Seventy-two people, many of them poor people of color, died in Grenfell Tower when the shoddily-maintained tower went up in flames last year. Five men were arrested today in Britain after putting a model of the building, complete with dark-skinned inhabitants, on an otherwise-legal bonfire.
A video shared on social media shows a cardboard model of the tower being set alight by a laughing crowd. The Metropolitan Police said the men - two aged 49 and the others aged 19, 46 and 55 - handed themselves in at a south London station on Monday night. Prime Minister Theresa May had called the video "utterly unacceptable". The footage shows a large model bearing a Grenfell Tower sign, complete with paper figures at the windows, being set on fire. Laughter can be heard off camera as the effigy is set alight, with onlookers shouting "Help me! Help me!" and "Jump out the window!". As the blaze takes hold, a voice can be heard to say "All the little ninjas getting it at the minute"
"Public order" offenses seem an English "shame culture" thing. The bonfire wasn't isn't illegal in any coherent sense, but sometimes (as in the case of leering racist sociopaths burning effigies in public) an example must be made when shame fails in the absense of guilt.
