The Ignored London Riots Context – 333 Deaths In Police Custody, 0 Convictions

By Alexander Higgins – Contributing Writer
August 9, 2011

The Guardian reports on the context behind the London Riots that is being completely ignored – unbridled corruption and police brutality.

The U.K. is ripe with police corruption/brutality and while the corporate media refuses to report on it, an article from The Guardian hits the nail on the head.

Since 1998 there have been 333 deaths in police custody and not one single conviction, which previously prompted a Guardian piece warning that the police are not on our side and that there is a movement by the masses to remove the media barons and the feral elite from power.

When you add that context to the brutal execution of a black man and the beating of a 16 year old girl at a peaceful protest by 15 police officers, a story that has been scrubbed by the corporate media, you get anarchy in the U.K. which has now spread across all of England.

We must also consider the widespread reports of the possibility of full scale martial law being declared on the streets of London.

‘Banker puppet govt + police brutality + betrayed youth = London riots’

Officers in London have been given permission to use rubber bullets to disperse crowds. A top Metropolitan Police official said they’re not afraid to use any tactic necessary. But investigative journalist Tony Gosling believes the force is in big trouble.

The Guardian lays out the context that can’t be ignored:

There is a context to London’s riots that can’t be ignored

The Guardian

Those condemning the events in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year).

Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures.

The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms, but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper.

The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

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