There's fighting in the streets.

As the violence in London spreads across the city (and out from the cover of darkness) it is easy to forget how it all started. A peaceful protest of about 200 people at the police shooting of Mark Duggan - and the subsequent lack of communication from the Met and the IPCC with his family - swelled as the police refused to speak to anyone from the protest. Watching it unfold on the BBC, I heard community leaders saying that they were not surprised that something like this had happened, that the lack of police engagement with the community had led to a huge amount of underlying frustration, and that police were still perceived as the enemy in many quarters. The police station on Tottenham High Road was described as being, "like a castle" in the community. As The Guardian reports;

Stafford Scott, a community organiser, said police were "absolutely" culpable for not responding to their requests for dialogue.

While the police claim that they are engaging sufficiently with communities, and that the perpetrators of violence were not representative of these communities, on Saturday night the people rioting were the community. Since then, media claims that the riots have become a more widespread excuse for looting and violence may or may not have more credence - it's impossible to say.

The police don't have a good track record of non-confrontational engagement. Responding to criticisms of insufficient policing of an earlier march, the student protest on 24th November 2010 was kettled and charged by officers on horseback after the looting of an empty police van left conspicuously unprotected along the march route. A protester I met later that evening was very clear that, "We were set up". Beyond protests, the police team in Cambridge established to "engage" the street life community only succeeded in harassing and arresting more of them for sleeping rough, if members of that community and the volunteers who worked most closely with them are to be believed.

Is this confrontational approach an inevitable element of policing? If the police exist to maintain law and order, it is certainly simpler to do this with the threat of force and punishment than with reasoned argument and inspiring altruism. Even more so against the back-drop of 20% cuts, as Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation explains,

it is the so-called "soft" services like youth clubs and initiatives that help keep young people out of trouble...which nationally the Education Select Committee says have been cut more than any other.

Maybe the police aren't doing a terrible job. At the time of writing there have been no deaths as a result of the riots, and tragedies during protests such as the death of Ian Tomlinson are fortunately incomparable to the pre-constabulary era Peterloo or St. George's Fields Massacres. And yet there are better ways of engaging, rather than simply dealing with, people from the other side of a conflict. Perhaps David Cameron could learn something from the community charities which survive his cuts about peace building without preparing for war. Because asking people who are justifiably angry not to become violent when confronted with aggressive policing is ridiculous. And then to call them "mindless" is hugely insulting.

We're not Judge Judy and executioner.

Well, looks like we finally got him. Osama bin Laden has been killed by American special forces in Pakistan, identified and buried at sea all in the blink of an eye, after 10 years as America's bogeyman-in-chief. And the world wants to celebrate! Americans feel as proud to be American as we did to be British just last Friday, while our very British newspapers fall over themselves to publish photographic evidence of bin Laden's death, so that we can all have a good look and tell ourselves how evil he was and how much he deserved what he got. Maybe the Sun will get to reuse it's most infamous headline tomorrow morning. The other two men killed in the raid are a mere footnote, as is the woman who was reportedly, "being used as a shield". Presumably someone decided a few more deaths was a price worth paying.

Because it has to be a price worth paying, right? We know that he killed all those people on September the 11th, we've been told so for 10 years. Never mind that he denied responsibility for it for 3 years (only claiming credit for the attack in an October 2004 attempt to discredit George W. Bush's re-election campaign), or that the British government's "September 11 attacks - Culpability document" concluded only that bin Laden headed the organisation responsible, or that al-Qaeda is not an organisation with a top-down command structure. Given that the perpetrators died in the attack, we needed someone else to be angry at, and the media repeatedly directed us to him. Who needs a trial? As Bush put it, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty".

