Problems At United Kingdom

Riots in London
A city in flames
Aug 8th 2011, 23:13 by M.S. | LONDON
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ANOTHER part of London belongs to the police tonight after hours of conflict with young and not so youngprotesters and looters. In Hackney, north-east London, a burnt-out bus, a boarded-up optician's, broken glass on the pavement outside JD Sports, a retailer, all bear witness to the conflagration sweepingthrough the capital's poorer neighbourhoods for the past three days. Fourteen mounted police are passing me on their horses. The clop of their hooves sounds oddly bucolic against the throaty thrum ofhelicopters overhead.
The horses were big enough to scare Marie (not her real name) and her eight-year-old daughter, she says. "People here are angry because of that boy the police executed inTottenham," she says, speaking of Mark Duggan, whose death on Thursday ignited a three-day wave of violence around the city, "and the police are so rough when they want to make you move." But anothercouple of mothers (their children are older) take a different tack. They say it was the looters who were rough. "Maybe they don't have jobs, but a lot of people don't have jobs. You don't have to rob andsteal and smash things up. It ruins it for everybody else here."

But in the confusion there were some modest signs of civic heroism, of bystanders who did not just stand by. A group of looterssmashed their way into a Boots optician in Mare Street, wrenched shelves off the wall and made away with fistfuls of spectacles. Rob, out for a walk after breaking his Ramadan fast, was taking food to theowner of the shop. He stopped some of the smash-and-grab crew. "This is his life," he said, and took back what glasses he could.

Rob told me of another earlier episode. A het-up gang of young menwere advancing on a police line on Mare Street, stones in their hands. A large man intervened, coming between the two lines with his hands raised. "Don't!" he shouted at the men. "Don't do this."...