On the Tottenham Riots

As you may be aware, the last two days have seen serious bouts of rioting occur in various parts of London. The instigation for the rioting was the shooting to death of a certain Mark Duggan, whose questionable acquaintances in life, and alleged behavior towards the police before being shot, certainly make him seem a less than entirely sympathetic victim. Even if Mark Duggan were the angelic figure that circumstances indicate he was far from being, it is also impossible to accept that the appropriate response to even the most unjustifiable shooting is to engage in large-scale looting, arson, stone-throwing and other acts of mayhem under the guise of expressing one's anger at the police.

The riots of the last two days cannot and should not be excused, and those who participated in them should be held accountable for their actions, but here's the thing: despite the utter wrong-headedness of the rioters' deeds, and the dubious character of the individual in whose name they've gone about their lawlessness, there is in fact a germ of justification for their hostility towards the London Metropolitan Police, a justification which goes well beyond the death in an alleged firefight - and here I stress the word "alleged" - of one man with shady friends. The fact is that the London Metropolitan Police has a history of biased and heavy-handed policing which presumes guilt if you happen to be the wrong skin color, regardless of however much the evidence might be in your favor.

When I say that the Met has a history of biased policing, I do not make such an accusation lightly: the truth of the matter is abundantly established. To be black is to live under a presumption of guilt as far as the police is concerned, while any complaints one takes to officers of the Met are likely to either be dismissed or followed up with less than complete vigor; I know this much not just because of statistics I've seen, but because I have personally experienced such treatment at first hand, on more than one occasion. Indeed, I was once again on the sharp end of racially-tinted "policing" this morning, on my way into work.

To forestall any attempts at justifying or excusing the incident I shall shortly describe in detail, let me state here that, as ought to be obvious just by reading my posts, I am not "gangsta" in any respect,  I do not dress or act like a hip-hop "thug", and certainly do not speak like one. I work in the City of London, in the financial sector,  am well paid, and dress accordingly. No one would ever mistake me for a hoodlum or troublemaker unless operating under the assumption that my skin color qualifies me as one.

Now, with that out of the way, let us proceed to the details of the incident. This morning, as usual, I began making my way out of Liverpool Street station. As anyone who's been through there during rush hour will attest, the exits get very packed, and at times all one can do is proceed at a plodding pace. This was what I was attempting to do, when suddenly I began to feel someone shoving me from behind.  I turned around to see a woman gesticulating and shoving at me, and asked her where exactly she was shoving to get to, pointing out to that there were several people ahead of me. Thinking that the end of it, I turned away from her, only to be shoved even more violently than before! I shrugged the woman off me, and warned her not to shove me again or there would be serious consequences, and then turned away again to continue on my way to the office, thinking it better to avoid a pointless, time-wasting confrontation with someone so clearly of unsound mind. What I had not reckoned with in my attempt at exercising self-control was the rank prejudice and stupidity of the police and their civilian auxiliaries.

Proceeding on my merry way once again, I saw a woman suddenly jump in front of me. From looking at her badge, I saw she was a Police Community Support Officer (badge number 6874), and asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted to know what happened and I recounted the event; thinking that was it, I started walking forward again. Suddenly she grabbed my arm, and began shoving me, and when I asked her what possible justification she could have for doing so, she claimed she just wanted to know "what's going on": when I noted that I'd already told her that, and also that she seemed uninterested in asking the aggressor in the incident any questions, she could not even be bothered to offer any justification whatsoever, busying herself instead with calling for reinforcement as if I were a suspect in the active course of conducting a crime. Meanwhile, the woman who'd been doing the shoving had of course slipped away completely ...

Shortly an actual police officer came to join us (badge number 6846). Of course he displayed no interest in finding out why I was upset with his auxiliary, nor even in what I had to say about the incident which served as an excuse for her to start manhandling me in full public view as if I'd been shoplifting or purse-snatching. Instead he began to accuse me of being "aggressive", and when I asked him what said "aggressiveness" consisted of, he claimed I was pointing as I was talking, ironically, and as I pointed out to to the officer, he was in fact the one gesticulating at me with his index finger and not the other way around, and it was his colleague who had been doing the grabbing and shoving, not I. When I asked him what possible justification there could be for holding me and making me late for work while the woman who'd been shoving me was left entirely at liberty, his response was simply to state that they would hold me there all day unless I began acting in a suitably supplicant manner.

Eventually these two upstanding representatives of the law deigned to take down my name and date of birth, for purposes unstated; as I asked them at the time, they seemed to be operating under the assumption that whatever had happened earlier, I had to be the guilty party - though of what I was actually guilty no one could really say - in as far as letting the other person go made it impossible for any even-handed investigation to proceed. The retort of the PCSO was that "It's your fault!" Yes, it was my fault that in her haste to presume that in any argument between a black male and a white female, it is far more important to publicly humiliate the black male in a show of dominance than to find out what, if anything, the white female's role in the argument might have been ...

