Also, the Peckham Poundland Post-It Peace Podium.

I think the situation with the police is more complex. The shooting and the protest that followed both featured police making things worse: allowing false reports of a shootout and confronting and then attacking the community protesters were the trigger for the violence. That was the first phase and the police created the trouble and then made it worse. Then, when the attack on the protest started the rioting, it was because the police did not have sufficient numbers to follow through on the aggressive tactics at the protest.

It's going to take some time for the facts to come out (or never given the police history of corrupt information operations), but I suspect that the initial orders from higher command once the rioting was confirmed were directed at making sure the police did not further escalate the violence. At this point, the strategy would be to attempt to contain the situation without escalation. It failed.

By day two, the police were now locked into a situation where they did not have the numbers on the street to do anything but block. If they aggressively pushed for arrests on day two and were not able to prevail through overwhelming numbers, the arson and looting would probably have been worse.

By day three, they got the mobilization needed to have the numbers to deal with large crowds in scattered locations.

Time will tell if the investigations will ever get to the underlying facts. The past history suggests the police have a discipline and morale problem that needs to be dealt with.

My estimate at this distance is the police need reform. They clearly contributed to the creations of the tension and provided the spark to set things off. After it got out of control, they acted responsibly to restore order with the least amount of force.

If this was the US, they would have been gassing, beating and possibly shooting people in the streets on day two. As far as I can tell, the police at least managed not to kill anyone after the riots started.

I have to admit I kind of stopped cold at the rape analogy.

It's not exactly an analogy, Miko. It was oddman's Metafilter comment on the distinction between causal responsiblity and moral responsibility, on the subject of rape, which inspired the article. That distinction is important to the rest of the post.

But it's not that good an article, don't read it if that bothers you.

Yeah, I read the thread - I'm pretty unconvinced about this distinction, but I see it was inspiring to you. I would argue that these are not so much to be considered 'causes' as 'conditions,' but in either case, I thought I was going to be reading about riots and then I was reading about rape, and how this idea of rape victims having 'causal responsibility' for rape, and it was just kind of disorienting.