British Police Crack Down, But Not on Rioters

img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-100892" title="London riot" src="/files/wxrimport/2011-08/london-riot.jpg" alt="" width="535" height="340" /><

Britain's equivalent of LA's Koreans in the '92 riots include the Sikhs of Southall shown in this hostile BBC segment, Kurdish and Turkish storekeepers in North and Eastern London neighborhoods, Bangladeshis in the East End who rushed from the mosque they'd been guarding to protect a local bank, and Anglo-Pakistani men in Birmingham, three of whom were killed last night in an incident that locals fear may lead to an eruption of black vs. south asian racial violence.

(Some of the best coverage has been by locally based foreign correspondents like this Australian journalist.)

Many of these brave people have been threatened with arrest by the same police who stood by on successive nights and watched feral gangs of hoodie-wearing youths loot and burn stores. For some mysterious reason of institutional culture, London's Metropolitan Police have seemed far more concerned with protecting their monopoly on law enforcement than with actively enforcing the law against marauding teen vandals and thieves.

They were particularly energetic in their confrontation with "vigilantes" in the predominantly white working class North London district of Enfield yesterday where a significant number of men, some of them allegedly members of the infamous fan club of the Millwall soccer team, had gathered to protect the community. Police in riot gear moved in force to disperse the crowd, displaying far more determination than they had shown against the rioters.

It is hardly surprising that vigilantism is on the rise given a) the disastrous failure of the police to protect the homes and businesses of ordinary people over the weekend, b) the authorities' strange complacency about the destruction of property, and c) their strange obsession with not using baton rounds, tear gas or water cannon no matter how much damage and injury those non-lethal tools might save. To get a mild taste of this bizarre obsession check out the insistence by former top cop Sir Hugh Orde that nothing short of armed insurrection could justify the use of baton rounds. (Burning people out of their homes and driving ill-equipped police out of town centers as in this footage apparently isn't serious enough to justify the firing of bean bags and rubber bullets.)

Indeed the real surprise is that it has taken so long for vigilantism to emerge in a country that for two decades has been bizarrely under-policed.