A black man killed by police. Mobs of looters. Cities charred and shaken. The riots in London mirror some of the worst uprisings in modern U.S. history.
And there are more parallels: Stubborn poverty and high unemployment, services slashed due to recessionary budget cuts, a breakdown of social values, social media that bring people together for good or bad at the speed of the Internet. And finally, there are a handful of actual attacks, isolated and hard to explain, by bands of youths in U.S. cities.
As Americans look across the Atlantic, a natural question arises: Could the flames and violence that erupted in Britain scar this country, too?
Police, elected officials, activists and regular citizens offer varied answers, reflecting the unsettled mix of race, class, lawlessness and the chasm between haves and have-nots that may lie behind the unrest.
“History shows that the social tinder for such eruptions of massive violence and looting is usually widespread poverty without hope, and the spark is typically an incident of police brutality in the absence of a culture of police accountability,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, CEO of the NAACP. “Such conditions exist in almost every major American city.”
Others, like British Prime Minister David Cameron, blame “criminality, pure and simple.” That echoes descriptions of some recent episodes of mob behavior in places like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago and Ohio. Stores have been pillaged, passers-by robbed and random victims brutally attacked by dozens or occasionally hundreds of youths summoned through tools such as Facebook and Twitter.
Philadelphia has responded by tightening youth curfews, and the Cleveland City Council passed a bill (later vetoed by the mayor) making it illegal to use social media to organize a violent mob.
Racial friction is an uncertain element. In Britain, TV images have shown mixed-race crowds creating mayhem. In recent mob violence in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, attackers were black and victims white.
The recent violence raises frightening memories of past racial unrest – the police club fracturing black civil rights marcher John Lewis’ skull in 1965 Alabama, or the cinderblock smashing white truck driver Reginald Denny’s head in 1992 Los Angeles.
Even though it’s unclear how much race motivates today’s mob violence, many see it as one of a combination of factors, which together make the grip of American law and order feel less secure.
“What we’re seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here,” columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.
“The cause was not injustice … (it was) greed, selfishness, a respect and even lust for violence, and a lack of moral grounding,” she wrote.
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