At architecture journal bdonline, Wouter Vanstiphout’s piece about the planning and related political implications of the riots begins in urban France:

In November 2005 French President Jacques Chirac welcomed back normality, after weeks of riots in the French banlieues. Instead of 1,000 to 1,500 vehicles being burnt every night, it went back to 163, and then kept to the normal 50 to 150. Every night of the year dozens of cars are being set on fire in the French banlieues and this had been going on for years on end.

What is normality to a French banlieue? It can mean that in the morning the elderly, women and children – and sometimes architects and historians looking for modernist housing projects from the sixties – can freely roam between the slabs and blocks, shop, play and look around.

After that the unemployed young men appear from their bedrooms and take up their positions near the entrances of the apartment blocks and on street corners. The elderly, women and children scuttle back home and the tourists leave altogether. The young men whistle and sign to each other, taunt and threaten the belated visitors and the semi-militarised police that buzz by in vans.

In many French banlieues, day turns into night around noon. Once, in one of these places, we approached a group of heavily armed policemen to ask for directions on the central square of a French housing estate.

They looked around nervously and said we shouldn’t stand still for too long, because one of the gangs could start throwing rocks. They then said that we should really really be back in the historic city centre within the hour; it was 3pm. They themselves would be out of there at dusk, at the latest. This was between riots, this was normality.

I know of nowhere in London that matches that description, but can we rule such scenarios out of the capital’s future? The comparison is inexact: “banlieue” means the urban outskirts, not the inner city areas where our riots began and mostly occurred. However, some fear that the effect of the government’s housing and other benefit reforms will be to foster banlieue-type concentrations of social marginalisation in London’s poorer suburbs, making the capital’s current situation even worse.

Vanstiphout continues:

In many ways, the [French] riots were “just” spectacular worsenings of a chronic condition, extrapolations on a permanent crisis lived by millions, but neglected by tens of millions. Something became visible for a moment, and then disappeared again, as a bad dream. Behind the scenes however a mechanism is in place that contains the badness, that keeps it from spilling over again, while making it inevitable that it will…the banlieues and their inhabitants have been effectively abandoned…

One person did well out of it, though: Nicolas Sarkozy, who as a minister of the interior fanned the flames by going on television, standing shoulder to shoulder with the riot police and calling the rioters scum (racaille) who would be wiped away; then rode the wave of popular fear all the way to the presidency, from where he invited a battalion of international architects to give back France its glory, by designing futures of the French capital, “Le Grand Paris“….

Right now it has become very difficult to think of an urban politics, let alone an urban planning or design approach that would be able to take on the underlying problems of riots like the ones in the UK in a serious way.

I do not think that the reason is that politics and planning have realised their limitations to shape society. I think that the reason is that urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental [my emphasis].

Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgment on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups, their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture.

Something there for politicians of all persuasions to reflect on. And there’s more:

It is much too soon to say anything about the relationship between the gentrification of Brixton or the coming of the Olympics to London, and the current explosion of violent alienation. But if we imagine another kind of urban politics, one that does not take into account a marketable image of the city, but the reality of the entire community, it would probably have entirely different priorities.

The first would be to work against the ever sharpening inequality of London, making it one of the unfairest cities in Europe, in poverty levels, education, crime and other indicators.

But then the reality of urban riots is that they have always turned out to be the opposite of a learning experience for a city. Riots have nearly always resulted in politicians simplifying the problem even more, and citizens looking away even further.

After a riot, your average city will become more afraid, more authoritarian, more segregated, more exclusive and less tolerant. That is the real tragedy of the post-war western urban riot, first it shocks and terrifies us, then for a moment it makes us see flashes of the kind of city we should be working towards, which then fades away into the darkness. Back to normal.

A “normal” that is unacceptable.

Wouter Vanstiphout is a partner at Crimson Architectural Historians in Rotterdam and professor of Design & Politics at the Technical University Delft. He is currently researching the relationship between urban riots and urban planning. I’m very grateful to @amarkodio for bringing Vanstiphout’s article to my attention.

The first casualties of urban riots are blameless people robbed of their livelihoods, their homes, their peace of mind, even their lives – nothing should come before easing their pain and striving to ensure that such barbarity is never again inflicted. The next casualty, cowering right behind, is the willingness of people in power and authority to get an intellectual grip on why those riots occurred, in order help prevent a repetition.

