London Burning; Hundreds Rioting With Businesses and Cars Torched Across City

Three days of rioting is leaving its mark, and the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) is looking to deploy more than 10,000 police to quell the rioting. There's even word that the government will send in the Army to stop the protests.

At the same time, the police said they had launched a murder inquiry after a 26-year-old man, who was not identified by name, was shot and killed in a car in Croydon, south of London, late Monday as rioters torched and looted buildings — the first known fatality since the unrest began in another part of the city on Saturday.

Mr. Cameron spoke after cutting short a vacation in Tuscany to return home as violence convulsed at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area late Monday and early Tuesday and broke out for the first time in other locations including Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham.

Coming after a cascade of crises, the measures announced by Mr. Cameron seemed to represent a bid to restore some appearance of official authority after nights of chaos and near-anarchy with rioters taunting or outmaneuvering the police, raiding stores and torching buildings.

This is a black eye on the government with the 2012 Olympics just a year away. Some of the businesses near Olympic sites have been hit by rioters.

And there's word that the rioting has spread to other cities as well.

So, what started the riots? Well, it appears to be traced back to the death of a suspected drug dealer at the hands of police. Yet, the riots went from being one of protest about the death to a general riot for the sake of rioting and copycatting. Some are also tracing the protests to cuts in various programs as part of the government's austerity package to bring the government spending in line with receipts.

The riots appeared to have little unifying cause — though some involved claimed to oppose sharp government spending cuts, which will slash welfare payments and cut tens of thousands of public sector jobs through 2015.

Others appeared attracted simply by the opportunity for violence. "Come join the fun," shouted one youth, racing along a street in the east London suburb of Hackney, where shops were attacked and cars torched.

Rioters were left virtually unchallenged in several neighborhoods and able to plunder from stores at will or attempt to invade homes. Restaurants and stores fearful of looting closed early across London.

Expect the damage to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars before all is said and done - as businesses close in fear of damage and people attempt to recover from damage done to their properties.