Londoners defend themselves from rioters - the police did not do anything so we chased them off ourselves -
The London lockdown seems to have worked. After three nights of escalating rioting across the city, last night was quiet. Instead, the looting and arson swept across England's provincial cities from Nottingham to Gloucester with Manchester seeing the worst of the violence.
It is unclear whether London was quiet because of the massive deployment of police — British Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday there would be 16,000 on the streets — or because across the city stores shut early, windows were boarded up, and staff were sent home.
Maybe the rumor that the biggest selling items at hardware stores and online mail-order shops were crow bars and other hand-held heavy metal objects deterred looters. Shopkeepers were clearly preparing to defend their property.
It appears that's what saved the shops in my neighborhood, Stoke Newington, on Monday night. After the rioting started in Hackney central, it moved half a mile west to the shopping district of Dalston. The mob then swung north along Kingsland Road toward Stoke Newington High Street. It's a neighborhood of Turkish Kurdish exiles and almost all the restaurants and shops — including several gold and jewelry stores — are owned by members of this community. More than a few of the Kurds have had to deal with the Turkish Army so a couple of hundred rioters weren't going to deter them. Crow bars and kebab skewers in hand they faced down the mob.
One Kurdish shopkeeper, Yilmaz Karagoz, told the Guardian newspaper, "We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves."
Police inaction, or ineffectual action, has been a big talking point in London the last 26 hours. Big questions hover over the Metropolitan Police's handling of these unprecedented events. People accept the logistics are hard enough. Police were faced with spontaneously combusting situations organized in the time it takes for kids with criminal mischief on their minds to text each other locations where the police seem not to be present.
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