Britain Turns to Reckoning With Rioters:Cameron Faces Parliament

TimesCast | Riots Spread in Britain

LONDON — Still reeling with shock and anger over the worst rioting in decades, Britain has turned to a tough reckoning with the perpetrators, with courts sitting through the night and the police saying Thursday that over 1,200 people had been arrested, the bulk of them in London.Police officers framed by a burned vehicle in Liverpool on Wednesday.But, despite an apparent lull in the rioting that has ravaged London and other major cities, concern was growing about many of the ethnically segregated districts battered by the rampages, particularly Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, where the police and political leaders worried about a potentially explosive new pattern of interracial violence that could be set off by the past days and nights of mayhem.Three young men of Pakistani descent were killed in Birmingham on Tuesday night when a car crashed into a group of residents who had gathered to protect local businesses from attack. Witnesses said that the driver appeared to be of Afro-Caribbean descent, and the police arrested a 32-year-old man and charged him with murder.On Thursday, the London police said 888 people had been arrested and 371 charged with offenses since the violence took root on Saturday, while the Manchester police in the northwest put the total of arrests there at 145, with similar numbers detained in Birmingham in the English Midlands. Courts in London and Birmingham sat through the night. But, with thousands of police reinforcement on the streets, heavy rain in some areas and residents in some places patrolling their own residential areas, there were no new reports of major violence overnight.Meanwhile, politicians braced for the fallout from the convulsion of violence as Prime Minister David Cameron faced the most severe crisis of his 15 months in office. The wildfire spread of violence, the initial failure of the police to contain it, the slow early response of political leaders and the cruelty of the attacks have left the nation shaken and wrung by an embittered debate about whom and what to blame.Casting himself as a decisive leader taking charge of the nation’s destiny, Mr. Cameron was set to address an emergency session of Parliament — recalled from its summer recess because of the violence — on Thursday. In face of the violence, he has taken a tough line, saying the actions of those who looted and committed arson showed a lack of “proper morals” and a failure of parenting.While many Britons had initially blamed the violence on unemployed youth, however, one surprise was the presence of young men and women with regular jobs among the riot suspects lined up in police wagons outside courthouses in London and other cities. That raised questions about why they had been caught up in the kind of mayhem that has traditionally drawn on an underclass of alienated young people, with no jobs and few prospects.Many of those who were remanded for trial appeared to come from just those kinds of backgrounds — evidence, as some commentators saw it, that the root causes of the disorders lay in social deprivation and despair. But those who stood before the courts for bail hearings in London, many of them still in their jeans and hooded sweatshirts, included a graphic designer, a postal employee, a dental assistant, a teaching aide, a forklift driver and a youth worker.One 19-year-old woman was listed on court documents as living in a converted farmhouse in a leafy, upmarket area of rural Kent that is part of what Londoners call the stockbroker belt. A 22-year-old woman gave her address as an upscale block of flats in a gentrified neighborhood of Hackney, one of the worst-hit riot areas in London. Local residents said that many of the residents of the apartments, which are valued at about $500,000, belonged to a community of affluent, middle-class people with jobs in London’s news media and art world.

TimesCast | What Is Driving the Riots

Ahead of the emergency House of Commons session on Thursday, Mr. Cameron declared a “fightback” against what he condemned as the “groups of thugs” who had driven the riots. With his government jolted by the scenes of young people looting and setting fire to shops, warehouses, vehicles and police stations, he spoke with an angry vehemence that conveyed a sense that his government had settled on an unyielding crackdown, shorn of the kind of exculpatory language that British politicians have often used when confronted with youth disorder.