Much can be learnt from the riots; but I suspect that the necessary and deserved legal processes will not include opportunity to research the causes of the ‘riot mentality’ or allow time for parents to be interviewed. These riots demonstrate the lack of respect for self and for others endemic in much of the Western World younger age groups. Why? What happened? How did this mentality occur? Police and communities desperately need to quickly understand what happened and why. It is not a time for academics to sit at their desks and ponder theory eventually producing papers to be totted around the media. This needs to be evaluated now; quickly. Parents must be held accountable and be legally required to give an explanation of why they lost control of their children and teenagers. Did they know where their children were and what they were doing? Of course, many of the parents of these teens and kids would not care and probably agreed with what they were doing. It is vital to determine the socio-economic background of the families; age groups, education levels, in work, long term unemployed, addiction, associated with low-level crime or mob mentality. I doubt that anyone with the power to begin this quest to find out will read this blog. However, others who agree know that it is not that hard to rapidly capture this information. We have all of the tools at our disposal; we just have to want to do it. Then and only then can laws be enacted to deal with future behaviour. Those laws should include immediately banning hoodies, wearing bike helmets unless astride a bike, wearing ski masks off a skiing field and just the highly charged emotional issue of wearing the burka and similar garments. People’s faces must be visible when they are out in public; do what you like in your own home or own cultural buildings but each one of us has a responsibility to the community we walk about in-it protects everyone.
