On the subject of Times reporting, the headline to the short piece reproduced below reads: "Dawn breaks on a suburban street in sleepy North London." In view of the incident described, perhaps the reporter, Adam Fresco (do his friends call him Al?) was being ironic, but it doesn't work:
The determined gait, the lettered helmets, the boilersuits may suggest a riot force about to quell unrest in any one of a dozen international hotspots.
But this was London yesterday. These officers marching down Romilly Road in North London were among more than a thousand from the Metropolitan, City of London and British Transport police forces, who took part in unprecedented raids at 56 addresses in the capital and across the country.
Operation Mista was aimed at people suspected drug dealing, money laundering, handling stolen goods and forgery. Thirty-seven people were arrested in the raids, which involved closing a shopping street.
Police with dog-handlers lined up in silence in residential side streets as Blackstock Road was shut. Among the businesses searched were an internet café, a halal butcher, a convenience store and a greengrocer. Shoppers were stopped and questioned at cordons at each exit to the street as they attempted to leave.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said that officers had recovered 350 stolen items of property including 120 laptops, 110 cameras, 32 ipods, 20 sat-navs, 47 forged documents, including passports and driving licences.
Only one word, "halal", gives the game away.
A close relative was caught up in this incident yesterday. Romilly Road is in Finsbury Park, near the notorious mosque, in the area known as "Little Algiers". The Telegraph gives a clearer indication as to why the riot police were out in force:
Their target was Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park, north London - said to be a "one-stop shop" for crime where up to 40 per cent of stolen mobile phones in Britain were sold on.
Around 600 officers dressed in riot gear swooped on the shopping street, a short distance from Finsbury Park Mosque and Arsenal's Emirates stadium, raiding 19 cafes and other businesses including a halal butcher, a convenience store and a greengrocer.
Officers recovered more than 300 mobile phone handsets, 120 laptops, 110 cameras, 32 iPods and dozens of satellite navigation systems.
Chief Superintendent Bob Carr, who was in charge of the raids, said they followed 12 months of planning.
He said the scale of the operation was "unprecedented" but necessary because of a small area in which a large number of crimes were taking place: "The whole purpose of visiting with this number of officers is to make sure the people you are trying to arrest do not feel they can fight their way out."
I know the area well. You walk past café after café, and not a woman in sight, just young men "of North African extraction", hanging around, transacting dodgy deals and eyeing up any female under the age of eighty. None of them seems to work, at least not legitimately, unless you count the café owners. What do these people have in common? Oh, I can't imagine. I think they are what the BBC would call "youths", or "Asians", or "people radicalised by the Israel-Palestine problem".
