Violence flared in parts of Britain for the fourth night Tuesday, including the firebombing of a police station in the central city of Nottingham, officials said.
There were no reported injuries in the police station attack, which authorities said involved a group of 30 to 40 people in the city’s Canning Circus area. Police arrested several suspects.
Other cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, reported some violence and relatively minor skirmishes between police and groups roaming the streets.
London, where the police presence was nearly tripled from the night before, reportedly remained free of widespread violence late Tuesday night. On previous nights, shops were looted and cars and businesses torched as part of the rioting that began Saturday.
British officials anticipating more riots Tuesday sharply increased police presence in London and elsewhere to try to control the country’s worst uprising in years.
About 16,000 officers were being deployed to try to accomplish what some observers described as “reclaiming the streets.”
Police said they could not guarantee an end to the looting, the burning of shops or the general destruction of property. The tactics under consideration for controlling unruly crowds reportedly included plastic bullets.
“We have lots of information to suggest that there may be similar disturbances tonight,” Cmdr. Simon Foy told the BBC. “That’s exactly the reason why the Met [police force] has chosen to now actually really ‘up the game’ and put a significant number of officers on the streets.”
Local media reported sporadic skirmishes between police and rioters throughout the day Tuesday.
Confrontations between police and rioters were also reported in Manchester and neighboring Salford in northwestern England. In central England, according to news reports, police arrested several people in Birmingham and stopped a group caught torching cars in West Bromwich. Looting was reported in Wolverhampton, police said.
Police were investigating the death of a man Tuesday who had been found shot in Croydon.
By late Tuesday, at least 560 people had been arrested in London, with more than 100 charged. Dozens more were arrested in other cities.
Prime Minister David Cameron — who cut short a vacation in Italy to deal with the crisis — recalled Parliament from its summer recess for an emergency session on the riots and looting that have spread from the deprived London neighborhood of Tottenham to districts across the capital and to Liverpool, Bristol and other cities.
Cameron described the scenes of burning buildings and smashed windows as “sickening,” but he refrained from tougher measures such as calling in the military to help police restore order.
“People should be in no doubt that we will do everything necessary to restore order to Britain’s streets and to make them safe for the law-abiding,” Cameron told reporters after a crisis meeting at his Downing Street office.
Parliament is to return to duty on Thursday, as the political fallout from the rampage takes hold. The crisis is a major test for Cameron’s Conservative-led coalition government.
Streets of once-prosperous neighborhoods were a mess — all across the British capital, gangs of youths had rampaged through the streets, smashing store windows, looting stores and carrying out goods including TVs, electronic equipment, mobile phones, clothes and cash.
A soccer match scheduled for Wednesday between England and the Netherlands at London’s Wembley Stadium was canceled to free up police officers for riot duty.
A wave of violence and looting raged across London on Monday night, as authorities struggled to contain the country’s worst unrest since race riots set the capital ablaze in the 1980s. Groups of young people rampaged for a third straight night, setting buildings, vehicles and garbage dumps alight, looting stores and pelting police officers with bottles and fireworks.
While in Birmingham, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was booed by crowds. London Mayor Boris Johnson was heckled on a shattered shopping street in Clapham in south London.
Violence first broke out late Saturday in Tottenham after a protest against the fatal police shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan. The Independent Police Complaints Commission, which is investigating the shooting, said a “non-police firearm” was recovered at the scene, but that there was no evidence it had been fired.
In addition, the government’s plans for sharp cuts in public services and rising unemployment have fed into growing frustrations in Britain.
Flash riots struck first at neighboring districts in north London, but spread overnight Sunday to central Oxford Circus and southward to the multiethnic area of Brixton, which has been beginning to emerge from a dark past of race riots and social deprivation.
By Tuesday morning, growing crowds of marauders moved to the more wealthy areas of Clapham in south London and up to trendy Notting Hill, where they terrorized restaurants and trashed stores, and in the upmarket west London borough of Ealing.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-riots-web-20110810,0,2306517.story
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