After Mark Duggan was shot by police in North London, in Tottenham, four days ago, the family conducted a peaceful vigil and march to the police station (as one does in black communities around the world; standard practice in Oakland, East New York, etc.). There were discrepancies in the account of Duggan's death, as usual. (Police said he'd shot an officer; instead, as usual, an officer apparently shot an officer.) Family and friends waited outside the police station for hours and were ignored. Later that night, a different kind of demonstration emerged, and 26 police were injured in what ensued. Over the weekend, riots and mini-riots "broke out" from Tottenham to Brixton all the way down to Oxford Circus. "Most of the looters were young teenagers, many of them girls," says the Telegraph—interesting: how many looters were there? How many of them were girls?—and here it's helpful to note that Tottenham has the highest unemployment rate in London. Local businesses were trashed; in pictures, demonstrators seem nearly all young and of all races. Like many episodes of unrest, this is a fairly inarticulate class uprising, with a few goons and a lot of people without jobs who are pissed off about the police shooting people. And the further you get from London, it seems, the more the riots are treated as some act of chav hooliganry; it's paragraph 13 in the Times where Tottenham is described as a place where "a large Afro-Caribbean population has felt singled out by the police for abuse"—and Mark Duggan's name doesn't make an appearance until paragraph 15. Unfortunately, we don't get many good accounts of what's really happening, or why people are furious enough to put themselves in harm's way, at least in part because most members of the media didn't feel safe reporting from the area, and as well a few were attacked. (Photo by Tom Kay.)

In the wake of the devastation of last week's weather—178 tornadoes in two days! Hundreds dead, many missing—states from Tennessee to Alabama to Texas are beset with looters, we hear. Seven in Ohio! Three in St. Louis! Two in North Carolina! Maybe 20 all told in Alabama! Literally, perhaps three dozens of people have been arrested for looting in the past week. READ MORE

"Looters," reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, "were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below." That "looting" is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one's own benefit-not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless-seems to have entirely escaped these reporters. The Journal, while chronicling this "violence" against property, does, however, offer one dissenting viewpoint: "Standing at the edge of the mob, 18-year-old Reginald Elacen suggested the police should be allowing the badly damaged stores to be emptied, and helping keep order. 'We really don't have a choice,' he said, referring to the desperate needs of Haitians who lost everything in the quake. 'If the police would help, it could be done without violence.'" What a wild idea. And? "Still, just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store's shattered roof, handing out goods can by can." This article, incidentally, is headlined "Haiti Authorities Battle Looters." READ MORE

Some excerpts from Ohio State University's Disaster Research Center's Working Paper #71, "Looting in Disaster," by Jane Gray and Elizabeth Wilson, August 1984, prepared for a conference discussion on the topic of the sociology of disaster. READ MORE