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A new sign of terrible social aberration that seems to be
spreading is the youth rioting in the UK over the last few days.
Here's a summary of events so far, from guardian.co.uk.
The riots that have plagued London for three
consecutive nights have claimed their first life. A man shot
in his car during last night's rioting in Croydon, south
London, died after being admitted to hospital. He was
discovered in a car suffering from gunshot wounds at about
9.15pm as trouble flared in the area.
David Cameron has announced that 16,000 police officers
will be deployed in London tonight, in an effort to get a
grip on the violence. This is up from 6,000 the night
before. The prime minister promised a tough response to any
trouble tonight: "I have this very clear message to those
people who are responsible for this wrongdoing and
criminality: you will feel the full force of the law. If you
are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to
face the punishments."
Police have disclosed that live baton rounds -- nonlethal
plastic bullets -- may be deployed tonight.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Steve Kavanagh of the
Metropolitan police told our crime correspondent, Sandra
Laville: "If we need to, we will do so." He said 525 people
have been arrested since rioting began on Saturday, and
about 100 have been charged.
Rioting spread to other cities in Britain for the first
time, with unrest in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and
Nottingham. West Midlands police made 138 arrests. Chief
Constable Chris Sims said of the looting in the city centre:
"This was not an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd."
A clean-up operation has got under way across London,
with many residents turning out to help. A number of
websites and Facebook groups have been set up to co-ordinate
the volunteer forces.
The riots have been going on for three days, spreading more
widely on the 8th. This is a diffuse event, with no sharply
defined temporal focus, so the GCP event was set for the
24-hour UTC day of the 8th. The result is Chisquare 86727.182
on 86400 df, for p = 0.215 and Z = 0.788.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish
signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be
largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.
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