British courts come down hard on youth for "riots" New head cop will "get the job done".

The Met's new head cop, a "friendly" face in the hood

There is much noise here in Britain about the new head of the London police force, (the Met) in the aftermath of last months disturbances. The new boss has announced that "criminals" will fear the new police force under his command. There will be "total policing" he says and criminals will be "harried, pursued and repeatedly targeted." "I think in the past," he says, "the police service has got trapped into some partnership working which is not always about fighting crime."  What he means here is that the working class communities, the most impoverished among them, where the police had hoped the community members would be forthcoming with information about who was doing what is not paying off.  Being poor or permanently unemployed doesn't make one stupid.

After the riots, London's top policeman wants to change all that and "concentrate on our strengths" which is as "problem solvers.  We go in, sort a problem out quickly and move on." All this war talk is for the ears of the British elite and the middle classes that fear the rampaging hoards.  One problem the Metropolitan police chief and his 32,500 strong army will not solve is the one that caused last months problem, unemployment, poor public education and social services and the corraling of the disenfranchised of society in to urban slums. The head cop never mentioned once the massive cuts in social services for example or the lack of opportunity. 

And despite all the rhetoric about lost generations of youth and the need to solve the problem of youth unemployment, alienation etc.  It is clear in the aftermath of the disturbances that the response is repression.  Two days ago it was revealed that Magistrates were instructed to "ignore sentencing guidelines" in their dealings with the "rioters" * and get the job done. They clearly want to send a message to the young people that the "usual" channels should be used.  "Why can't they send an e mail to their MP, or hold a candelight vigil like civilized people would?"

It is coming to light that 90% of the young people before the judges of the ruling class are male. 21% are aged 10 to 17 and 31% aged 18 to 20 according to official findings reported in the UK Guardian today. 73% of those arrested had been previously "cautioned or convicted" the report says, but anyone that has lived for any length of time in the inner cities, as I have in the SF Bay Area knows that the this doesn't mean much when the primary role of the police, as the new Met boss admits, is to "harass, target and pursue criminals".  The cops do not apply this strategy to slumlords, I know this from experience in tenants rights campaigns. Also, a cop can make you a felon with the stroke of a pen.  During our strike in 1985, a scab knocked me down with her car and the cop gave me a ticket, not for obstructing a vehicle, but for breaking some law about obstructing a cop in his line or duty or something like that; fortunately, I was in a Union that had a lawyer on retainer.  But presto, I became a felon overnight and you have to live in the US to understand how that disenfranchises you, and I should add, the effect this has on black folks, particularly youth, who are "targeted" most of all and who are almost 50% of the prison population. (See blogs under the racism or justice system label for more stats on this subject).

But even with this biased statistic about "criminal history", only 55% of juveniles arrested had any run in with the injustice system which shows that the events of last month drew in a whole new group of first timers.

True to the cause, the judges have sentenced 315 people so far with 176 of them receiving immediate jail sentences of 11.1 months.  The report compares these figures to the average during "normal" times. This is an incarceration rate of 43% for "rioters" compared to 12% for similar offenses through 2010.  For those convicted of theft (shoes, TV's cell phones etc) the figures are 67% for last month's events compared to 2% normally.  There are other figures that show that the state is intent on teaching the youth a lesson and warning all workers that it means business, that includes those who participate in the coming strike wave against the pension cuts that the Union officials have threatened and that we hope gets out of their control so that the ranks can actually achieve some major victories.

Would this sell on E Bay for $20?

Compare these sentences and to the those handed out to the real criminals. Nick Leeson was the money trader who stole more than $1.5 billion dollars and broke the Bearings Bank, one of Britain's oldest.  I remember reading about how he and his friends would go to a bar and light their cigars with HK$ 1000 bills. He served six years in jail.  He ended up as CEO of a football team and has written two books, the first one, How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World boasting about his crime and making lots of money off his years as a thief. The latest one, Back from the Brink: Coping with Stress must tell of how difficult life has been for him.  How nice.  One of his jackets sold for $21,000 at auction.  That should give some of the convicted youth an idea, maybe they can sell their hoodies on E Bay. Jerome Kerviel, did better than Leeson. He lost $6 billion of his employers (really our) money and spent only three years in jail.   The fact that these folks spent any time in jail was because they stole from their own; they all steal from us.

I read today of the British PM, Cameron in Libya basking in his glory after the NATO invasion. (What happened to the no-fly zone resolution?) congratulating Libyans on "taking their country back".  The Libyans are in for a bit of a surprise as Cameron is in the process of taking from the British workers and youth all those social gains made over a couple of centuries of struggle.

Protesters clash with police in Rome, in Chile, in Greece, in London.  The struggle will now intensify between the various groupings in Libya as despite statements to the contrary, the French and British, and US bourgeois want their just rewards. (As an aside, the British invited the murderous Bahraini regime to the arms fair here this week). 

We live in very interesting times.


 *While I recognize that there is behavior we refer to as rioting I don't like the term simply because language is important. The capitalist media is very careful about language it uses to describe events in society and while much of last months events would fall under the heading "riots" I think that other forces in society, like the organized Labor movement for example needs to more often refer to such events as "uprisings" because they occur among sections of society that have no formal organizations and, to be honest, they have not only been abandoned by capitalism but also by traditional organizations and political parties of the worker class. If these forces don't like the methods used we need to offer an alternative.