Recent Riots

It’s been a crazy week in England this past week with all the riots taking place and it is now over a week since the original shooting which sparked of the first set, but since then it has clearly just been riots for the sake of trouble and the chance to loot many of the places these people rely on for their daily lives!

I was in central London on Monday and Tuesday with my daughter and while we didn’t see any troubles it was clear that everything was more tense. There were many more police on the streets and on Tuesday there were a lot of shops closing early from 3pm onwards. Walking through London on Monday night it was much quieter than I have seen for a long time.

It’s incredibly sad what has happened over the past few days especially with the injuries and those who have lost their lives and of course everyone is trying to blame this and that for causing the problems. Earlier in the week when interviewed on TV Theresa May was so out of her depth it was untrue and she clearly had not understood the seriousness of the situation. The Prime Minister finally returns from holiday to ‘take charge’ and make things happen, when in reality it was the police who managed to get things moving. David Cameron came out with a lot of tough words and gave the impression he was giving police more powers, but in reality the police are still in a very difficult position. They will always face the risk of a potential ‘victim’ taking them to the court if they really wanted to.

Being out on the streets outnumbered by the thugs is a very daunting task for any person even if the police do have training. They clearly needed the backup and support of greater numbers and fortunately things improved as the week went by. Just a shame some of the politicians want to take credit again. Since then of course there has been all sorts of talk looking for things to blame for the violence and still the government says that the cuts to police budgets will not mean less people on the beat, mmmm why don’t I believe that?

With the internet and the many tools out there for analysing everything it is quite interesting some of the information coming out and amazing what you can now find out. Go Squared produced this article on the 11th with some stats about the use of the Internet.

Part of the blaming on the riots of course focuses on the use of the Internet. We start getting down to the ridiculous suggestions coming from the Prime Minister and others about the use of the Internet in situations like this and what they can do to stop people using social media. Clearly they sat in the cabinet room and someone suggested that if blocked BBM and Twitter all would be much better! Er NO it wouldn’t guys! Clearly they do not understand what they are talking about. Iain Mackenzie at the BBC wrote this ‘Is technology to blame for the London riots?’ article, which is far more balanced. The government clearly haven’t thought this idea through what are they going to ban in the event of future riots? There are a whole raft of online and mobile applications such as BBM, Twitter, Facebook, Mobile MSN and all the other IM clients, text messages, what about voice calls on  mobile ban those? Who decides when to put the ban in place and for how long? Do you ban the whole lot, by area, network, ISP and the list goes on. What about the people who genuinely need those forms of communication to keep in contact with family members or work?

There are obviously the privacy issues and freedom of speech issues going around which I won’t cover here but for me it is the actual practicalities of implementing such restrictions. If the government banned BBM for example while I riot was taking place then there would be another form of communication used and the government will not have covered that.

The other thing they haven’t mentioned is that these forms of communication can also be used to prosecute these same people, the electronic message is online somewhere out there even on systems which are encrypted and secure.

Hopefully we won’t see scenes like that again but you never know and I hope the government doesn’t continue to have knee jerk reactions about how to fix the problems but look at the real underlying issues instead.