The starkest examples in recent days have been provided by Conservative Party politicians. Michael Gove’s performance on Newsnight was definitive. Fellow guest Harriet Harman’s mild observation that the causes of the riots are “complex” produced a barked tirade of rigid sanctimony – the first refuge of the right in denial. The politician responsible for children’s education presented himself as stoutly opposed to mental reasoning of any kind.

London’s top Tory hasn’t done much better. Boris’s approach has been to denounce what he called “sociological justifications” and indulge in the populist sharp practice at which he excels. His remark on yesterday’s Today programme that the government might reconsider its cuts to police budgets achieved its intended effect, intoxicating a media so addicted to Johnson’s rivalry with David Cameron that, with noble exceptions, it barely mentioned the Mayor’s own, continuing, contribution to reducing police numbers in London. It was initially left to journalists with lives outside the Westminster Village to point this out: Adam Bienkov and Martin Hoscik at MayorWatch.

The taboo against clear-eyed, realistic, intelligent diagnoses of a profound and terrifying rupture in London’s social order is so ferocious that any politician attempting it in public is effectively lynched. Ken Livingstone’s first statement about the trouble in Tottenham was explicit in saying “there can be no justification” for the destruction of businesses and homes, but he was dangled from the Daily Mail’s lamp post anyway for, albeit rather clumsily, daring to argue that government economic policy had helped create conditions for unrest. On no account must social context be permitted to dilute the orgy of self-gratifying condemnation, it appears. The irony is that Ken’s statement also called for a halt to police budget reductions, beating Boris to the punch by days.

It’s always entertaining to watch London Tories bashing Ken on crime: he’s every bit as pro police, pro stop-and-search and pro bobbies-on-the-beat as the are – every bit as Tory, in most ways. The big difference between Ken and Boris is that Ken is prepared to put council tax payers’ money where his mouth is, whereas Boris is not. Tories are frantically accusing Ken of exploiting the riots for political purposes. They are, of course, exactly right, but they don’t seem to mind their boy doing it too. Ken, meanwhile, has now joined the Labour mainstream in the inane “police numbers” bidding war, praising Margaret Thatcher in the process. This is, unless I’m very much mistaken, a little bid to outflank Boris on the right. At this rate he’ll have Brian Coleman crossing the floor.

Journalists too are menaced by Tory-led anti-thought policing, and the anxiety that their audiences will join in. On Tuesday morning I had the novel experience of first eavesdropping on then later hearing the broadcast of a radio interview. BBC 5 Live’s Aasmah Mir was one of several correspondents on central Hackney’s Clarence Road, scene of burning and looting the night before.

Her piece was first-rate, dead straight, street-level reporting, gathering the reactions of people from the Pembury estate to the destruction on their own doorsteps. Nearly as striking was her live preamble to it, in which she felt obliged to gently, almost apologetically break the news that almost no-one she had met had condemned the riots outright but talked as well about the frustrations of even law-abiding local youths. Warning: the following item contains truth; some listeners might find this enraging.

Our leaders could do much worse than pay close attention to what concerned, responsible members of riot-hit communities are saying. Some of my Hackney neighbours have joined the fearful clamour for tear gas and troops, but others know the counter-productive risks of the “tough” approach to enforcing the law, as they told Boris himself as recently as the end of May. Does any politician in this city really believe that the ruthless, pitiless criminal subcultures that have emerged so brazenly from the capital’s shadows can simply be “robustly” policed out of existence? How’s the “war on drugs” going, by the way?

Given the fury directed this week at any politician daring to suggest that the riots, as well as being intolerable, will have had complex social roots that need to be addressed I was encouraged that Boris said the following to me this morning:

I do not think that this is a simple issue, and I do not think we can simply ascribe it to wanton criminality or simply ascribe it to “Tory cuts,” or whatever, you know.

He offered that thought during a visit to Stoke Newington fire station in Hackney to thank London Fire Brigade members for their efforts during the riots and disbelievingly note the imbecile urge that seized some people to throw missiles at them as they went about their work. He also took the opportunity to thank Transport for London and all those operating “non-emergency transport services,” notably buses, for keeping things moving on the roads, and, striking a reassuring vote, to advise his fellow parents that “London is a great and safe city, and that everybody should allow their kids to grow up here with confidence and freedom.”

I was able to ask him some specific questions about the parts of London that had been affected, why he thought the riots had happened and how the issues they have raised should be addressed. We talked for about eight minutes – more time than it’s usually possible to grab with him – and he said some interesting things. I reproduce just about all of our conversation below:

DH: It’s very nice to see you in Hackney, though obviously not at the locations where the burning and looting and disruption took place. I understand that there might be very good reasons for that, but…

BJ: I am going [to those places], ah, shortly. Not necessarily today, but soon. I’ve got a heavy agenda. I’ve got to go and reopen the Croydon Tramlink, for example.

