Racism? Always about others and one of the first resorts of the guilty.
Look back through this and similar threads for the number of posters pointing the finger at others and taking not the slightest bit of responsibility for their own part in all this mess.
These criminal disturbances have so far had one root. Kids with far too much power being policed by people with far too little... and the rest of us burying our heads in the sand for the last couple of decades.
If you ain't kids, you're adults and probably parents. Fact is we've all looked the other way as things gradually got more and more out of hand. This is a democracy or thereabouts. MPs and Councillors hold regular weekly surgeries and popular campaigns are not difficult to get going - that is if we really cared about the increasingly negative influences on our kids. Unsurprisingly in this apathetic society of ours, the only people I've seen organising against the way things have been going, are the families of murdered kids (a fair few in my area and many others elsewhere, up and down these islands).
When I talk about negative influences, I'm talking about a lot of things: graphic (and increasingly distorted) sex and violence as featured in movies, computer games, websites, phones etc.. I'm talking about fashion items which a standard income cannot afford including branded trainers, tracksuits, football shirts and so on... and all this on a diet of skunkweed from the age of, say, 14 upwards. All this and much more as the years have gone by and the need for a bigger shock and/or a stronger buzz increases.
We've seen all this affecting ourselves, our parents, brothers, sisters, children. Affecting our mates, our kids' mates, the bloke on the corner... All of these things have been quietly eating away at the fabric of the communities we live in, and we've all known it was going to end in tears.
Now we're starting to pay the price for strolling on and negating the obvious - and that price for that lethargy goes further than a few burning buildings and looted shops.
We've let politicians tell us what to do and teachers and the police walk on eggshells. To have avoided all this, we've known it needed to be the other way round but couldn't arsed to get involved. Which of us has effectively protested against these negative influences over the years?
If we think that by taking non-white kids out of the mix these problems are likely to disappear, we're evidently in denial (blissfully ignorant of the facts) - and that makes us as dangerous as any of these 'gangstas' or whatever they fantasise about being. Black kids don't run Sony, Nike, Hollywood, Microsoft etc., like all other kids, they're just mindless victims of these increasingly immoral institutions.
Having been content to stand aside and look is bad enough, BUT if we've then actually got the gall to point our finger at others when we're as much to blame then what's that all about? That was called stinky finger in my school. On the street and in the nick it's called grassing. Is that you, 'cos I tell you what, it ain't me. I'm prepared to hold my hands up, take my share of the blame and do something to improve things going forward. After all, it's kids that are doing all this but can we blame kids for succumbing to influence? It's part of the maturing process. It's down to adults and parents to check those influences.
When police resources stretch to breaking point and we find our troops and reservists over-committed elsewhere, instead of Citizen's Militia's chasing black kids around, let's start doing something about the problem on our own doorsteps. Let's start controlling our own kids and helping with those of our neighbours, school mates and so on, by protecting them from the corruptions and depravities of the adult world before they're well rounded enough to deal with it.