<p>I suspect the answers are not going to be simple, it is going to be a complex bunch of reasons about why this has taken a life on its own, from the little bit I have been able to fathom, the initial cause could be what often causes riots, a group of people, reacting to either a real or rumored situation, that fans flames already brewing. In this case, the shooting death of a young minority male triggers people who for whatever reason feel marginalized, and erupt (note I am not going to judge whether the cops acted badly, whether the people who were ****ed off had reason to be, it doesn’t really matter, to be honest, since those who started this somehow felt the need to do this…).</p>
<p>We went through these kind of riots in the 60’s, we had riots in Watts, Detroit, Harlem,Newark and other inner city areas, where due to economic conditions and quite frankly very real claims of racism and being treated like crap, they erupted, usually over some sort of incident that sets it off. And yes, there was economic opportunism in those riots, people smashed store windows and looted, feeling like they were getting something back from the man (in the case of the 60’s riots, the stores targeted were often either owned by Jews, or were perceived as being owned by Jews, and the claim of the looters was that Jews economically exploited them for years, so this was payback, though in the end it didn’t matter, it was like a flock of locusts on crops, almost everything was hit).</p>
<p>With London, BBC news and other sources seem to be saying that the real culprits were people simply looking to stir things up, local community groups who represent the Caribbean community and such have said that the initial protests and such have little to do with the ongoing riots, that the ones now rioting are either thugs looking for an opportunity to score a fast one, or the usual gang of bored, angry types of all races, anarchists (read drug addled morons), and those who go there in their own perverse way to have a good time.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that the bad economic times have something to do with it, people are feeling angry about what they see as something more making their lives miserable, but I also think that blaming Britain’s austerity budget alone or claiming it is cuts doing that are too simplistic. </p>
<p>As far as why the police are using water cannons, police learned a long time ago that armed force in a riot is a disaster area, that it is kind of like cutting off the head of a hydra in that armed response tends to breed even more violent reactions and so forth.</p>
<p>One of the sad parts about this is if it plays out like the 60’s riots did, it will make the lives of the people in those areas worse, not better as some may think, and those who go there thinking they are standing up for the oppressed and fighting for them by rioting, will end up making their lives worse if history holds. Places like Newark, Harlem and Detroit after the riots lost a lot of stores, it wasn’t all that long ago that Newark, for example, finally got a supermarket opening there, the first since the 67 riots, and other then Harlem (which gentrified), most of the places I am talking about lost what little they had and still have not recovered, 40+ years later.</p>