Articles 8 (Riots & Their Causes)

How should we understand the recent rioting in England and the so-called “flashmob” violence and thefts in cities across the US? Or, are these incidents so senseless that they defy explanation? The following three editorials seek to explain why this nonsense is occurring.

The Cato article blames the riots on the ever-expanding welfare state that, in turn, leads the government to “fail in its most basic function — protecting persons and property.” It continues, “If an anti-market and socialist mentality replace an ethos of liberty and responsibility, then the harmony that results from limited government and free markets will disappear — and hooligans will gain the upper hand.” The Philadelphia Enquirer article blames the mob violence in Philadelphia (as it draws comparisons to the London riots) on the unstable economy, joblessness in poorer neighborhoods, and deep budget cuts to education and social services. The article argues, “[The street-mobs] might not be protesting any one thing, but [are] lashing out at everything…” The Washington Examiner article blames the riots on widespread “moral and spiritual” decay. “Personal responsibility and accountability and the right to life, liberty and personal property” are not being taught and embraced like they were in the past, and the London riots are an “extreme outcome.”

Can Christians offer a unique perspective on these events? Is one of these explanations sufficient to gain our assent? Finally, each article contains a very different kind of argument; what about the validity of the arguments themselves?

-NB


The Cato Institute. “The Welfare State's Road to Riots.” (August 17, 2011)

By James A. Dorn

(This article appeared on Orange County Register August 17, 2011).

If the riots in Britain have taught us anything, it is that when government fails in its most basic function — protecting persons and property — civil society ends, and warfare begins. The rise of the welfare state has eroded respect for private property rights and fostered a socialist mentality that dulls individual responsibility.

The U.S. is quickly catching up with European welfare states. Entitlement spending has skyrocketed since the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s, especially Medicare and Medicaid. Those two programs along with Social Security now account for more than 40 percent of federal spending, which itself has risen to 25 percent of GDP, or nearly $4 trillion. If all entitlement spending is included, payments to individuals account for 66 percent of federal spending.

The transformation from limited government (true liberalism) to the welfare state has no constitutional basis. The three branches of government have failed in their solemn duty to uphold the Framers' Constitution, or what F. A. Hayek called "the constitution of liberty."
The lesson from the British riots is that when government overextends itself, it will fail to do what it is supposed to do: protect persons and property.

It is not free enterprise and limited government that led to the riots in Britain; it is rather their demise. The U.S. should wake up and recognize the danger the welfare state poses to property — broadly understood as rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The most fundamental question facing any society is the role and scope of government. The Framers of the Constitution accepted the idea that the primary role of government is to safeguard private property. In 1792, James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, wrote, "Government is instituted to protect property of every sort. ... This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."

The Preamble to the Constitution states that the purpose of the charter is to "establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty." To "establish justice" means to prevent the violation of an individual's natural rights or property rights; it does not give the federal government an unlimited power to take private property and interfere with freedom of contract.
Madison and the other framers would not have enumerated — and therefore limited — the powers of the federal government in Article 1, section 8, if they thought a redistributive state was just. Nor would they have added a Bill of Rights.

Amendments to the Constitution — notably the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — further strengthened property rights. But the Progressive Movement (1890s–1920s) began to erode the Framers' Constitution. Today, the broad interpretation of the General Welfare Clause, the Commerce Clause, and other clauses have expanded the powers of the federal government far beyond that envisioned by the Framers. In doing so, the meaning of justice has been turned on its head: from its legitimate meaning of safeguarding property to its modern meaning of using taxes, regulation, and laws to redistribute income and wealth to achieve "social justice."

The problem is that when government is seen as an instrument for "doing good" rather than a force for preventing harm, there is no end to government mischief. By its very nature government operates by coercion, not consent; and as Milton Friedman liked to remind us, when government spends other people's money, it will naturally want to do more and more.

The lesson from the British riots is that when government overextends itself, it will fail to do what it is supposed to do: protect persons and property. If an anti-market and socialist mentality replace an ethos of liberty and responsibility, then the harmony that results from limited government and free markets will disappear — and hooligans will gain the upper hand.

