"Riots"

I had planned the next post to be about our recent trip to Wales. That will come shortly. But so many people have been writing and phoning, asking us if we are OK, and all worked up about the "riots," that I thought I'd best respond to that first.

Apparently, the U.S. news media have made it appear that all of England is in flames. The British media are only slightly less panicked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, Nottingham was listed among the cities having "riots," but we learned about all this the same way you did -- on TV. Our neighborhood is very quiet, and nothing out of the ordinary occurred here.

I put "riots" in quotes, not to take anything away from what happened in Tottenham or Birmingham, where people actually died. But here in Nottingham, at least, every broken window was being reported in the news as an "incident" related to the "riots."

Now, judging from the number of storefronts that have steel roller doors that pull down over their windows at night, or that pull bars across their windows at closing time, I'd guess that broken windows occur with some frequency here. It might be attempted robbery, vandalism, or just the fallout from a drunken street fight, but a broken window does not a "riot" make.

Here in Nottingham, about 30 people got together in one of the really poor inner city neighborhoods (a place we've heard about but never been), possibly started some rubbish fires in the street (litter is everywhere here, so it wouldn't take long to collect enough trash off the street for a little campfire), then marched to the city centre where they tried to break into a store. At that point the police moved in and arrested the ones who didn't run away fast enough. There were two other "incidents" the next night, even less eventful than this.

Currently, the media here are comparing these "riots" to the LA riots of 1992. I have no first-hand experience of either, but since the LA riots raged for a week across a sizeable area, and these only a few nights in isolated areas, my guess is that this comparison is absurd.

To an outside observer, the political rhetoric is pretty fascinating. There are Tories (the conservative party in power) crowing about law and order, and there are Liberals and Labour (the other two parties) talking about the root social causes, and the Tory government's plans to lay off hundreds of police officers to save money, respectively. It sounds a good deal like Republicans and Democrats at home, but the partisanship is much less divisive.

There are also a number of people in my field of media studies who would really like to get some hard data on the role of social media and cell phones in all of this. That, too, would be fascinating, but is for another venue.

Bottom line: Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers, and believe even less of what you see on TV. We're fine and England is not burning.