UK gov't, police into blame game over riots

As London returns to normal after 4-days of rioting, the British government and senior police officials are disagreeing over who is most to blame for failing to stop the social unrest.

Police officers claim that budget cuts reduced their manpower, hampering their efforts to restore order. But

Prime Minister David Cameron insists the cuts would not hit frontline officers. Yang Wei-han has more.

The British government's austerity measures will slash 80 billion pounds from public spending by 2015 to reduce the country's swollen budget deficit.

Police budgets are also on the list.

London Mayor Boris Johnson broke with the government, saying such cuts were wrong and that people neeed to se police out on the streets.

Johnson said, "The case I make to government and I'm going to continue to make is that (police) numbers matter. And I think that the numbers we've got on the streets of London now, they are up on when I came in, but it's vital that we keep them high."

Chief of British Transport Police echoed Johnson's statement.

Andy Trotter, chief constable of British Transport Police said, "We've got to be sensible in the way we do it, but we cannot pretend that the scale of cuts that we face will not impact upon the front line of policing, it is simply not possible."

Cameron's Conservative Party, faces pressure to scrap plans to cut spending on the police, as well as calls for more funding in Britain's deprived inner cities. In the short term, Cameron and his 15-month-old coalition government look to have been damaged by the riots.

But an election does not have to be called until 2015, giving him breathing space and time for a nuanced reponse.

However, Cameron may run into conflict with his Lib Dem coalition partners if he responds to the riots only by cracking down on law and order while ignoring social problems that may lie behind the unrest.

And further outbreaks of rioting could be fatal to Cameron's chances of retaining power.

Michigan Man Suspected in 7 Deaths Kills Himself During Hostage Standoff

DETROIT — A hostage standoff in Grand Rapids, Mich., ended late Thursday when a man suspected of shooting seven people to death, including his daughter and another child, earlier in the day killed himself as the police were instructing him on how to surrender, the police said.

The man, identified as Rodrick S. Dantzler, shot himself once in the head at 11:30 p.m., about four hours after leading the police on a highway chase, crashing his vehicle and kicking in the back door of a nearby home, taking three occupants hostage, Chief Kevin Belk of the Grand Rapids Police Department said. Mr. Dantzler was pronounced dead at the scene.
The two hostages still in the house at that time, a man and a woman, were unharmed, as was a 53-year-old woman who had been released about two hours earlier, after he demanded and received Gatorade and cigarettes.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Dantzler killed five adults and two children, one of whom was his daughter, Chief Belk said. At least two of the women killed were former girlfriends, he said.
Later Mr. Dantzler also apparently shot two other people while fleeing from officers. Neither person suffered life-threatening injuries, the police said.
The events unfolded over more than eight hours. The police first said one child had been killed but later said two of the victims were children and five were adults.
Chief Belk said investigators did not know of a motive, but the killings appeared to be the result of a domestic dispute.
“It does not make sense,” Chief Belk told reporters shortly after the standoff ended. “I don’t think you can make sense out of something like this.”
The chaos began shortly before 3 p.m., when the police said a 34-year-old man called his mother and told her he had killed his wife. Public records show an address for Mr. Dantzler, who described himself on Facebook as a “tech building engineer,” on the street where the police arrived.
Within the next two hours, the police found two women and a 10-year-old girl dead at a home nearby and four more people, including another child, dead in the basement of another home.
“We do believe there were prior relationships with at least one person in each location,” Chief Belk said.
In the early evening, Mr. Dantzler opened fire at a downtown intersection, wounding one woman in the arm and putting numerous holes in the windshield of a police car, Chief Belk said. Another person was injured when Mr. Dantzler apparently shot through the back window of his vehicle. No officers were injured.

Police confirm ID of girl, 6, found dead in Delray Beach canal

Confirming what police already suspected, the medical examiner positively identified the little girl found in a black duffel bag in the C-15 canal as 6-year-old Ju'Tyra Allen, a Delray Police Department spokeswoman said in a statement today.Ju'Tyra's body was found near that of her half-brother, Jermaine McNeil, 10, whose body was identified yesterday.

Police suspect that the children's mother, Felicia Brown, is also dead; they think she is the formerly unidentified corpse found in a garbage dump in West Palm Beach in August.

Brown's former boyfriend, Clem Beauchamp, 34, has been named as a suspect in the case but not charged; he has been arrested on an unrelated federal crime.