DH: That’s great. So in the future will you be taking a close interest in all the parts of London that have been particularly hurt and damaged? Because that seems to be quite important in terms of trying to figure out what happens next.

BJ: Yes. Look, Dave, let’s be clear. It’s too early yet to begin the kind of big post mortem. What we’re looking at still is getting it right, calming it down, repairing, business confidence about the compensation they’re entitled too, getting the money where it needs to go – we want to make sure people understand that it’s being dispensed. And, of course, Hackney – everything that happened in Hackney – is going to be very high on our list. But what I want is for us [London as a whole] to come out better than we were before the riots.

DH: There was a statement you issued shortly after all the rioting began in which you said there is no connection between what happened with Mark Duggan and the immediate aftermath of that, and the rioting that came in the following days. [To be exact, he said in the statement: "These acts of sheer criminality across London are nothing to do with this incident."] I’m assuming the point you were making was that the rioting can’t be excused [by the Duggan shooting].

BJ: That’s right.

DH: But it wasn’t a coincidence that three days of rioting followed all that went on around the Duggan incident. So would you accept that there has to be a connection of some type between the two things, and that you’ve got to look at that.

BJ: Patently, patently. Absolutely, I would certainly agree with that. And the IPCC has got to do its job, and they’ve got to do it without fear or favour. I tell you, as soon as I got a text on holiday saying that this operation had gone wrong, whatever had happened, I had a bad feeling about it immediately, I have to admit. The IPCC has got to get on and do its stuff, and I’m sure they will get to the bottom of it. But as I said in that statement, I don’t think that any event can excuse or justify what happened and frankly I think the vast majority of people who then took part in the looting and the rioting were by no means actuated by…

DH: Noble sentiments of moral outrage?

BJ: I think it unlikely.

DH: I’m sure you’re right.

BJ: But the other thing, let’s be clear Dave, there are rich ideological pickings for both left and right. That’s the deep truth of the matter. And there are issues here that can cause heart-searching on both sides of the political argument. That’s about as much as I want to say about all that at the moment, because I really want to think about it and try and produce a more considered assessment about what it means, a bit later on. You know what I’m saying…

DH: Yes I do, and it’s very good to hear you saying it. And I understand that in the immediate aftermath of things like this people take rather defensive positions and [only] say, ‘We must stamp down on this,’ and so on. But you do have to do more than that in the end I think.

BJ: And on that, let me just say…well, I don’t want to say much more about it now, but it will become clear that I do not think that this is a simple issue, and I do not think we can simply ascribe it to wanton criminality or simply ascribe it to ‘Tory cuts,’ or whatever, you know.

DH: My last question is really leading on from that. I’m now beginning to scratch my head and ask, what does all this actually tell us about where we are and where we’re going as a city, because stuff has come out of the shadows that was always there and it’s still there, even though it’s gone [from view] again.

BJ: It’s still there. Look, as I say, I want to be more considered about this so please take this as a sort of first, you know. I think London is a wonderful city, and it works brilliantly and it brings people together in the most amazing way. [But] there are huge gaps, inequalities, there are problems of aspiration, of achievement, all sorts of [things] that lead people to behave in absolutely despicable ways. And, you know, I don’t want to get into the whole background field of causation, cos it is very, very various…

DH: And a minefield.

BJ: It is a minefield. But what it has exposed is things to do with society over a long time. I don’t want try to sum it up in a groping way with you now, but what I certainly think is true is that it has exposed issues, and what I really want this to do is to allow us to tackle gang crime, to get a grip on it. There it is, it’s absolutely in the spotlight of the nation, and if this [becomes] our way of dealing with some of the issues that have been exposed…illiteracy or crass materialistic values in young people, whichever way you want to put it, then this is the moment.

So out of this disaster, this blow to London, I think great things can come. London is fundamentally in an amazing, good state at the moment. I was looking at a piece by a French journalist saying, look at the royal wedding, the Olympics coming up, it all looks fantastic, and this suddenly exposes something worse. The opportunity now, that big, flat rock having been flipped up, is to look at the creepy-crawlies.

DH: There’s less excuse for averting our gaze.

BJ: There’s less excuse for averting our gaze, and there’s the opportunity to do something about it. That’s the important thing, cos everybody can see it…I’m telling you far too much.

