Tariq Jahan and the riots aftermath

I lived in Birmingham for a year and a half and out of all the cities I have lived in I can categorically say that it is the most racially intergrated that I have lived in. On the bus home it would not be uncommon to see muslim, black and white chatting on the way home from work. In my time there, four murders took place, one in the house that backed on to mine. The shopkeepers of Balsall Heath successfully shifted prostitution from their home area. Prostitution takes place far away from the wives of the curb crawlers.
I saw photos of the looters who were sent to court this week. They were doe eyed novices, not gang members who organised the Clapham disturbance to distract police from Croydon. As a boy my father warned me that it was the second boy to jump the stream who fell in.
The sight of a composed Tariq Jahan who heald his dead son in his hands, not knowing who he had gone to help and his composure has to be the memory of a week that began with the police murder of a young man. Politicians making mileage out of these troubles is sickening though to pretend that these riots occurred for no reason is blind stupidity.
There is a carnival element to rioting. A sense of power that has been stolen from the marginalised. But, as things settle, let us know that young people died.