The uprising

What an eventful week it was in London town! I have been in London for almost 3 and a half years now and I admit that, for the first time, I was on the verge of stating that I feel unsafe in the city...

It all started 9 days ago with a "peaceful" protest in Tottenham after the cops shot a guy there, presumably by accident. In no time, the protests spread like a flu virus to all parts of the city, initially to areas notorious for such activities, say Hackney and Camden and Brixton, and then to virtually all of London: from buzzing Oxford Circus, to busy Clapham and even peaceful Ealing, literally minutes away from our home. A spell of copy-cat behaviour led to similar riots taking place up in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, where these gangs unleashed a severe spell of violence and theft from high street shops, breaking into any stores and stealing anything from bins to flat screen TVs to phones and wine.

For almost a week, all we could hear were police sirens, helicopters, fire engines and ambulances. The presence of police escalated in stations and the streets and London was transformed overnight from a busy metropolis to what seemed a scary scene in some Armageddon movie.

The night the looters headed to Ealing, we were peacefully asleep and only realised what was going on a few hundred metres away the next day via BBC and first-hand inspection of the broken shops on the Broadway and Uxbridge Road.

What amazed me most was the fact that people were filming these opportunistic idiots stealing and breaking and the police were standing right in front of them but had no right to fire on them, because of human right issues. So these have rights not to be fired on with water cannons? And the other 7 million Londoners do not have a right to feel safe in their city? At times, these Brits amaze me...

I guess these unfortunate accidents confirmed my "theory": it is not enough to have thousands of CCTV cameras all over the place (something like 1 for every 14 persons) and have footage of criminals and then no means of matching a face to a person. What is needed is real police presence on the streets, dressed in civilian clothes, ready for action and nothing else. CCTV may be deterrents but clearly they are not working.

All seems to be back to normal now, but what if this happened in a year's time during the height of the 2012 Olympics? Should they then also wait for the blessing of Cameron or the whole of Parliament or whoever to deploy some sort of retaliative measures? I hope there is no comeback by these gangs...