I hope he’ll telling us more before too long, and I’m grateful to the Mayor for his time.

My sense is that Boris Johnson did himself a bit of good with his Today interview this morning. His law-and-order line will play well with his London suburban core vote and others – some Hackney neighbours have told me they crave the military, tear gas and rubber bullets to deal with rioters. His titbit suggestion that the government looks again at cuts to police budgets is already being ravenously swallowed by a media that fails to grasp that Boris-biffs-Dave stories are to the political advantage of both men – so much so that one commentator with good Tory connections has claimed that they are practically staged.

And Boris needs to claw back all the credibility he can. A poll published today by YouGov finds that 54% of respondents think Boris has handled the riots situation badly – and YouGov tells me that almost all those responses were received before that uncomfortably heckled appearance at Clapham Junction yesterday, for which Boris has received an almost universally bad press.

But all of this makes me despair. Effective and properly resourced policing is, of course, an essential part of any approach to tackling criminality in communities, but the policing issue that Boris and other politicians, Ken Livingstone included, should really be addressing is not the number of police in London – a facile and highly-spun debate over a couple of thousand either way – but how productively police resources have been used in recent years.

I closely witnessed the incident that marked the start of the first wave of trouble in Hackney on Monday, opposite the railway station. A large group of riot police emerged from a trio of vans and detained two men, whom they interrogated in front of a diverse crowd of around a hundred. When one of the men was released a cheer went up, and the situation deteriorated from there. This brought to mind a public meeting held in May, a five-minute walk from Monday’s riot scenes, addressed by Boris, his policing deputy Kit Malthouse and others.

The audience predominantly comprised concerned black adults – responsible local people. They expressed a range of views. Some said there weren’t enough police on the streets, and doubted Boris’s (questionable) assertion that their numbers were increasing. Others drew attention to the high rates of exclusion of black children from schools and the lack of corrective supervision for them afterwards. But the biggest cheer of the night was for the comments of a local churchman, Wayne Malcolm. Here’s what he said:

There appears to be a disconnect between people’s actual experience of the police on the street and what the statistics say…[there] is a very real sentiment as far as many young people I’ve worked with, as far as my own children [are concerned], a perception that the police are not on their side – on the side of law-abiding people – that they are thuggish, that they are pretty much another gang, and that they are abusing their power of stop-and-search, and they’re treating people and speaking to people with such lack of dignity or respect that…

At this point his words were drowned out by clapping. He resumed:

We on the [youth] mentoring side are saying, ‘You are someone, you can be someone, you can become something,’ and their experience with the authorities is ‘You are nothing, you are in the way.’ The perception is real, and it really has to be managed.

More applause. Both Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are supporters of stop-and-search, the former conspicuously so. Yet it has long been far from clear that the tactic has had any benefit in terms of reducing knife and other violent crime against young people, which have risen under Boris. At the same time it is regarded by mature and intelligent adults to have had a very bad influence on the relationship between young Londoners and the police. The post-riot debate should not fixate on the quantity of police resources, but the effectiveness – or disastrous lack of it – with which they have used.

Update, 11:25 As Adam Bienkov and MayorWatch point out, Boris’s suggestion that cuts in police budgets might be reversed looks a bit iffy in view of his record.

So weird. Hackney riots on the radio. Hackney riots just down the road. What was this Hackney journalist doing? Grilling chops. Well, Hackney children must be fed, even when certain of their local peers are out trashing the neighbourhood. “What’s happening, Daddy?” asked the youngest (aged nine). I kept it light: “Some stupid people are breaking windows.” I’d previously texted my second eldest, who lives nearby, advising him not to go out. Twenty-two year-old males, I believe, are more likely to become victims of random violence than 53 year-old ones (me).

“Was abt to head into stokey for some food!!!,” he replied. “Is it safe there?” How could I know? Things were moving so fast, and not just in Hackney: “Gangs of masked kids popping up everywhere,” I replied. This was laying it on thick, though my wife, heading home from work, had spotted a gang of up to 40 roaming the border with Islington. I needed more spuds. I felt a foolish tremor of anxiety about going to the corner shop. I found it already shuttered, and the proprietor, a lovely man called Abdullah, standing warily outside with two sons and a brother.

By this time I’d already done two tours of riot duty. The first was nipping down to Mare Street at about half three following a tip off from my 15 year-old. “It’s already started, at JD Sports,” she told me, quoting BlackBerry Messenger. Shops on the pedestrianised northern end – known locally as the Narrow Way – were already shut, though people seemed relaxed. I passed a few police on my way to the junction with Amhurst Road and the bridge serving Hackney Central station.

