Echoes of the Watts Riot emerge in England

First consider this from the University of Georgia’s Civil Rights Digital Archive:

The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era. The riot spurred from an incident on August 11, 1965 when Marquette Frye, a young African American motorist, was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus, a white California Highway Patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. As a crowd on onlookers gathered at the scene of Frye’s arrest, strained tensions between police officers and the crowd erupted in a violent exchange. The outbreak of violence that followed Frye’s arrest immediately touched off a large-scale riot centered in the commercial section of Watts, a deeply impoverished African American neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. For several days, rioters overturned and burned automobiles and looted and damaged grocery stores, liquor stores, department stores, and pawnshops. Over the course of the six-day riot, over 14,000 California National Guard troops were mobilized in South Los Angeles and a curfew zone encompassing over forty-five miles was established in an attempt to restore public order. All told, the rioting claimed the lives of thirty-four people, resulted in more than one thousand reported injuries, and almost four thousand arrests before order was restored on August 17.

And we call your special attention to this section:

Throughout the crisis, public officials advanced the argument that the riot was the work outside agitators; however, an official investigation, prompted by Governor Pat Brown, found that the riot was a result of the Watts community’s longstanding grievances and growing discontentment with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and inadequate schools.

Read the rest.

Note the similarities to the just ended outburst of rioting that paralyzed England.

The violence began as the result of a confrontation on a hot August evening between police and a member of Britain’s growing black underclass, afflicted with the same soaring unemployment, poor housing, and ailing schools that had outraged African Americans in Watts.

And just as in Watts, British authorities have blamed the violence on organized agitators, rather than confront the deeper issues which had made the violence possible.

From Reuters:

Prime Minister David Cameron blamed the worst riots in Britain for decades on street gang members and opportunistic looters and denied government austerity measures or poverty caused the violence in London and other major English cities.

Cameron told an emergency session of parliament that police tactics had failed at the start of the rioting. Courts worked through the night to deal with hundreds of mostly young people arrested during the mayhem.

“The fightback has well and truly begun,” said the Conservative leader, in power for 15 months.

“As to the lawless minority, the criminals who’ve taken what they can get, I say this: We will track you down, we will find you, we will charge you, we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done,” Cameron said.

Read the rest.

But let’s take a look at another factor that’s surely played a major role in the violence, reported in December by Caroline Davies of The Guardian:

A total of 333 people have died in or following police custody over the past 11 years, but no officer has ever been successfully prosecuted, according to a watchdog’s report.

Prosecutions were recommended against 13 officers based on “relatively strong evidence of misconduct or neglect”, but none resulted in a guilty verdict.

Calling for further research, the Independent Police Complaints Commission said juries were unwilling to convict police officers. Len Jackson, IPCC interim chair, said: “It is clear to us there is some real difficulty in this area.”

The IPCC had a responsibility to investigate and present a file to the CPS “if we feel there are any matters potentially of a criminal nature”, he said. But then it was up to the criminal justice system.

“We have a jury system that is as good as anything in the world, but it is clear that juries quite often find it difficult to convict police officers.”

Only in one case was a civilian member of police staff found guilty of misconduct, and sentenced to six months, the IPCC’s study into deaths in England and Wales between 1998 and 2010 shows.

Read the rest.

What her story doesn’t clarify is the ethnicity and class background of the victims, but we’d bet that they hail largely from the ranks of racial minorities and the underclass. After all, white collar criminals are handled with kid gloves and not police batons.