A Wonderful Country If You're Not Poor

This Englishman doesn’t want our help in dealing with rioters.

America's law and order settlement is not one any sensible foreigner would want to embrace. Sorry, Bill Bratton, I know you've done some good work and we're all keen to learn from each other. But you were starting from a very different and much, much more violent place. We don't need it here.

We'd better get this right or we risk lurching into an American view of policing [...] which has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world: more than 2 million people in prison, twice that number on probation or parole, at any one time. No thanks.

[...]

We know voters want looters punished – I do myself – but appropriate punishment is only half the equation.

[...]

[PM Cameron’s] list of problematic attitudes and behaviour in wider society, conduct that may help to explain last week's disorder, did not include the relentless pressure of commercial advertising – "buy our stuff!" – which hits the poor hardest.

[...]

[The Metropolitan Police’s explanation] was that the police initially saw the riots as a public order issue, a form of political protest like last winter's student riots or the G20 protests. In consequence, they handled them warily, aware that they might be criticised for heavy-handedness, as they were.

[...]

Only on Monday, too late, did they see that they were mostly dealing with opportunistic and apolitical looting.

[...]

[Rush] Limbaugh called last week's Tottenham-led mayhem "the flower of socialism in full bloom", when any idiot with even half a brain should be able see it was as American as pecan pie in so many ways.

[...]

Yet of all the acres of guff and wisdom I read about the riots this weekend, the article which stuck most firmly – and alarmingly – in the mind was by a clever American. What he said in effect was: "Say goodbye to your unarmed British bobby, you lot have opted for our version of liberty now and it will have to be policed much more robustly from here on."

[...]

Americans fear their police – and with good reason – but have confidence in the efficacy. The fact that Duggan was carrying a gun when shot would have ended the debate about injustice in America.

[...]

There [are] far more people in prison in the US than in China, with four times the population, and gun violence is rampant – more than 12,000 gun-related homicides in 2007 alone. It's a wonderful country in all sorts of ways if you're not poor, very hard if you are.

  UK Guardian

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.