The massive U.S. debt is a reflection of the rapid growth of entitlements and a do-good vision of government. Next year's elections will be a referendum on the size and scope of government. If Americans return to the Madisonian principle of justice that underlies the Constitution — and is the foundation of morality — the future of peace and prosperity will be bright. If they adhere to the illiberal principle of "doing good with other people's money," the welfare state will grow and eventually put out the light of liberty.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13583&utm_source=Cato+Institute+Emails&utm_campaign=f2b50d4412-Cato_Today&utm_medium=email


Philadelphia Enquirer Daily News. “London riots, Philly mobs.” (August 09, 2011)

MAYOR NUTTER has sent a new wake-up call to the teens participating in street-mob violence. Following his impassioned sermon on Sunday at the Mount Carmel Baptist Church, he announced yesterday earlier curfews in Center City and University City for minors; they now have to be off the streets by 9 p.m.

Law-enforcement officials backed him up, including District Attorney Seth Williams, who vowed to prosecute and send away any teen caught up in a violent mob.

It's clear the city's leaders are working hard to present a tough and united front against the marauding teens caught up in two street-mob outbreaks in the past six weeks. Since mob incidents were at night, in Center City, an earlier curfew is a good step, though we wonder why other neighborhoods aren't included. A curfew in two neighborhoods could shift the activity to others.
Of course, upscale dining, entertainment and tourism make Center City and University City more radioactive to mob disruption.

In the long term, though, corralling the problem within the geographic confines of a few upscale neighborhoods could do more lasting damage, if it allows us to ignore some of the factors that could help explain these violent outbreaks.

And for that, we may have to look to London.

This past weekend, more than 200 young people were arrested in London as three days of violence and looting spread through some of that city's poorest neighborhoods. There, the young people set fire to buildings and cars, and threw bottles and fireworks at police. The violent riots were thought to be sparked by anger in the black community over a police shooting of a 29-year-old man. High unemployment was also cited.

It's easy to dismiss a connection between the Philadelphia mobs and London's riots; Philadelphia's mobs don't have a "cause" and have not been prompted by an external event.

But we're misguided if we don't understand that our own unstable economy, with high jobless figures especially in poorer neighborhoods, and deep budget cuts to education and social services could be a less dramatic but just as incendiary set of circumstances that the young may be responding to. They might not be protesting any one thing, but lashing out at everything, and although it's valid for the mayor to tell parents to take more responsibility, let's not forget that many of the homes that these youth must get to earlier could be miserable; parents spread their misery to their kids.

Let's be clear: explaining is not the same as excusing. Street-mob participants should be prosecuted as fully as the law allows. Curfews should be enforced - and probably widened to include other neighborhoods in the city.

But we should also be asking: how much failure in our systems - from education to the family- can young people be expected to tolerate before erupting?

And how much can we?

http://articles.philly.com/2011-08-09/news/29867495_1_mob-curfew-neighborhoods


The Washington Examiner. “Britain confronts its real sons of anarchy.” (August 10, 2011)

By Cal Thomas

PORTSTEWART, Northern Ireland -- Some have compared the riots in the U.K. to the London Blitz. It's a flawed comparison.

The strategic bombing of London in 1940 came from an external enemy, Nazi Germany. Enemies from within are carrying out the free-for-all that began in Tottenham, England, on Saturday -- quickly spreading to London and other parts of the U.K. -- following the shooting death of suspected gang member Mark Duggan by Metropolitan Police.
Theresa May, the British home secretary, rejected calls for water cannons and more forceful methods to help overwhelmed police quell the chaos.

Interviewed on Sky News, May said, "The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities." If that sounds completely feckless, that's because it is.

Businesses have been wiped out. Untold numbers of jobs have been lost. Did the community "consent" to that? If even a few shop owners had been armed, perhaps these products of the British welfare, entitlement and envy state might have thought twice about their thuggish behavior. Unfortunately, gun laws in Britain are strict, owners must be licensed and self-defense can be difficult to prove.

Northern Ireland, while also part of the U.K., has more liberal gun ownership laws and the bar to prove self-defense is much lower, perhaps because of the history of violence in the country before the peace agreement. There has been no rioting in Ireland, Scotland or Wales.

Prime Minister David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer session to discuss the situation and to present a "united" front.

But that, along with condemnations "in the strongest terms" won't address the real problem, which many Britons may not wish to confront.

