Friday night on Market Street/Piccadilly Gardens

[julesjones]

Still pairs of police every 20 yards, and the occasional moderately senior officer wandering around assessing things, but a distinct lack of vans tonight and the police were looking relaxed and cheerful. Some of the broken windows have already been replaced with new glazing, although there was so much damage it's going to take Manchester Glass a few days to get around them all. The shops with boarding over the windows have large signs saying "we are open", and people are in them. It felt like the usual Friday evening number of shoppers and commuters pottering about, and the mood was back to normal.

This is probably partly due to the fact that the first batch of arrestees were processed early on Wednesday morning on a fast track basis, and ever since the local newspaper has been providing the photos, names (other than minors), ages, localities, occupations, pleas and sentences of each and every person passing through the courts on charges connected with the looting, and has sworn to keep doing so for as long as it takes, right through to any crown court proceedings down the line. Anyone who thought that even if they got caught they wouldn't be seen by the courts for months, and then get an ASBO that nobody would ever hear about, will have had a nasty shock, and a strong incentive to keep their head down.

Comments

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Well done that paper! :)

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're doing okay during all this. Also, I just couldn't understand how all the assholes with uncovered faces thought they'd get away with this. Isn't England in general and London in particular one of the most CCTV covered places in the universe?

Assholes.

[julesjones]

It is indeed the most camera-covered society in the known universe, but I think many of them assumed that with several hundred people involved, the police simply wouldn't have the resources to cope. They may also have had the view that the police are old farts who don't understand social networking and would never work out how to find their bragshots of themselves on their FB pages.

GMP is busy proving them wrong -- amongst other things, GMP is using its own FB and Twitter feeds to publicise mugshots in the #shopalooter campaign, and has hired a pair of vans with digital billboards to drive around the city displaying video and stills for people to look at in the hope of identifying the looters. The result of all this activity is that they're identifying looters fast enough to go and grab them while the nicked goods are still in their possession.