British Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday "a fightback is under way" after a fourth night of violence hit cities around England, although a huge police deployment helped restore order to the capital.
Speaking after meeting with his crisis-response committee for a second time, Cameron said a more robust approach by the police had led to calmer streets in London.
The northwestern cities of Manchester and Liverpool, as well as Nottingham, Birmingham, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, in the area of England known as the Midlands, saw the worst of the unrest overnight.
Cameron said the police have been authorized to use whatever means necessary to combat "despicable violence," with the use of plastic bullets permitted and plans in place for water cannon to be available within 24 hours if needed, he said.
"We needed a fightback and a fightback is under way," he said.
The violence first began Saturday after a protest over the death of a man in an incident involving armed police in north London turned violent. But police have characterized the disorder on the nights since as "copycat criminal activity" by youths intent on looting and destruction.
As the clean-up costs rise along with the tally of people arrested -- the youngest an 11-year-old boy -- public anger over what is widely perceived as criminal looting by lawless youths appears to be growing.
Hundreds of people took to their local shopping streets in London Tuesday to clean up the broken glass and debris left by looters, their brooms raised in a gesture of defiance.
Sarah Driver-Jowitt, 37, who lives in an 18th-floor flat in the Clapham Junction area, said she saw fires across south London from Clapham to Croydon Monday night -- and felt compelled to join the clean-up.
"I feel really strongly that the only way to respond to disorder is with civil order," she said. "They're just a bunch of people who find it exciting to be destructive."
A headline in the Sun newspaper, Britain's best-selling tabloid, summed up the mood Wednesday. Its front page headline, flanked by grainy security camera images of suspects handed out by police, says: "Shop a moron -- Can you name any rioters and looters?"
The violence comes against a backdrop of austerity measures and budget cuts. But Cameron, community leaders and the police have repeatedly pointed to a criminal, rather than political, motivation to the looting.
Speaking outside 10 Downing Street Wednesday, Cameron said those involved would be held accountable -- and stressed that sections of society that had lost their respect for authority and sense of personal responsibility must change.
It was "all too clear we have a big problem with gangs," he said, adding that the authorities would not "let any phony concerns about human rights" prevent police trying to identify young suspects.
Asked about government plans to cut police funding, he said the police had told him they had the resources they needed and had shown they could successfully redeploy existing personnel to make the most impact.
Some 16,000 officers were on the streets of London on Tuesday night, with the same level of policing expected Wednesday night.
London's Metropolitan Police Service said it had arrested 770 people in connection with violence, disorder and looting as of Wednesday morning, of whom 171 have been charged with crimes. More than 100 police officers have been injured.
The force pushed back Wednesday against suggestions it had been too slow to act when trouble first broke out, as some media reports claimed police had initially been told to stand back and observe rather than making arrests.
"It is simply wrong to suggest officers were initially told not to actively arrest those involved in disorder," a Metropolitan Police statement said.
Greater Manchester Police said Wednesday it had arrested 113 people, aged 15 to 58, after a night of unrest in Manchester and nearby Salford, most of them in Manchester city center.
A taxi driver there, Mohammed Nasar, said many of the people he saw roaming the streets were youths wearing hooded sweatshirts, a group known as "hoodies" in the UK.
"People are not happy with them at all, because... this wasn't a kind of planned demonstration," Nasar said. "This was vandalism, hooliganism. This was robbery basically."
Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan said Manchester and the neighboring town of Salford had "been faced with extraordinary levels of violence from groups of criminals intent on committing widespread disorder" Tuesday night.
The trouble had "put Manchester and Salford in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons," he said, saying he was appalled by the rioters' "shameful actions."
"These people have nothing to protest against -- there is no sense of injustice or any spark that has led to this. It is, pure and simple, acts of criminal behavior which are the worst I have seen on this scale," he said.
In Birmingham, which saw "pockets of disorder" in the city center, police are treating a traffic collision in which three people died in the early hours of Wednesday as a murder investigation. They have not said if the case was linked to the unrest.
Nine people have also been arrested in the city of Coventry, police said Wednesday.
The scene in the capital Wednesday morning was largely calm, after about 16,000 officers were dispersed onto London's streets overnight -- more than twice the number the night before.
But for those still clearing up after Monday night's outbreaks of conflagration and looting, the picture remains grim.
The aftermath of the violence left one West London entrepreneur heartbroken.
"You know, they've ripped everything out, demolished it," Liz Pilgram said, standing in the middle of the ransacked maternity and baby clothes shop she's owned for seven years. "It's just mindless violence."
The looters stayed long enough to drink champagne and eat snacks, leaving the trash behind.
Some businesses have opted not to take a chance on getting looted, emptying car showrooms and barricading shops with wooden planks.
Some London pubs also boarded up windows on Tuesday night and BP said it was banning anyone from filling canisters with gas, or petrol, at its gas stations. Petrol bombs have been tossed at police in some clashes with looters.
And it would seem some people are not depending on police for their security. Amazon UK reported that sales of aluminium baseball bats had skyrocketed -- at one point hitting 8,000% above previous levels -- since the disturbances broke out.
The initial outbreak of violence on Saturday night followed a protest over the shooting death on Thursday of Mark Duggan, 29, a black man.
Officers from Operation Trident -- a Metropolitan Police unit that deals with gun crime in the black community -- stopped his cab in the working-class, predominantly Afro-Caribbean district of Tottenham during an attempted arrest, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said.
Soon after, shots were fired and Duggan, a father of four, was killed. Shooting deaths are rare in England.
An illegal firearm had been found at the scene, with a "bulleted cartridge" in the magazine, but there was "no evidence" it was fired during the incident, the commission said.
A bullet that lodged in a radio carried by an officer was police issue, the commission said.
"A post-mortem examination concluded that Mr. Duggan was killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest. He also received a second gunshot wound to his right bicep," the commission said, without saying who fired the bullets or why police had stopped the cab.
The man's family and friends, who blamed police for the death, had gathered peacefully Saturday outside the Tottenham police station to protest.
The protest soon devolved into violence as demonstrators -- who included whites and blacks -- tossed petrol bombs, looted stores and burned police cars.
Violence continued in isolated pockets Sunday, erupted on a large scale Monday in several areas of London and spread to other parts of the nation, and continued Tuesday.
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