The problem in Britain, and increasingly in America, is moral and spiritual, not economic and political. British history and values are no longer being adequately taught in the U.K. for fear a sense of supernationalism might be conveyed.

This comes at a time when no nation is to be considered superior to any other, a view expressed by President Obama.

According to a 2007 research report on church attendance in the U.K. from Tearfund, a U.K. Christian relief and development agency, just "fifteen percent of U.K. adults go to church at least once a month."

BBC News reports that according to a 2001 census survey, "a fifth of children are in lone-parent families ... 91 percent of these families headed by mother" and there is "a minority of married couples for the first time -- 45 percent of the population versus 64 percent in 1981."

So when the government calls on parents to be more vigilant about the whereabouts of their teenagers, the likelihood there are enough stable two-parent households who care enough to do so is not encouraging.

If civility, right and wrong, personal responsibility and accountability and the right to life, liberty and personal property are not values worthy of being passed on to the next generation, then their opposites will be taught by default.

Children don't "catch" goodness and right behavior as they do a cold. Their natural tendency is to do wrong. The goal of discipline is to teach them to do right. The London riots are the extreme outcome when "right" is no longer defined.

When a society refuses to impose a moral code in its schools, homes and culture, pandemonium is the result -- think Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington. Multiply that several times and you have the lawlessness that has swept Britain with greater force than its mad cow disease scare.

"This was not an angry crowd; this was a greedy crowd," said Chris Sims, chief constable of West Midlands police. One could see that from the TV shots of women trying on clothes and shoes before stealing them and men ripping flat-screen TVs off walls and smashing windows and jewelry cases.

There's a TV program called "Sons of Anarchy." It is fiction. These rioters are the real sons (and daughters) of anarchy and it will take more than political condemnations to repair the damage they've caused.

Seventy years ago, the London Blitz forged a national unity in Britain. Where's that unity today?

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/08/britain-confronts-its-real-sons-anarchy#ixzz1VJ89ftwS




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For more information and commentary on these events, take a look at the articles below:
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The New York Times. “London Riots Put Spotlight on Troubled, Unemployed Youths in Britain.” (August 9, 2011)

By LANDON THOMAS Jr. and RAVI SOMAIYA

LONDON — “I came here to get my penny’s worth,” said a man who gave his name as Louis James, 19, a slightly built participant in the widening riots that have shaken London to its core. With a touch of guilt on Tuesday, Mr. James showed off what he described as a $195 designer sweater that he said he took during looting in Camden Town, a gentrified area of north London.

In recent days, young rioters and looters like Mr. James have dominated front pages and television reports around the world, prompted a recall of Parliament to a special session and forced the deployment of thousands of police officers.

Widespread antisocial and criminal behavior by young and usually unemployed people has long troubled Britain. Attacks and vandalism by gangs of young people are “a blight on the lives of millions,” said a 2010 government report commissioned in the aftermath of several deaths related to such gangs. They signal, it said, “the decline of whole towns and city areas.”

The government investigation revealed that though only a quarter of such incidents were reported, 3.5 million complaints were nonetheless made to the police. An iPhone app is available to track attacks, and one enterprising inventor marketed a device, called the mosquito, that emits a high-pitched noise that can be heard only by young people as a means for store owners to keep gangs away.

Politicians from both the right and the left, the police and most residents of the areas hit by violence nearly unanimously describe the most recent riots as criminal and anarchic, lacking even a hint of the antigovernment, anti-austerity message that has driven many of the violent protests in other European countries.

But the riots also reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain, where one million people from the ages of 16 to 24 are officially unemployed, the most since the deep recession of the mid-1980s.

The riots in London began when protesters gathered outside a north London police station after the shooting of a local man by officers. The police have long had troubled relations with racial and ethnic minorities in Britain and have sought to repair these relations, although the protesters have come from all backgrounds. Days later, in Hackney, where some of the fiercest riots took place, a young man in a gray hooded sweatshirt shouted directly into the faces of riot police officers: “You know you all racist! You know it.”

The combination of economic despair, racial tension and thuggery has “a devastating effect on communities,” said Graham Beech, an official at the crime-prevention charity Nacro. “It’s something that ordinary people see on their walks to work — street drunkenness, vandalism, intimidation — and that affects the general fear of crime.” As the British government’s austerity measures begin to take effect, young people will also see their chances of employment dwindling and their financial and community support cut, Mr. Beech said. “Boredom, alienation and isolation are going to be factors,” he said.