This is all pretty troubling, but what on earth does this action say about our foreign policy? Obama at least is being consistent, having promised in his election campaign to pursue bin Laden into Pakistan with or without the permission of their government (and having spent so much time criticising operations in Iraq as having "taken our eye off the ball" that he's probably going to do extremely well out of this), and as yet it is unclear whether Pakistan even knew that the raid was coming - at the time of writing, the "Death of Osama bin Laden" Wikipedia page states, "the government of Pakistan was not notified of the planned raid", though this has yet to be cited (or even tagged, "citation needed"). To have assassinated a man without trial in the territory of an ally but without their permission?

What if America had tried this in North Korea? Or if it had happened in Pakistan, but executed by Indian troops? There are two first strike scenarios for Joshua to run right there. Should we now expect a series of surgical operations against other people America has reason to hate? Can minor states expect to get away with policing the world in this way? And what merits this kind of special attention, is it the number of people killed or just the number of Americans?

At what point did the world's most powerful nation decide that it was acceptable to mete out punishments of which it deemed people were deserving, without recourse to anything resembling a judicial process, the approval of the international community, or the knowledge of those on whose soil this was being carried out? It's not as if killing him does anything for his victims, proven or alleged. And what about the three people who died with him?

What a load of baloney.

How to direct action?

I couldn't make it to the protest in London last Saturday (stupid charity meetings), though I understand it went quite peacefully. For my part this comes as good news as it means that none of my friends got beaten up (as far as I know, haven't actually heard from everyone who I know was there since Saturday...) though not everyone agrees. This post describes itself as "an intervention in defence of direct action", thought it is specifically defending the tactics of the "black bloc" protest movement.

I'll come to the tactics employed by different groups in a second, but I feel that the poster starts badly, by describing their fellow marchers as, "supposed comrades" [emphasis mine]. Surely it makes sense to embrace, not alienate these people, for as long as we have a common cause? Especially when 138 of the 147 protesters being charged by the police were involved in the peaceful direct action at Fortnam & Mason. While the poster argues that, "The dichotomy between “protester” and “anarchist” or “troublemaker” is entirely false" these words are not synonyms (neither UK Uncut nor the TUC is anti-capitalist), and if politicians and capitalist commentators can still disagree on the very nature of the situation but still protest under the same banner, are the anarchists really unable to? It seems like a shame, especially when UK Uncut specifically ask them to. And did the poster really expect everyone who came to the march to get involved in violent direct action? Even those who brought their kids, or came in their wheelchairs, or to protest at cuts to their pensions?

Putting any such considerations aside though, what would be the ideal level of protest? If the protest really has had no effect on government policy, even those of us who want to work with the current system must surely acknowledge its limitations? Perhaps it serves well to raise awareness, but if as Vince Cable says the government is consulting with trade unions does this make us the suffragettes to their more-effective-but-less-glamourous suffragists? UK Uncut claim to be hitting organisations where it hurts (their wallets) by closing business for a period of time, and acts of peaceful disobedience to the law have a long-established and respected pedigree - Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jnr. And clearly they're rattling cages, or the police wouldn't have made so many arrests.

But what for those of us who want to change the system, not its current manifestation? Violent resistance has an equally long list of heroes - Judas Maccabeus, Robin Hood, Malcolm X - and the tactics of the black bloc are very clearly deliberate, down neither to "mindless hooliganism", nor to being "out of control", nor even to a wish to "vent frustration", all of which I've seen suggested in the past few days. The police are the obvious body to be the target of this violence, and our poster considers the police operation have been a success because they "[meted] out so many more injuries to protesters than were sustained". But the Police were protesting too, and here again is the risk of alienating potential allies in the current battle of a longer campaign. So is this form of violent protest wrong? And if it's wrong in the UK, why are we supporting it in Libya?

There are peaceful ways of changing regimes, but they are longer and slower. If anarchists believe that the current system is causing suffering then they may see themselves as having a duty to act as quickly as possible, but that doesn't mean that other methods don't work, or that they should be dismissed and ridiculed. People exercising the power they have to effect change within the constraints of the law should be encouraged not reviled, or else they'll stop. As Alice Walker said, "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."