UK's Cameron under pressure over cuts after riots - Yahoo! News
UNEASY PEACE
Britons were appalled at the scenes on their streets, from the televised mugging of a badly beaten Malaysian teenager by people pretending to help him, to a Polish woman photographed leaping from a burning building.
The scale and ferocity of the rioting -- not only in inner-city areas but also in some middle-class suburbs -- battered Britain's image as a civilized and peaceful society.
Footage of looters kicking in shop windows and stealing everything from baby clothes to food and large television sets was repeated for days on rolling news channels around the world.
The unrest flared first in north London after police shot dead a black man and refused to give his relatives information about the incident. A local protest then developed into widespread looting and violence.
But social strains have been growing in Britain for some time, with the economy struggling to clamber out of an 18-month recession, one in five young people out of work and high inflation squeezing incomes and hitting the poor hardest.
Some of the looters spoke of taking a stand against "the system" and picked out the recent scandal of lawmakers' fraudulent expenses claims and huge bonuses paid to bankers.
Morale in London's police force has been dented by the loss of its leader and other senior figures in recent weeks in the fallout from the phone-hacking and bribery allegations at Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers.
As courts stayed open through the night to deal with the hundreds of people charged over the violence, police flooded the streets to maintain an uneasy peace.
Steve Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said 16,000 officers would remain on duty in the capital on Friday. That is their biggest peacetime deployment and compares with a normal figure of around 2,500.
"London has remained calm for the last two nights and I certainly hope and pray it stays that way," he said in a statement on Thursday evening.
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