HoustonChronicle | The riot that tore through parts of north London's deprived Tottenham neighborhood has cast a pall over Britain's capital, echoing an earlier era of racial unrest, while spreading malaise through a city preparing to host the Olympic Games.
Eight officers were hospitalized after a peaceful protest against the shooting death of a young man degenerated into a Saturday night rampage, with rioters torching a double-decker bus, destroying patrol cars and trashing a shopping mall.
Looters descended on the area around midnight, setting buildings alight, and piling stolen goods into cars and shopping carts. Sirens could be heard across the capital as authorities rushed reinforcements to the scene.
"This is just a glimpse into the abyss," former Metropolitan Police Commander John O'Connor told Sky News television Sunday. "Someone's pulled the clock back and you can look and see what's beneath the surface. And what with the Olympic Games coming up, this doesn't bode very well for London."
As residents of Tottenham and nearby Wood Green picked through the wreckage Sunday, O'Connor said the disturbance had echoes of Tottenham's 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, a deadly disturbance that led to the savage stabbing of a police officer and the wounding of nearly 60 others — brutally underscoring tensions between London's police and the capital's black community.
That riot was among one of the most violent in the country's history. It too was sparked by the death of a local resident after an encounter with the police.
Journalist and Tottenham resident Rizwana Hamid, who covered the 1985 riots, said Saturday night's violence was reminiscent of the earlier eruption in Tottenham, an ethnically mixed area which is home to one of London's largest black communities.
"The climate has changed, but very little of the issues have gone away," she told the BBC. She cited desperation, poverty and what she said was a lack of communication from police about the circumstances under which the man — 29-year-old Mark Duggan — was gunned down.
British media said that an officer involved in the shooting had a bullet lodged in his radio, suggesting a gunfight, but other details were scarce. Britain's police watchdog is investigating.
The Metropolitan Police, colloquially known as Scotland Yard, has struggled for years to cope with a 1999 inquiry into the death of a black British teenager that concluded that the force was "institutionally racist." In 2003, the Black Police Association even went as far as to call on ethnic minorities not to join Scotland Yard, saying discrimination was rife.
Although the force has made strides in its relationships with black communities, tensions linger.
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