ARTICLE CARNIVAL RIOT 2008.

BLOODY MONDAY

Notting hill carnival deteriorated into an orgy of opportunistic chaos on Bank holiday Monday in a scene reminiscent of the 1980’s riots, with running battles between the police and missile throwing youths

Only this time there was no underlying flame of racial tensions . Black, white and across the colour board, akin in their own sub-culture, laced with pseudo Jamaican idioms hurled bottles at a squad of defenceless police on Ladbroke grove for a full fifteen minutes before the police were given an order to respond with inadequate , and fruitless charges, to then re-group and again stand without shields or helmets and be pelted .

As some officers fell, their strategy reminded me of the last scene of Frank Miller's movie 300.

Not 200 yards away, at the corner of St Mark’s Road and Rustin Mews sat at least three vans with riot squad officers awaiting the bureaucratic order to be deployed. It was at least another 45 minutes before a protective visor was to be seen let alone a shield. Had they clamped down an hour before, the sense of free-for-all stoning the sitting ducks could arguably have been suffocated

Every charge made by the targeted 'lambs to the slaughter' in luminous yellow ended up hurting onlookers. They felt the nervous wrath of anguished coppers swinging batons indiscriminately while the appropriate offenders had dispersed behind diminishing hoards of onlookers filming on phones and huddled in a bus shelter. On adjoining side streets where the violence trickled, it transpired that ordinary police constables were not allowed to detain or arrest perpetrators who they saw being violent because it is not of their department although they are police officers. The youngsters had no diminution and no call for it.

I overheard phrases such as stone them bumba claat and saw one kid laughing as he casually trotted back to his friends' doorway and told them almost in passing that he'd "just been 'pitching bottles at the pigs"

Let the media note, (as at least one newspaper has cited it as being a race riot sparked by police stop and search tactics against black boys), that some of us were so angry at these kids that we ended up in violent confrontations with them.

An awful end to a remarkably well spirited event that gleamed with racial diversity, relegating secularism to faded history. The Caribean spirit really does seduce.

It's a crying shame that this magnificent success story, with it's intense government supervision can realistically be ruined by a handful of approximately eighteen to twenty - seven year old males who are simply immature, have an unchecked lack of respect for anyone , and warrant a good old fashioned pre- politically correct thick ear.

Or am I missing something