“This isn’t to excuse the sort of mass, wanton disregard for the law that we’ve seen of late” – to be followed with pathetic excuses such as boredom, confusion, Boris Johnson’s fixed penalty notice and pandemic trauma.
In one thing I am in agreement with the author: “the real problem here: Britain’s lack of leadership or adult responsibility”. The thing is, his dismissal and pathetic excuse making for black criminality is exactly the lack of leadership and failure to exert adult responsibility he speaks of. Like the weak parent who is always ready with an excuse for their out of control child’s behaviour, and insist they are really a good boy, he and his ilk are the root cause of the problem.
Black fathers deserting their children is not a “stereotype”; it is a fact. These lawless brats probably never received and discipline and moral teaching in the home. They certainly didn’t get it in school, where they were busy getting a chip placed on their shoulders when told how oppressed they were, and how their failure and bad behaviour was the result of “systemic racism”.
No discipline, no moral teaching, brought up on junk culture, let off with slaps on the wrist by the police and courts and with an army of excuse makers like the author – that is where these feral brats come from.
The author invokes moral panics. A career criminal in the USA, with heart disease and Covid, high on a lethal dose of crystal meth and Fentanyl, has a heart attack while resisting arrest. Riots, worldwide protests, the demonisation of the entire white race, the institution of anti-racism training and “decolonisation” and racial discrimination against white people ensue everywhere. I’d say that was the biggest moral panic in history, and at the heart of it was the same failure to place blame where it actually lay, and instead offer pathetic excuses such as “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” to explain why the death by heart attack of a self-overdosed career criminal resisting arrest wasn’t his fault;
As was predictable, the hysterical, misguided response to Floyd’s death has made the lives of law abiding black people worse. Not only are they the primary victims of the increase black crime, but they suffer as a result of association with the criminals. If the author and black people in general stopped defending criminals and instead worked with the police to punish them and drive them out of their communities. we would be on the way to a better future, instead of a further descent in to criminality and social conflict.

“In response, the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, ordered the Met to “hunt down and lock up” the culprits, as though they were the Krays.”

No, as though they were petty semi-organised thugs who use violence to get something for nothing.

…these wayward youths are part of a more complex criminal profile

.

…conspicuous youth crime and deviant behaviour is imbued with media and political capital.

.

Whether it’s Jews, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Somalians, Albanians, Polish plumbers, acid house ravers, radical feminists, Black Lives Matter or Gary Lineker, there’s always some bogeyman hiding in plain sight

.

As Thatcher and Cameron, then Blair and Brown, mortgaged British society, economically and morally, today’s political leaders are squandering what’s left. Riots and looting and recession are their legacy.

… and trope follows trope follows trope.
This piece is little more than intersectionistic propaganda with a scholarly spin – even resorting to that old favourite sneering term left-leanng pundits and creatives like to use when discounting ordinary people’s perfectly rational fear of crime and disorder: Moral Panic!
The intellectual class may experience increasing concern about their pet moral causes (climate change, racism, misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, islamophobia – you know the drill) but little people’s fears are no more than small-minded panic.

Was this written by Grauniad AI?

Garbage. There is no moral panic. Nor any need for any.
It’s crime. In fact, it’s organised and pre-meditated crime. There’s no excuse. All we need to do is enforce the laws we already have to deal with this.
It is a sick and declining culture that tolerates and excuses this sort of behaviour.

Was this load of gunk written by the Champagne Socialist?
“pandemic-traumatised young people”
most young people don’t put on balaclavas and descend on Oxford Street (potentially armed) to assault and loot though. Thus, your literary device renders pointless.
I bet you blame the weekly stabbings events on the “pandemic-trauma” too. asinine

I thought that this was a Guardian article as well.Is Unherd becoming like GBNews and insisting on having token lefties?The whole mainstream media is woke.That is where an article like this belongs.

“This isn’t to excuse the sort of mass, wanton disregard for the law that we’ve seen of late.”
Strange, because your first three paragraphs seem intent on doing just that.

“witness the real conditions people are living under.”
The implication being that its all the fault of if those evil Tories, and the society that provides those youths with free schooling, healthcare, benefits…
I once stayed in a building with a large numbers of Indian IT workers. Mostly brought up India by low to middle income families. If you entered their houses in the evening, every one has a father in the house, every child was busy studying. Most of them had hardly any vacations or luxuries, the flats were tiny.
None of those kids ended up looting due to their “real conditions”.
You know how tough it is to get into grammar schools? The majority of those kids got into one.

