From: smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Trouble in Bristol?
Date: 21 Jul 92 10:07:29 GMT
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol

In article <1992Jul20.231820.3452@trl.oz.au> hayes@blaise.trl.OZ.AU (Mark Hayes) writes:
>We have had a couple of very short news reports here in Oz re rioting
>in Bristol. According to these reports the riots occurred after a
>high-speed car chase. Could anyone fill in the details, eg. which area
>of the city, how many people involved, how much damage, etc.? As usual
>the media only reports on the sensational stories and usually blows
>them up out of all proportion.

See if we can help a little, though I don't know all the details.  The
area involved was Hartcliffe, which is a small area on the Southern
edge of Bristol.  The focal point was a large council estate (for the
us readers, that's something like 'housing project').  As background,
Hartcliffe is a poor area, with a very high level of unemployment.  The
housing estate is a large one, and it offers virtually no acceptable
focal point for young people to gather in, so 'hanging around' is a
popular pastime.  Hartcliffe also recently applied for (and was refused)
a government grant of something like 30 million pounds under a program
which is meant to provide for improvement of communities like Hartcliffe.
And, since someone is going to ask, Hartcliffe is a predominantly white
community, and from the news pictures it appears that most if not all
of the rioters would be categorised as such.

In common with many such communities, the population splits into
several groups, major ones being older people who have lived there all
their life, younger couples and families who can't afford to live
anywhere 'better' but who are basically law-abiding, and a small but
noticeable group of 'out of controls'.  The troubles in Hartcliffe
involved a fairly small subset of that last group.  (Police numbers
that I've heard estimated the numbers of people involved at maybe a
couple of hundred -- not all from the area.)

Now one currently popular form of entertainment in such estates around
the UK is joyriding using stolen (and preferably high-performance) cars
and motorcycles.  Last week, two Hartcliffe youths who were joyriding
on a high-powered stolen bike (BMW, I think) were killed when they were
run off the road by an unmarked police car which pulled out in front of
them.  (There's a police investigation going on into the circumstances
of this, and not a lot of detail has been released yet, though 2
policemen have been suspended pending the outcome.)

This event was further complicated by the facts that the stolen bike
was in fact an 'unmarked police motorcycle, outfitted with a set of
sophisticated surveillance equipment' (and stolen from outside an
officer's home the night before); and that at the time of the accident,
the bike was being shadowed by yet another unmarked police motorcycle.
From which one presumes, though it hasn't been stated, that the driver
of the police car pulled out in front of it in full knowledge that it
was about to be there, and with 'malice aforethought'.  The kid driving
the stolen bike was said to be a very competent rider, so there's a
feeling that things were staged such as to make a nasty accident
unavoidable -- that if there'd been any chance to stop less permanently,
he'd have managed it.

That night (allegedly and believably after an afternoon of drinking), a
smallish (maybe 100) group of youths -- probably mostly local -- went
on the rampage, looting and burning shops and the occasional car, and
attacking the police and firemen with rocks and petrol bombs (Molotov
cocktails) when they responded.  The first night there were something
like 2 injuries and 15 arrests.  The next two nights appear to have
involved fair sized contingents from other parts of town (anyone want
to bet on Southmead?) as well, coming along to 'take part in the fun'.

In all, there were something like 75 arrests, of which about 20 were of
local (i.e. housing estate) residents, and something on the order of a
dozen vehicles and half dozen of the local shops were burned out.  The
remainder of the shops were looted.  Initial court hearings were
yesterday, and around 10 of those arrested were 'remanded' (i.e. held
in custody) and the remainder were released on bail.  Apart from the
original two motorcyclists, there were no deaths, and no reported
serious injuries resulting from the affair, though there were a fair
number of minor ones.

Things have now calmed down a bit, though there is now an increased
police presence in the area.  (Ironically, the community has been
pressuring for that for some years now.)  The shopkeepers seem to have
divided, some expressing determination to stay, others saying that they
are planning to leave, claiming that while business was good enough to
keep them just scraping by, it's not good enough to enable them to
rebuild.  

It appears that the majority of the residents of the area either
support, or at least understand and sympathise with, the police action;
but there is a very vocal minority who feel that 'the police murdered
two of ours, and we won't be even until we get two of them', so we may
be on for more trouble in that area.  Interestingly, it appears that the
families of the two kids who were killed are split, one family in each
camp.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!uknet!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132