In many ways, Mr. James’s circumstances are typical. He lives in a government-subsidized apartment in northern London and receives $125 in jobless benefits every two weeks, even though he says he has largely given up looking for work. He says he has never had a proper job and learned to read only three years ago. His mother can barely support herself and his stepbrothers and sisters. His father, who was a heroin addict, is dead.
He says he has been in and out of too many schools to count and left the educational system for good when he was 15.

“No one has ever given me a chance; I am just angry at how the whole system works,” Mr. James said. He would like to get a job at a retail store, but admits that he spends most days watching television and just trying to get by. “That is the way they want it,” he said, without specifying exactly who “they” were. “They give me just enough money so that I can eat and watch TV all day. I don’t even pay my bills anymore.”

Jonathan Portes, the director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London, says that Mr. James’s plight reflects a broader trend here. More challenging students, Mr. Portes says, have not been receiving the attention they should as teachers, under pressure to meet educational goals, focus on children from more stable homes and those with greater abilities and social skills. Disillusioned, those who cannot keep up just drop out.

Headlines here, which often describe the young people as “feral,” have been dominated in recent years by the gangs’ turn toward bullying the most vulnerable. Almost 30 percent of the victims of antisocial behavior surveyed in the government report said they had “longstanding illness, disability or infirmity.”

In one incident typical of those described in the report, in 2007 Fiona Pilkington, 38, pulled her car to the side of a secluded highway. Inside, her learning-disabled daughter, Francesca, 18, watched as Ms. Pilkington doused a pile of old clothes in the back seat with gasoline and set them on fire. The two burned to death.

She was driven by a campaign of intimidation that stretched back over a decade. A gang, with some members as young as 10, pushed dog excrement through the letterbox of their modest home, beat her son and threatened to kill Francesca, who had the learning ability of a 3-year-old. The mother said she made 33 requests for help to the police, to no effect.

It was this culture of impunity that forms one context for the current riots. The most vulnerable people feel trapped, said Margo Milne, 49, who uses a wheelchair part time because she has multiple sclerosis. A disabled friend of hers reported looting in a neighborhood convulsed by rioting. “But she is worried that if she reports them to the police they will come for her,” Ms. Milne said. “And what would she do?”

In a low-income housing complex in Hackney on Monday, an elderly woman was hospitalized after a riot in which as many as 300 people rampaged, setting fire to cars and looting stores. Two priests, one in full robes, were brought in by the police to persuade rioters to allow an ambulance to take her to safety. “We need to get these people out,” one of the priests was heard telling a police officer.

But as soon as the ambulance left, officers abandoned the neighborhood and looters struck up in earnest once more.

Later, when one young man, kicking a trash can into the street nearby, was asked why he was rioting, he just shrugged.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/europe/10youth.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=London%20Riots&st=cse&scp=1


The Economist. “Riots in Britain.” (August 13, 2011)

Anarchy in the UK

A bout of violent mindlessness that has shaken Britain’s sense of self—and may be exportable.
SHAME was the first response of many people in Britain to the riots that started in the Tottenham neighbourhood of London on August 6th, skipped across the capital in the following days and nights and spread to Manchester, Birmingham and many other cities. Alongside the shame, there was a jolting bafflement. The law-abiding majority suddenly saw that some of their compatriots were happy to torch cars and buildings, loot shops, and attack firemen and ambulance crews. The confidence trick at the heart of the social order was violently laid bare: it turns out that if sufficient numbers of criminals want to create havoc on the streets, they can. In the absence of internal, moral restraints, external ones can only do so much.

The world watched London in fascinated amazement. Other nations tend to regard Britain as enviably orderly and law-abiding, at least compared with many of its more excitable continental neighbours. That peaceable image is only partly justified: contagious rioting has broken out before, typically during the summer, including in the 1980s, when Tottenham and some of the other flashpoint areas this week last erupted. This time, however, the complexion of the trouble is different from those earlier flare-ups. In its sheer mindlessness, it was, in a way, even more depressing (see article).