Get real, and stop defending the behaviour of young people from communities with terrible cultures.

“not least because too many of their own (prime) ministers have been on the wrong side of the police.”
I would rather have a scumbag law breaker as PM who does a great job of managing the country, rather than the other way round
Boris did a much better job of refusing to follow lockdown diktats in Xmas 2021, and of the vaccine process, than many of his peers. And he at least somewhat pretended to accept the Brexit referendum, unlike most of Britain’s elite class.

What a bunch of strung-togethet rot.

“A moral panic” is usually a term relating to an unjustified concern over morality. This was not a panic, it was a justified concern that organized mobs were robbing stores by force of numbers.

How about individuals actually taking responsibility for their own behaviour and for raising their children as opposed to producing feral humanoids.?

This must be some joke article. Looting, like graffitti, is a leading indicator of societal destruction. The “broken windows” approach in community safety works – little forms of disorder lead to larger forms of disorder and crime. In the US, we have terrible problems with looting and shoplifting, to the point where many stores need to lock EVERYTHING up. The use of social media to coordinate looting mobs is more and more common.

It is time for a panic. This needs to stop. We all pay for looting.

No matter how obvious the criminality, there is always some liberal around to minimize the problem, excuse the criminals, and accuse the ordinary people being victimized of being the real cause of the problem anyway. Today’s example.

Water cannon would stop anything like this. Why not?

“Moral panic”? What the h*ll?! Living in a sh*tty neighborhood is absolutely no excuse for rioting and looting. These kids aren’t Jean Valjean stealing bread to survive, they’re savage, greedy punks in packs. Government is not responsible for raising these creatures. Children in strong families of every socioeconomic level don’t commit these crimes. “Hear me out”. Yeah, even you know what you’re saying is bullsh*t.

I think about this in exactly the way I think about what’s going on in France: 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.
On the one hand, the UK is being led by politicians who are – taking an optimistic perspective – third rate. Completely feckless, unable to solve any problems or conduct any discussion without resorting to unseemly screeching (Braverman is excellent at this – even if I agree with the basic thrust of some of her opinions, I wish she would be less shrill) or reciprocal blame-lobbing. It is completely obvious that their authority is going to erode.
In the same way, I don’t think that the French establishment is blameless. I don’t think the police have always acted in an acceptable fashion and they have been ill-equipped and under-resourced by the state which makes them frustrated and more likely to act badly. Which undermines respect among the people who are subject to their (waning) authority.
On the other hand – it is entirely possible for young people to pull themselves together and decide to be better than their superiors. Bad behaviour like looting cannot be excused by pointing the finger at the hated establishment. That argument ignores the fact that young people do have agency to think for themselves and form their own identities – independently of whatever is going on on the political level. No country can improve if self responsibility is denied on such a widespread level and that denial is ingrained into young people from an early age. The author seems to be going in this direction at the end of the article, but unfortunately didn’t expand on the thought.

Leadership and adult responsibility are exactly what fathers provide.

The media will cover the looting of big corporate stores in Oxford Street. Corporates that will reclaim the losses from their insurers and mark the cost of insurance and security into their inflated prices. However the real victims of this rise of robberies are small businesses with low turnovers that cannot afford security. A family member works in a supermarket along the south coast with no security and a secluded location. Large amounts of alcohol are regularly lifted (by white men) threatening the financial viability of the supermarket and the jobs of those working there. The permitted rise in shoplifting is probably part of the plan to ‘consolidate’ the British economy into cartels, which will fund ‘corporate’ Labour as well as the Conservative Party.
We are also seeing the result of the police’s refusal to treat burglary of residential properties as a crime. The public has no confidence in the police amid scandals such as GMP failing to record a quarter of reported crimes and the arrest of easy targets for non-criminal hate incidents, not to mention the continuing employment of criminals by the Met.
The next step will be public indifference to both the losses suffered by large corporates and the injuring and murder of police officers when the police and political establishment finally have to confront the rise in violent crime.

I love a ‘moral panic’; it gives me a chance to ‘clutch my pearls’.

“Hear me out.”
No.
I read it anyway and am even more committed to the correctness of my initial impression of the article.

Note to self: no need to add David Matthews to reading list.

Any criticism of any action is a moral panic, innit?

How long until the caliphate of Britanistan is declared? Not good news for females of course, but at least Sharia law will put an end to mayhem. Lots of POC will have to learn to tie their shoes with one hand, too.

Crime is criminal!

