RIOTS - Aftermath: Reaction on streets around Chalk Farm - ‘Now they’re getting listened to'

THERE have been some unusual discoveries in the streets and estates around Chalk Farm Road in the past 10 days. 
 

Discarded loot and empty boxes which residents presume were taken in a hurry during the Camden riots has been found.
 

As far up as the Southfleet estate in Malden Road, abandoned goods and packaging has been spotted. 
 

Leo Fitzgerald, 75, has lived there for 50 years, chairing the tenants association during the 1980s.
 

“It was all taken from shops in Chalk Farm,” he said. “The things is, why take it if you’re just going to dump it? 
 

“They just wanted to be violent and cause a scene. It makes us elderly people worry because it means police will jump over the walls of our houses and gardens.”
 

Mr Fitzgerald said he had spoken to some of the rioters, all of whom he believed were in their early 20s, before they were arrested over the weekend. 
 

“They were saying to me that it was all very handy,” he said.
 

“They said, ‘the police are not stopping us, they’re standing in the street looking at us, so we robbed his shop, we robbed a computer, we got all the stuff we needed’. 
 

“If the government doesn’t look after its people, then the villains will.”
 

Umtiaz Ginghar, 19, who lives in a nearby block, tried to explain the frustrations among his peers. He said he knows people who have been arrested for their part in the riots.
 

“If I want to do what I want, which is go out, rent a flat, I can’t do it,” he said. 
 

“Have you seen the prices? £1,000 a month for a little one-bed in Camden. Can I afford that? No. Neither can my friends. 
 

“To be a man, live in your own place, do education, work, be adults like that, we can’t do what people used to do. So where does all the energy go? In anger.
 

“That’s what happens to young men if they don’t get that energy out raising a family or whatever, but to do that, boys my age can’t afford it unless they want to be on benefits or whatever.”
 

He explained that before his friends began rioting, they had been sitting on the stairs that lead up to their block. 
 

Umtiaz added: “Most of them before the rioting were like, ‘come on we got to get some money, we can’t do anything unless we got some money’.”
 

Another nearby resident, Melissa Moran, said her 17-year-old niece was kicked out of school when she was 14, and shortly afterwards the £35 weekly EMA (education maintenance allowance) she got was stopped.
 

“That was her lunch money every day,” said the 30-year-old mum-of-three who said she knows many of the arrested looters because they live around her. 
 

“When she sat around with her friends she didn’t feel embarrassed because she had lunch money. She has no lunch money now and she gets embarrassed with her friends.”
 

She added: “They can’t really achieve things any more because they can’t go to uni. They don’t feel they can become doctors, or lawyers, or journalists like other kids can.

So they feel like, ‘Well this is our achievement’, because they’re getting listened to, they’re getting looked at and getting a response like you do with an achievement.
 

“The proud feeling of being noticed is the same.”