Editor’s Note: This is a special report from London, England written by Woodstock Early Bird Special Correspondent NICOLE BARTNER. Bartner is a Woodstock, Vermont resident working for an international law firm in London.
The rioting and looting in London is MUCH more widespread than they are even showing on the TV news. It is spreading throughout the entire city. The Police are completely outnumbered, not to mention UNARMED. The riot control Police, who have been on duty three days’ straight with little to no sleep, appear to be armed with nothing more than plastic shields.
The hooligan youths (mainly male, but also female – and ranging in age from as young as 12 or 13 from the looks of them on the TV) know that; (1) the Police are outnumbered and fearful of having more of their members injured; and (2) the Police are unarmed. So they simply ignore them or charge right back when the Police push forward with their shields.
The first two nights the Police attempted to use horses and dogs to control the crowds, but appear to have given up on that. The news commentators actually appeared to be criticizing the use of Police dogs, as if that were too much force. Apparently they’d prefer the entire city to be burned to the ground.
Some neighborhoods have no Police presence at all, there are just not enough of them to cover the city. In those places emergency services will not respond because they have no protection, so buildings are left to burn.
I am working in an office of about twenty people. Every one of us experienced the looting last night. It is not spreading from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, as you might think. It is jumping ALL OVER the city. To give a New York analogy, it started in the Bronx and then was also in Brooklyn, last night it was also in Manhattan. They are not showing the “better areas” being looted on the TV. However, one of my co-workers was watching looting in Notting Hill/on the Portobello Rd from his apartment window.
I live on Kings Road in Chelsea, which is the fanciest shopping street in London. That is where they are always taking pictures of Kate Middleton and her sister shopping. They started looting on Kings Road last night. That would be like looting on Madison Avenue.
Basically, anywhere there is a Tube station there looting. And there are Tube stations EVERYWHERE. The looters are communicating with each other via Blackberry Messenger, because it is encrypted and the Police have a harder time hacking in. So they message each other and say something like, “Be at the Sloane Square Tube Station in half an hour” and then twenty or thirty people come up out of the Tube station and start trashing the neighborhood.
Everyone in government was away on their European-style-month-long summer holiday and the Prime Minister (really thought the Rupert Murdoch thing was going to take him down, but maybe this will!) did not return from his $15,000 a week Tuscan villa until last night, THREE DAYS into the mayhem. The Home Secretary came home a day earlier and she gave a statement on TV saying, “This behavior is unacceptable.” NO KIDDING.
I can’t convince any of my coworkers to accompany me to the pub tonight because everyone is afraid to go out after dark now!
Julia Carlisle
Woodstock Early Bird 