Bruce Crumley: Why London Riots Are Scarier Than Paris '05

Bruce Crumley is the Paris bureau chief for TIME.

With the violence that broke out in London Saturday having spread to other English cities during a third straight night of rioting Monday, it's tempting (and probably portentous) from the comfort of Paris to offer up lessons learned from the nearly three weeks of upheaval that rocked French towns in 2005. Yet while there seem to be certain details common to both those explosions of urban fury, significant differences not only complicate directly comparing events in the U.K. to those that occurred in France nearly six years ago—but also leave the current unrest looking more serious in terms of destruction and consequence. As shocking as the images of burning cars, vandalism, and clashes with police were in 2005, the scenes today from across London inspire an even stronger, awesome fear. Here's why.

The detonators of both uprisings appear to have been similar: first, police involvement in the deaths of local youths in neighborhoods with large populations of visible minorities, followed by the fury — nourished with wider frustrations of discrimination and alienation — that those killings unleashed. And as happened in 2005 France, the initial unrest that broke out Saturday in Tottenham has gradually spread to other areas of London and to two other British cities as young people have embraced the underlying message of social protest and rage—or used them as convenient excuses for running amok. Not insignificantly, the spread of violence in both cases also provoked laments-cum-accusation that over-dramatization and voyeuristic media coverage early on led to “copy-cat” replication of the urban outrage.

From there, however, things seem to get different in important ways--starting with urban geography. The Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois that initially erupted in unrest in Oct. 2005 is just that: one of the many towns hosting huge but decrepit housing projects for increasingly disenfranchised segments of French society. Those large clusters of projects are almost invariably located in relatively remote suburbs ringing most major French cities, sparing France the kinds of intra muros ghetto areas that cities like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles have—or neighborhoods with very large non-white, often economically disadvantaged populations as London does...