Moral malaise

This week’s multiplying riots had some common features—looting, arson, attacks on the police—but they spanned different places, races, ages and sexes. Race was not the defining issue, as it was in many of the disturbances of the 1980s. One of the first to appear in court for looting was a 31-year-old teaching assistant: hardly an identikit hooligan. That left politicians free to project their own rationales on the carnage.

For some on the left, the real villain was the government’s public-spending cuts. This view is given superficial support by the fact that the 1980s outbreaks happened during the “Thatcher cuts”. But it is still a lazy fantasy. It might be comforting to think of the riots as an extension of a familiar debate—and to argue that the underlying ills can be easily remedied with a little more state largesse—but there is little reason to do so. Unlike the riots in Britain in the 1980s, Los Angeles in 1992 or France in 2005, these were not overtly political or racial. And since the cuts have barely bitten yet, that explanation doesn’t wash.

But the right’s knee-jerk response—that this is criminality, pure and simple, and that to seek a deeper explanation is to excuse the culprits—is also wrong. There is clearly a cadre of young people in Britain who feel they have little or no stake in the country’s future or their own. The barriers that prevent most youngsters from running amok—an inherent sense of right and wrong; concern for their job and education prospects; shame—seem not to exist in the minds of the rioters. Britain needs to try to understand why that is so.

It is unlikely that the closure of, say, a local youth club has caused that alienation. Perhaps it has something to do with the changing nature of the economy and consequent shortage of low-skilled jobs, or the long crumbling of family structures and discipline. Technology, too, may have had a role, for BlackBerrys were widely used to summon mobs. Digital communications have tipped the balance of power away from the authorities towards the streets, as they did in the Arab spring; but in Britain, the effect has been terrifying rather than inspiring.

If technology is a major factor, perhaps such scenes will be replicated in other countries. On the other hand, a peculiarly British set of conditions may be at work. Near-American levels of inequality may have combined with laxer European attitudes to criminal justice to create an incendiary mix of rage and boldness. Whatever the reasons, a moral malaise has gripped a minority of young Britons, a subgroup that is nevertheless big enough to terrorise and humiliate the country.

The thin blue line

David Cameron, the prime minister, recalled Parliament to discuss the crisis, declaring that pockets of Britain were “frankly sick”. Politicians will no doubt come up with all manner of responses over the weeks to come. Job-creation and welfare schemes will surely play a part in the debate. But the immediate focus was on policing, and why, especially on the first few nights of trouble and particularly in London, the police seemed unable to cope.

The spark for the initial incident in Tottenham was a fatal shooting by police officers; some hooligans cited resentment of the police as a motive. But as the violence spiralled and spread, the main criticism levelled at them—particularly London’s Metropolitan Police—was that they were too soft. That criticism was partly justified. The Met was caught out by the scale of the unrest and unable to respond quickly enough. In some parts of the capital the police were outnumbered, outmanoeuvred and unable or unwilling to prevent looting.

With suitable reinforcements and better tactics, they and other forces performed better on subsequent nights. Nevertheless, there were widespread calls for much more draconian measures. One opinion poll suggested a third of respondents favoured the use not only of rubber bullets but of live ones. The imposition of curfews and the deployment of the army were discussed but thankfully not implemented.

Thankfully, because that sort of response would make Britain a different place from the open, liberal country most of its citizens want it to be. Yet one message of this week’s events is that the reality of modern Britain doesn’t quite live up to that hope. The widespread assumption that, for all their inequalities and fissures, the country and its capital are fundamentally orderly and harmonious, has been revealed to be complacent. The cracks in British society—economic and moral—have opened up, and they are deeper than they seemed.

The riots have been bad for Britain’s already stuttering economy. They have been ruinous for the people whose homes and businesses have been damaged and destroyed. They have tarnished Britain’s image around the world. But most of all, they have been desperately disorienting for the country’s own sense of itself.

http://www.economist.com/node/21525891n


The Chicago Sun-Times. “For flash mobsters, crowd size a tempting cover.” (August 9, 2011)

By ERIC TUCKER and THOMAS WATKINS

The July 4 fireworks display in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights was anything but a family affair.

As many as 1,000 teenagers, mobilized through social networking sites, turned out and soon started fighting and disrupting the event.

Thanks to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, more and more so-called flash mobs are materializing across the globe, leaving police scrambling to keep tabs on the spontaneous assemblies.

