British Cities Under Siege by Young Thugs Street crime has become an issue with an increase in armed teens. In one East London case, what started as a 'trivial dispute' turned deadly.
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 29, 2006 LONDON Canning Town grew up as a Victorian-era slum, home to a caustic stew of noxious factories and cramped houses backing up to open sewage ditches. Some believe it was an inspiration for Charles Dickens' portraits of London childhoods too miserable to produce anything but thieves. Things haven't changed much, if you ask Alex Jackson, a longtime resident of the East London neighborhood. Jackson said he was accosted recently outside a market by three or four boys who he guessed were between 10 and 14 years old. "One of the kids says to me, 'Get us some cigarettes, will you?' And I tell him, 'You're not old enough to smoke.' And I kept going. On my way out, about 10 yards out, I get from one of them, excuse the language, 'You [expletive] bald-headed old [expletive], I'm gonna stab you.' I'm not kidding. It's an everyday occurrence." The neighborhood made headlines last year when DHL, the worldwide courier service, allowed its drivers on occasion to opt out of deliveries to Canning Town. "They deliver in Beirut. They won't deliver in E16," Jackson said, referring to the postal code here. One only has to step off the train into this dockside neighborhood across the Thames River from the money-soaked Canary Wharf district to understand how street crime has become an issue even tougher than terrorism for Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party. The government has poured major resources into dozens of investigations of homegrown Islamic extremists. But the more immediate, day-to-day reality in parts of many British cities is that going to the market or dropping children off at school can involve running a gantlet of young thugs whose numbers and audacity appear to have largely overwhelmed the police in areas such as Canning Town." (more at link) http://tinyurl.com/gwcmt To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
