Having been bought up and raised in North London, right bang in between Tottenham and Enfield, this weekend’s events have left a sour taste in my throat. Seeing the streets that you call home in disarray, the shops that you visit burnt down and the community that you love given a bad name hurts. Shop keepers have lost businesses, people have been made homeless and the decades of community work that has gone in around this area has been rendered meaningless within the space of 48 hours by the actions of idiotic thugs.
What hurts even more, however, is the misinformation and ill-advised comments that I have witnessed on various media platforms and social networking sites over the weekend regarding the trouble in North London.
From the shotgun reaction from certain sections of the media, who quickly labelled Mark Duggan a ‘gangsta’ who shot at police without waiting for verification of the facts, to the completely idiotic muppets on twitter and Facebook who called for fellow North London residents to ‘rise up against the f***ing feds’, what we have witnessed here is a merry-go round of claims and counter-claims that has finally escalated into the apocalyptic headlines that we see today. Some of these claims clearly need to be addressed.