Of course, despite my less than subservient attitude, they had to let me go, as the fact of the matter is that I hadn't actually done anything, as even they had to admit: it is still perfectly legal to be angry at officers who rush to treat you like a criminal though you're the one who's been subject to unwarranted aggression. What makes this particular incident even more infuriating, though, is that it isn't the first time I've been held up by the police for no good reason by any means, and each time the incident has ended in the same way, yet when I was physically assaulted by two thugs in broad daylight on Oxford Street - the busiest street in all of London - and despite shop guards who witnessed the incident repeatedly calling the police, and multiple members of the public coming forward as being willing to serve as witnesses, the police took an hour and a half to show up, took 3 more hours to collect my report of the incident, and then informed me a week later that they would not be proceeeding with an investigation, supposedly because they were unable to identify my assailants. This was especially laughable as London has more CCTV camera coverage than any other city in the world, yet the London Metropolitan Police manages to make such poor use of all this surveillance. So much then, for trading privacy for security ...

I've given such a detailed recollection of my experiences not just because I'm still angry about it all (which I certainly am), or because I have no faith that the complaint I've subsequently filed will lead to any meaningful action (I don't believe it will), but because I want to give some insight into why it is that so many people might seem less than fully sympathetic towards the police over the recent riots. When your interactions with the police are inveriably either in a context of unjustified aggression and suspicion, or else your appeals for assistance are dealt with in a less than serious manner, it naturally breeds in you an attitude that the police are just as much the enemy as the criminals they're supposed to be protecting you from, useless at best and an agent of caprice and prejudice at all other times.

Comments

[Benjamin Fowler]

Thanks for sharing this interesting story of this kind of casual racism (because it's pretty obvious what kind of attitudes motivate this kind of behaviour). Kudos for you for having shown such restraint, although unfortunately, I doubt you would've had much say in the matter.

Here I was thinking that it was just the way one looked and dressed, rather than skin colour these days. Your experience is an interesting data point. I've been stopped and hassled by police a couple of times in the past, but each time, I chalked it up to having "asked for it", because I was wearing the wrong clothes, cycling home on a BMX and a rucksack (almost guaranteeing police attention).

[Andrew]

Outrageous. You should try to get this story published in the mainstream press.

[Ipvideo]

"It is still perfectly legal to be angry at officers who rush to treat you like a criminal though you're the one who's been subject to unwarranted aggression"

It is certainly legal but is it prudent?

Given that police have wide latitude in these situations, what's the point of agitating them? The likelihood that it improves one's situation is low and the downside of them ruining your day is real.

Tactically, I would think one is better off saying 'yes sir, no sir, thank you sir, have a good day.'

Ultimately, are people responding primarily for one's color or one's attitude? I don't think it's prudent to agitate people in such mundane situations.

[Abiola]

Ipvideo,

The fly in the ointment for your argument is that the one-sided detention *preceded* the irritation on my part - in fact, that is what caused said irritation. I had no "attitude" when the PCSO grabbed my arm and started shoving me after I'd calmly answered her question; nor could it have been my "attitude" which caused her to ignore the pushy woman entirely, leaving her free to leave the scene while claiming she just wanted to know "what happened" ...

Frankly, even though your advice isn't really applicable in my case, I think it is precisely the problem that police officers - and badly trained clowns in quasi-police guise - are allowed so much latitude that one should have to treat them with exaggerated tact. They are public *servants*, not our masters, and the fact that they so quickly forget this is why police-civilian relations are often so testy in poor and minority areas. Too often the police act as if they were victorious conquerors in such areas rather than civil servants tasked with keeping the peace, so is it any wonder that they are hated?

I have no sympathy at all for thugs who go out on looting sprees, but I'd be lying if I said my attitude towards the police were much better, after what I've seen, and what many others I'm personally acquainted with (all of whom are also middle or upper-middle class) have experienced. What we see is that the police do nothing when we need them, and needlessly harass us the rest of the time.

[me.yahoo.com/a/92muoQVippfURjcth3tCOxn_uoIut0ozp7lj]

It may or may have not been racism. One time in Leicester square a witnessed an old man being harassed by a street mime. The old man had been shuffling along (with a cane no less), minding his own business when the street mime, who had gathered a crowd, stepped in front of him and began doing his shtick. The old man tried to go around him but the street mime kept getting in his way. All this time this time the crows was applauding and laughing at the mime and I presume, the old man. Finally the old man raised his cane and the mime backed off. At that moment 2 of Britain's finest accosted the old man and never even bothered to ask him what was going on or even attempted to interview the mime. The had watched the whole thing transpire and went after the old man who was simply trying to gt away from someone who was harassing him. Last I saw the cops were carting the old man off. It's the mentality of the British cop to simply pick one and that's god enough for them. They only care about controlling the situation, not justice. Just be glad they don't carry guns like ours.