London Riots - Day 4: Vigilantes Take to the Streets

Reclaiming the streets: Sikhs defend their temple and locals protect their pubs as ordinary Britons defy the rioters

• Met Police warn public against use of vigilante justice as crowds of football fans patrol roads intent on 'protecting the streets'
• Warning comes as murder probe launched in Birmingham after deaths of three men 'killed while protecting community from looters'
• Hundreds launch public patrols following claims riot police teams were told to 'stand and observe' looters rather than confront yobs

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 11:31 AM on 10th August 2011

Some armed with swords, some carrying hockey sticks, defiant Sikhs stood guard outside their temples last night.

More then 700 men, some in their 80s, took to the streets to protect the homes, businesses and places of worship in Southall, West London.

The residents rallied together in a show of unity against looters echoed in other parts of the country as ordinary Britons attempted to reclaim the streets.

Resistance: Dozens of Sikhs stage a display of defiance against 

the rioters outside London's largest temple in Southall yesterday

'Protection': A large group gathers on the streets of Eltham as crowds form intent on warding off looters in London

On patrol: The Met Police have been forced to warn people 

against forms of vigilante justice following the crowds of 

people forming intent on 'protecting the streets'

Pictures of the crowds emerged as the Met Police today urged the public against forming groups intent on vigilante justice.

Many of those who gathered in the late night public patrols had done so after becoming frustrated by the lack of police response to the riots.

 

It was only on Monday night that police tactics changed and armoured vehicles called Jankels were used to disperse the crowds.

ONE IN THREE BRITONS SAY 'SHOOT THE RIOTERS'

A survey of British adults has revealed that one in three would support the police's use of live ammunition on rioters.


The poll of over 2,500 adults also showed that nine out of ten Britons believe police should be able to use water cannons to deal with the growing unrest.


The YouGov survey for the Sun showed widespread support for the various police tactics available.


Over three quarters 77 per cent) of those surveyed also support using the army ho help deal with the situation.


And worryingly for the government, over half (57 per cent) think David Cameron has handled the riots badly.


A massive 85 per cent are also convinced that the majority of rioters will go unpunished.
 

Large groups gathered in Enfield, north London, and Eltham, south east London, last night and joined police in patrolling the streets.

One video filmed in Enfield shows a huge crowd surge through the streets near the London suburb's Southbury Road station.

But while many pictures this week have shown crowds clashing with police in destructive stand-offs, the video clearly shows officers and crowds running in the same direction in a bid to ward off looters.

However, Met Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Kavanagh told Sky News: 'What I don't need is these so-called vigilantes, who appeared to have been drinking too much and taking policing resources away from what they should have been doing - which is preventing the looting.

'These are small pockets of people. They're frustrated, they're angry, and that's totally understandable.

'The sadness of those images through the night and the night before last will affect everyone.

'But the support that we need is to allow those officers to prevent looting and prevent crime.

'Ironically, when you see those images with no police available, the police are now having to go and do the vigilantes as well as the other problems that they've got. That needs to stop.'

One of those involved in the Enfield patrol, Nick Davidson, told Sky News: 'We've had enough of the police just standing there... while people are looting and ruining the whole area.

'Everybody here pays tax and we've all had enough of it. We're sickened by the police doing absolutely nothing.

'They're not policing our streets, we have to police them.'

One man in his 20s, who would not give his name said: 'We won't stand for it. If anyone wants to come down here and start looting tonight, let them try - we'll be ready for them.

'We're here to protect the town. What went on last night was a disgrace. It shouldn't be allowed.'

In Southall, the locals rallied to keep the rioters at bay following reports of a planned attack on the area. It is just a few miles from Ealing, which was targeted on Monday night. Each of the Sikh temples was guarded by around 200 men.

Not in our town: Large groups of people run through Enfield, 

north London intent on 'protecting the streets' from rioters

Reclaiming the streets: The group made their way through 

Enfield flanked by police officers during the late night patrol

Amarjit Singh Klair from nearby Hounslow, who helped rally the men, said: ‘We are working along side the police, they’re doing what they can but they are stretched. 

 

‘Why shouldn’t we defend our homes, businesses and places of worship? This is our area. There’s lots of talk about it kicking off here. But we’re ready for them.’

Hooded youths could be seen scouting the area but appear to be have frightened off. Only a handful of police could be seen patrolling the area. 

The Sikh community were running a military style operation to protect themselves after almost 100 rioters tried to attack the heart of the area early on Tuesday. 

With few police around, elders at London’s largest Sikh temple in Havelock Road resorted to telephoning male worshippers for help. 

Last night groups of Sikh men stood guard at different parts of the town, keeping in touch via their mobiles. 

One man in his 20s said: ‘They caught us off guard last night but we still managed to get people together to protect the area. We saw them putting on their balaclavas preparing to jump out of three cars but we charged at them and managed to chase them off.’

On guard: Groups of Sikh men stood around different parts of the town,

keeping in touch via mobile phone to crush any potential trouble

Turkish shopkeepers who stood guard outside their businesses and chased off looters on Monday night have been hailed as heroes. 

When the gangs of youngsters arrived to wreak havoc in Dalston, East London, on Monday night, the men, armed with baseball bats, snooker cues and even chair legs, sent them packing.

Trouble started about 8.30pm when a group of 15 youths set fire to a bus. Later another mob of around 20 arrived. Kebab shop owner Omer Asili, 29, said: ‘The police were telling us not to chase them, but it was only down to us that they went away.’

Looters in Loafers

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 18, 2010

Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies, “Goldman Sachs.”

Sure enough, last week the Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Gucci-loafer guys at Goldman of engaging in what amounts to white-collar looting.

I’m using the term looting in the sense defined by the economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer in a 1993 paper titled “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” That paper, written in the aftermath of the savings-and-loan crisis of the Reagan years, argued that many of the losses in that crisis were the result of deliberate fraud.

Was the same true of the current financial crisis?



Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. Clearly, some borrowers were lured into taking out complex, expensive loans they didn’t understand — a process facilitated by Bush-era federal regulators, who both failed to curb abusive lending and prevented states from taking action on their own. And for the most part, subprime lenders didn’t hold on to the loans they made. Instead, they sold off the loans to investors, in some cases surely knowing that the potential for future losses was greater than the people buying those loans (or securities backed by the loans) realized.
What we’re now seeing are accusations of a third form of fraud.

We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.

And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.

So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst.

As for the alleged creation of investments designed to fail, these may have magnified losses at the banks that were on the losing side of these deals, deepening the banking crisis that turned the burst housing bubble into an economy-wide catastrophe.

The obvious question is whether financial reform of the kind now being contemplated would have prevented some or all of the fraud that now seems to have flourished over the past decade. And the answer is yes.

For one thing, an independent consumer protection bureau could have helped limit predatory lending. Another provision in the proposed Senate bill, requiring that lenders retain 5 percent of the value of loans they make, would have limited the practice of making bad loans and quickly selling them off to unwary investors.

It’s less clear whether proposals for derivatives reform — which mainly involve requiring that financial instruments like credit default swaps be traded openly and transparently, like ordinary stocks and bonds — would have prevented the alleged abuses by Goldman (although they probably would have prevented the insurer A.I.G. from running wild and requiring a federal bailout). What we can say is that the final draft of financial reform had better include language that would prevent this kind of looting — in particular, it should block the creation of “synthetic C.D.O.’s,” cocktails of credit default swaps that let investors take big bets on assets without actually owning them.

The main moral you should draw from the charges against Goldman, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong — and not just because no such promise would be credible.

For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.