Some men were boarding up a section of the JD shopfront. Had looters been and gone? It all seemed very quiet. People were shopping normally, though here too many stores were closed. Some cop cars came and went. I leaned against a wall to tweet and was suddenly almost knocked over by three youths riding the pavement on their bikes, their faces concealed by scarves. They too melted away. It turned out that the boarding-up of JD was pre-emptive. Was something brewing or was it not?

I wandered for a minute, and then more police arrived: van loads. They pulled up outside Marks and Spencer, piled out in a pack and crossed the road towards the apron of the usually tranquil St John-at-Hackney graveyard and the branch of Coral that occupies the Old Town Hall. Suddenly, they’d snatched two guys and had them pinned against Coral’s wall. A crowd gathered fast. Many were snapping and filming. Kids sat chattering on a wall. I found that I was sharing my tombstone vantage point with an after school play worker I know. “These kids should be back in their yards,” she told me emphatically.

One of the detainees was released, to cheers: at a recent local public meeting about youth crime, Boris was left in little doubt that stop-and-search attracts a lot of opposition around here. I lost track of what happened to the other guy, because suddenly police were moving behind the Corals, past St Augustine’s ancient tower, and then a teenage girl was giving them verbal abuse, and then a crowd had gathered round and an officer bellowed to a colleague by the vans to “Get the NATOs out” – riot helmets. “You should tear gas their asses,” my friend advised a nearby group of constables. They grinned, noncommittally.

The graveyard crowd evaporated as swiftly as it had formed, leaving a small line of cops behind a wall of see-through shields looking as though they’d been inserted into the wrong scene of a film. And then all eyes were back on the Narrow Way, where some sort of stand-off was taking place. At one point the onlookers turned and fled, then turned and crept back. The focus switched again, to the section of Mare Street just behind the railway bridge. By now, the road junction was a cop car park. Buses backed up down Amhurst Road. I saw a missile thrown, but the attacks on police cars being shown on TV via the helicopter overhead was beyond my line of vision.

I went home to write, tweeting on my way that something was going on up Clarence Road but lacking time to stop. I was back there two hours later, and the rest you broadly know: smashed shops, blazing cars, kids hurling things at cops. I and my wife, home by then, were among the disbelieving onlookers. As well as being a depressing, desperate scene, it was a horribly fascinating and oddly social one as well.

We walk up Clarence Road quite often on normal days, and all of a sudden it was in flames as though viewed though some smokey, distorting prism. I bumped into folk I hadn’t seen in years, including a young man who went to the same neighbourhood primary school as most of my children and was a member of its football team when I helped run it. I told him I was there half as a journalist, half as a resident. He said he was there as a sociologist. Perhaps he can help the rest of us make a little sense of what’s gone on.

The riots do not mean that Olympic visitors will not be safe in London, but some might need convincing

Two hundred Olympics delegates are in town this morning to watch a beach volleyball test event on Horse Guards’ Parade. They will have been assured that London’s three nights of rioting won’t dilute this picturesque spectacle in any way, but the IOC will surely be asking concerned questions about the safety of the capital as it reels from the impact of its worst destructive violence for thirty years, not least because the global coverage of the riots are hardly an advertisement for the world to come and stay.

That coverage is already looking beyond the riots to next year’s Games. A CBS News piece begins:

Less than a year before London hosts the 2012 Games, scenes of rioting and looting a few miles from the main Olympic site have raised concerns about security and policing for the event.

Noting that some of the worst disturbances took place in the Olympic borough of Hackney, the Times of India reports:

[A] number of incidents of looting and arson have taken place in East London, within a few miles of the Olympic facilities. The latest violence happened when the police were conducting a “stop and search” operation. In fact, reports poured in later in the evening that there were running street battles between young people and policemen. The windows of London state transport buses were smashed.

The website Hotels for the Olympics writes:

Hackney, one of five designated Olympic boroughs that border the main cluster of Games venues, has seen some of the most serious disturbances. Shops in the Stratford Centre, which sits just a few yards from the main entrance of the Olympic Park, closed early after warnings from police that protesters were planning riots in the area.

The IOC and British Olympic Association have already been obliged to make a calming statements and Boris Johnson, expected back from his holidays later today, can expect to be required to elaborate on his hope, expressed in a telephone interview with the BBC, that, “People will have a fantastic Olympics,” despite the riots.