“They’re gathering with an intent behind it — not just to enjoy the event,” Shaker Heights Police Chief D. Scott Lee said. “All too often, some of the intent is malicious.”

Flash mobs started off in 2003 as peaceful and often humorous acts of public performance, such as mass dance routines or street pillow fights. But in recent years, the term has taken a darker twist as criminals exploit the anonymity of crowds, using social networking to coordinate everything from robberies to fights to general chaos.

In London, recent rioting and looting has been blamed in part on groups of youths using Twitter, mobile phone text messages and instant messaging on BlackBerry to organize and keep a step ahead of police.

And Sunday in Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter condemned the behavior of teenagers involved in flash mobs that have left several people injured in recent weeks.
“What is making this unique today is the social media aspect,” said Everett Gillison, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for public safety. “They can communicate and congregate at a moment’s notice. That can overwhelm any municipality.”

A Philadelphia man was assaulted by a group of about 30 people who were believed to have gotten together through Twitter. In 2009, crowds swelled along the trendy South Street shopping district and assaulted several people.

On June 23, a couple dozen youths arrived via subway in Upper Darby, outside Philadelphia, and looted several hundred dollars of sneakers, socks and wrist watches from a Sears store. Their haul wasn’t especially impressive but the sheer size of the group and the speed of the roughly five-minute operation made them all but impossible to stop.

“The good thing is there were no weapons and nobody tried to stop them, either,” Upper Darby Police Chief Michael Chitwood said. “The only people that tried to stop them were the police when they rounded them up.”

Dubbed “flash mob robberies,” the thefts are bedeviling both police and retailers, who say some of the heists were orchestrated or at least boasted about afterward on social networking sites.
In recognition of the problem, the National Retail Federation issued a report last week recommending steps stores can take to ward off the robberies. There have even been legislative efforts to criminalize flash mobs.

The Cleveland City Council passed a bill to make it illegal to use social media to organize a violent and disorderly flash mob, though the mayor vetoed the measure after the ACLU of Ohio promised it would be unconstitutional. The bill was at least partly inspired by the Shaker Heights disturbances on July 4.

Jonathan Taplin, director of the innovation lab at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, said he was not surprised to see people using social media for organizing flash mob robberies.

“You are essentially having a world where you have 25 million people who are underemployed and 2 percent of the population doing better than they ever have,” Taplin said. “Why wouldn’t that lead to some sort of social unrest? Why wouldn’t people use the latest technologies to effect that?”

In Los Angeles last month, thousands of ravers forced rush-hour street closures when they descended on a Hollywood cinema after a DJ tweeted he was holding a free block party. The sudden crowd dispersed only after police fired bean-bag bullets at the restive revelers and arrested three.

And in April, a man was shot when hundreds of rival gang members congregated along the Los Angeles seafront in Venice, sparking pandemonium as people scattered for cover. The group had gathered after some of them posted on Twitter and police were still strategizing their response to the huge crowd when shots rang out.

Los Angeles police Capt. Jon Peters said law enforcement’s challenge is to try to sift the ocean of tweets and Facebook updates for signs of trouble.
“We need to be able to get better on the intelligence side to pick up on communications that are going on,” he said.

Gillison, the deputy mayor from Philadelphia, said the police department there has reached out to younger community members and friended some of them on Facebook. This enables officers to monitor the traffic that could generate flash mobs and some have been prevented, he said.
In April, about 20 teenagers entered G-Star Raw, a high-end men’s clothing store in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of the District of Columbia, and stole about $20,000 worth of merchandise despite employees’ efforts to grab the apparel back, store manager Greg Lennon said. D.C. police have investigated leads but have not made arrests in the case.

Lennon said he later saw Twitter postings, apparently written after the robbery, that referenced the theft, with one person describing having been in the store and making plans to come back.
The National Retail Federation said 10 percent of 106 companies it surveyed reported being targeted in the last year by groups of thieves using flash mob tactics.

“Retailers are raising red flags about criminal flash mobs, which are wreaking havoc on their business, causing concerns about the safety of their customers and employees, and directly impacting their bottom line,” the federation said in a report, which advises retailers to monitor social media networks and report planned heists to the police.

That’s exactly what Lennon does. He says he checks his store’s Facebook page to see who’s visiting, and monitors Twitter for any reference to his store and its merchandise.

