini-cab, the media seemed baffled at first. Of course, The Daily Mail has since jumped at the opportunity to go on about how Mark Duggan fired on a police officer and therefore forfeited his human rights. The killing of a white student by a bear in Scandinavia seemed to deserve a higher level of coverage than the death of a black father at the hands of police officers. Yet it should be noted that the death of a young black man only lit the match, Tottenham already has an unemployment rate of 8.8% and the community is being subjected to a series of huge cutbacks. Keep in mind a history of racism and police brutality that precedes the riot of 1985.

The exact details of the death of Mark Duggan are not clear, the police were from Operation Trident - the unit that deals with gun crime "in the black community" - who stopped the cab and shot him four times in the midst of an arrest. Incidentally, Operation Trident largely goes by the 'stop and search' approach when it comes to young black men and the point of the unit is to police the black community which requires "special policing" of course. The police have since let the media know that the shots were fired in self-defence because Duggan fired on them first. The police officer who was supposedly shot was in hospital over night and then the police claimed that the shot was absorbed by the officer's radio. An eyewitness claimed that the police had restrained Duggan on the ground when the shots were fired. It wouldn't be the first time the police have killed a man in this way, as we have seen with Charles de Menezes who was shot seven times in the head as he was restrained on the tube. Both men were excluded as targets which could be legitimately killed, by the police and chunks of the media.

Update: The bullet lodged in the police radio was a police issue bullet. So much for the claim that he was a 'stone-cold gangster' who shot at a couple of innocent 'bobbies' only to get what was coming to him. Apparently, the gun was still in his sock when he was killed and the weapon is only capable of firing blanks.

The protest outside the police station was a peaceful one at first. It turned violent after the police set upon a 16 year-old girl with batons. Apparently she had come towards the police lines yelling something about "justice", though the The Daily Mail is currently running with the line that she threw a rock at the coppers. Then there is the police claim that the violence started when the protesters began throwing missiles at police cars and vans, which some might say were 'bait' left there to provoke an attack as seen in the student protests. Of course, the Right are running with the line that the looting is not an expression of a 'legitimate grievance' and not only was it right that the police killed Mark Duggan but these people just wanted to go ape. The looting of shops and burning of houses is not an expression of anything, it is just the cheap opportunism of people who have no conception of community or civic duty. It's a line that has a lot in common with what Derek Vinyard said about the LA riots in American History X.

Karl Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The Right will never understand this quote because they adhere to a conception of free-choice which eliminates all room for even the minimal level of context and determinants. For them these people simply chose to trash their own community, if Mark Duggan was still alive and there was no history of police brutality would this have happened? I think not. The legitimate grievances are socio-economic as well as racial and that is undeniable given the nature of events, unless you subscribe to 'free-choice' in which case it was just coincidental that the riot followed the death of Mark Duggan. This is bigger than Tottenham as poverty is not just ghettoised into a neat section of the City waiting to explode, which is the reason for fears that this could spread to other parts of London.