How fretful should people be? The CBS piece quotes Tony Travers of the London School of Economics:

You can imagine how stretched the police would be if this were to occur during the Olympics, so I think this will create a worry within City Hall and the Home Office. It’s not so much that this might happen again – unlikely – as that it reminds the people in charge that while the Olympic Games are going on, any other major event is going to be complicated.

Sound thoughts. It’s worth adding that the disorder, though widespread, was mostly localised in parts of the city that seem unlikely to be priority destinations for Olympic visitors, and that the objects of the rioters’ ire were police officers and property rather than passing foreign visitors.

As a long time Hackney resident I should add that although crime remains an issue locally, I do not cower in fear of it and very much like living here. It would be wildly alarmist to conclude from the riots that Olympic London will be a place of constant, inescapable criminality. Nonetheless, it seems that such worries are going to have to be addressed.

There are five.

1. As always with urban riots, Tottenham and its aftermath have produced political rock-throwing. A familiar polarisation can be witnessed in mainstream and social media alike. From the right comes condemnation of the criminality, uncritical support for the police and a snorting contempt for any attempt to diagnose the events with reference to their wider social and economic context: unemployment, poverty, historic tensions with the Met and so on. From the left comes, yes, an insistence that the events cannot be truly understood without reference to that wider social and economic context, an insistence that the police must be held to account, and so on.

I’m in the latter camp, but do I also condemn the burning and looting? Yes, stupid, I do. I find it hateful, depressing, selfish, contemptuous, vicious and frightening. My, possibly paranoid, sense that delinquent youths all across the inner city are emboldened by the current mood has ratcheted up my parental anxiety an unwelcome notch or two.

I have no problem with condemnation, only with condemnation in isolation. That is because condemnation on its own is far too easy – so easy, in some mouths, that it becomes a sort of narcissistic vigilantism: my condemnation is bigger than your condemnation; your smaller condemnation condemns you as a secret non-condemner and therefore a closet excuser and justifier, etcetera. The other problem with condemnation unadorned is that it’s a dead end. You condemn. Then what? You have to look for some solutions. Condemning alone is not enough.

2. Rioting is often described as “mindless.” The problem is, it’s not. I know why the word is used: it expresses our incredulity and sometimes points to the rioting’s counter-productiveness – that’s the meaning, I think, that David Lammy deployed when he used “mindless” in his strong and nuanced statement yesterday. But people who riot do have minds, and in these lie the reasons for their rioting.

Those reasons vary, and may be various. They will be bad reasons, even when miserably explicable. But reasons, they are. Call them motives, if you prefer. These may be greed, hatred, a craving for status, for battle and excitement and for an antisocial sort of liberty. Some deep, possibly incoherent rage against authority and a safer, kinder more prosperous world they can’t join might be part of this story too. None of this is evidence of mindlessness, and to declare it so is to hide from reality.

3. Do the riots and their backdrop indicate that the capital’s street criminality is becoming more ingrained? I’ve a sad suspicion that they do. The whole story, beginning with Trident’s operation against Mark Duggan and broadening to smashed shop windows in Enfield and elsewhere, has ushered into the light a still mostly hidden London subculture of guns, thieving and thuggery that normally appears mostly suppressed.

The long-term pattern of overall crime in London is down, but as a careful interrogation of serious violent offences shows, the numbers of teenage and young adult victims of knife and other grave assaults has been rising in recent years – a trend our Mayor has yet to acknowledge. Does anyone believe the drug trade is in decline? Does anyone doubt that localised fraternities of felony are an established part of inner city London life? Does anyone seriously think that the police alone can make them go away?

4. The cops are not perfect: they spin, they’re secretive, they do wrong things. But every inch of riot footage confirms to me that I don’t have what it takes to be one.

5. From MayorWatch:

I’m not sure there’s any practical need for Boris to return from his holiday. Sure, on arrival he could make a few speeches, give some interviews and distract the Met by demanding meetings and briefings. But would any of that really move the situation on?

Probably not, and I detect in some cries for his immediate return the sound of political points being scored. What’s more, Boris’s few words on the phone to the BBC did strike roughly the right chord. It was unfortunate that he twice referred to Mark Duggan as “Michael”, but as well as denouncing the rioting he rightly stressed that there are “legitimate questions” to be put to the police.

The real test of Boris will be to keep striking the right chord and adopting a fitting profile after he gets home. His habit over policing has been to hog the limelight when it makes him look good and duck it when it threatens to be less than flattering. If that changes, at least one good thing will have come out of the horrible events of recent days.