How then to explain the lower levels of criminality during the Depression of the 1930s? It seems that the one thing that must not be blamed is the criminals lack of morality. The new philosophy seems to be that individuals have full entitlement, but no duties.

If a computer made a comparison of opportunities for young people living in London or in the centre of other big cities compared to young people in many small towns or rural areas then i am confident that computer would state the former are far more priviliged in terms of range of educational courses,health facilities or recreational choices.And maybe if the political classes tried to tell many young people living in UK cities that most of them are not victims but people who have priviliges that many others dream of including all the migrants trying to get in Britain.Most migrants want to live in UK cities not left behind provincial Britain

Southend is not a town, as the article asserts, it’s a city. Its status as a city was recently expedited by the MP being stabbed to death in his own surgery.

I am fed up of reading pseudo intellectual or BLM excuses for what is basically a cultural behaviour by a significant proportion of young black society. It’s not our fault for being so nasty and racist to them, that’s just the way they are, witness anywhere else in the world…. Cultural enrichment!!!
Marcus Leach has it bang on…..

In a word, no homework implies lack of “opportunity, prospects and hope”. Strict schooling gives the kids an alternative vision of life that they may not find at home. Solutions are known – naturaly the author has nothing to say about improving these lives.

I watch a lot of true crime TV, and I have considerable difficulty believing anything that happens in Europe is comparable to the level of violence in American cities. American cities are violent and scary, and American police forces are militarized because they have to be just to properly be prepared for what they routinely face. They buy military vehicles because they legitimately need them, not often, but enough to justify the expense. The average American, even in the remotest countryside, chuckles at the notion of unarmed officers. The only kind of unarmed officers here are private security guards, though a lot of them are armed too, and the meter maids who write parking tickets, but again, depending on the jurisdiction, they might be armed too. If anything that happened in London were comparable to what happens in Chicago, New York, LA, or Philadelphia on a daily basis, you’d have armed your cops to the teeth long ago and wonder how an unarmed police force could function at all. Terrorist attacks are the closest analog, and we get comparable scenarios from ordinary criminals on a fairly regular basis. I watched something the other day where a murderer had taken several hostages inside a home and had to be shot by a police sniper. Crime is so prevalent here that we have a live action COPS. The cameras are placed with a few departments and the hosts simply go to whichever one is responding to a crime, and there’s enough crime that there’s never a dull moment. Given all this, it’s understandable why your journalists invoke ‘the violence of American cities’. Our reality is pretty scary. A bit of perspective from an American cousin.

Are organized mobs of feral gang youth sacking Harrods in the same way that they are sacking California’s shopping districts? If so, then it’s not a ‘moral panic’ – it’s more of a real panic.

Let’s be honest about this already: the reason for these kind of arguments being made by the far left elites is that they fear the people doing the looting, carjacking, robbing, rioting, etc and have adopted a policy of ‘give them what they want and they’ll leave us alone’, thinking that they’ll be safe in their gated communities with their private security. Appease the mob, expose your weakness.

I doubt the rioters read UnHerd, but if they did here would be another leftist adult desperately trying to get ‘down with the yoof’ making truly pathetic excuses for their behaviour. Poor behaviour from some of our leaders (but not actually most of them) doesn’t justify these scum who make ordinary – yes actually hard working peoples’ lives a misery. The vast majority of young people of all races do not actually behave like this either – let’s be on their side for a change

The West is so pathetically weak. This would be crushed in a moment by many far better run states, Singapore springs to mind. It wouldn’t actually need to be crushed, because people would simply know that rioting and looting would exact a heavy retribution.

Yet again we’re treated to binary solution: cuddle the wrongdoers orvflog them publicly.. Clearly the answer has to be a combination of carrot and stick. Leadership certainly plays a part but for the next 5 years at least that seems out of reach given the craven politicians on offer.. the only hope will be to fund mote local efforts and pray that a better calibre of leader emerges there. Equally, facilties need to be funded and all kinds of opportunities must replace
today’s hopelessness.
In the meantime, and simultaneously, the law must be upheld and stiff community service sentencing is surely called for.
But there is a 3rd contributor to this upheaval! The obscene salaries, profits and dividends are – correctly in my view – seen as legal theft by the squeezed middle and lower income people and if it’s okay for the rich to steal billions from them then it must be okay, morally and every other way for those victims to steal back what was taken from them. The transfer of wealth from the lower 80% to the top 1% is irrefutable evidence of that. Unless that is corrected ASAP GB can look forward to more, much more of the same.

Hahahahaha… I can practically smell the halitosis coming from all the dribbling reactionary gobs in this thread.