Here's the elephant (advisedly) in the room. These are young people wanting attention. If they were happy with their economic conditions, they wouldn't need it. There are those as mentioned above who will use this for personal high jinks but this misses the point. Overall, the purpose of these riots is to bring attention to police harassment, to highlight the unequal status of brown and black people in the UK. Beating them as was advocated above will only make matters worse and soon these activities will be exported to the US. (We've seen this movie before.)

Being punitive, narrow-minded, self-righteous and complaining will not solve the problem. The root of the problem has to do with racism.