Gillison and others blame at least part of the problem on bad parenting.

“They’re 12 years old and not around the corner from their home. Where’s their parent?” said Chitwood, the Upper Darby police chief. “If they’re out doing flash mob thefts when they’re 12, what the hell are they going to be doing when they’re 16?”

Copyright © 2011 — Sun-Times Media, LLC
http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/6964774-418/story.html


The Washington Post. “Conclusions we can’t draw about London’s riots.” (August 10, 2011)
By Anne Applebaum

Riots in the British capital have hit inner-city Tottenham, suburban Ealing, gritty Hackney, chic Notting Hill. Windows have been smashed, video cameras stolen and cars set ablaze. Young men in hooded sweatshirts congregated on street corners and charged the police. “Copycat” riots have followed across the country, from Bristol to Nottingham. And nobody really knows why.
Scan the comment pages of the British press, and you will find a wide range of explanations. Read the center-right Daily Telegraph, and you will learn that the riots were caused by a weak and cowardly police force, absent fathers, welfare dependency, multiculturalism and the tolerance of gangs in schools. Read the center-left Guardian and you will be informed that police brutality, social exclusion, cuts in welfare spending and the widening gap between rich and poor are to blame. Some are convinced that high levels of immigration are at fault. Others believe the problem lies in British intolerance of immigrants and minorities.

There is a reason for the discrepancy: The rioters themselves do not wave signs. They do not chant. They weren’t protesting any particular government policy, as were student demonstrators in London last winter. They have not sought publicity for their views, if they have any. They hide from cameras and dodge journalists. And thus have they become the inkblot in a kind of national Rorschach test: Everyone sees in them the political issue they care about most, whether it’s welfare dependency, budget cuts, the decline of public education or — my personal favorite — the rise of a vulgar and amoral public culture.

And yet it is their lack of politics that most clearly defines them. If the Egyptians in Tahrir Square wanted democracy and the anarchists in Athens wanted more government spending, the hooded men in British streets want 46-inch flat-screen HD televisions. They aren’t smashing the headquarters of the Tory Party; they are smashing clothing shops. Instead of using social media to create civil society or cyber-utopia, they are using social media to steal. Someone circulated a text message on Monday night, calling friends to central London for “Pure terror and havoc & Free stuff. Just smash shop windows and cart out da stuff u want!”

Aside from stealing, a lot of the rioters — maybe most of the rioters — were also out to have a good time. Don’t be fooled by the stiff-upper-lip cliches: From Wat Tyler’s medieval peasant rebels to the modern soccer hooligans, there is a time-honored tradition of smashing things for fun in Britain, and the groups that enjoy it have been around for a long time. It doesn’t take very many of them to do a lot of damage. As of Wednesday morning, police had arrested 768 people, according to the BBC, and charged 105 in connection with violence in the capital. Overnight, London was calm for the first time since riots began last week.

I’m not counting out the other possible explanations, many of which would be worth investigating even if these riots had never occurred. The welfare state really has left a generation of young people feeling both dependent on government handouts and entitled to more. Poor state education has left as many as a fifth of British teenagers functionally illiterate. The slow economy means many will never find jobs and thus will never integrate into the mainstream. The presence of the world’s oligarchs and billionaires in London means the city has an economic gap that is unusually wide for the developed world. The tabloid press thrives on envy of the rich and cult-worship of boorish celebrities. Traditional institutions — the school system, churches, even the BBC — long ago lost their ability to transmit older values. A spate of scandals has recently discredited the banks, Parliament, the media and the London police even further.

And yet — there was looting in London after the Great Fire of 1666 and, despite the mythology, there was looting in London during the Blitz. Go back and read Dickens: Criminals, both immigrant and “native” British, have taken advantage of opportunities to loot in London during more peaceful times, too. A peculiar confluence of circumstances — a mob angry about a police murder, a sudden bout of warm weather, an unprepared police force distracted by scandal and, yes, the astonishingly widespread availability of smartphones among the underprivileged — might have allowed them to do so again. Beware of broad political generalizations in the wake of these riots: We don’t know whether we have just witnessed a “new” phenomenon, or a more mobile and technically adept version of a very old one.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/conclusions-we-cant-draw-about-londons-riots/2011/08/10/gIQA3H4k6I_print.html