Home Secretary Suella Braverman says anyone who committed crimes during disorder in London’s Oxford Street triggered by a TikTok video should be “hunted down” and jailed.
Hundreds of young people turned up in Oxford Street on Wednesday afternoon after a video on TikTok encouraged people to come along and “rob JD Sports.”
Several shops in Oxford Street and Regent Street closed their shutters and locked customers inside while looters ran amok in the area.
Police officers armed only with batons then arrived at the scene and clashed with dozens of young men and women while officers on horseback tried to disperse hundreds of people who had responded to the TikTok video, many of whom were apparently only there out of curiosity.
The Metropolitan Police said nine people were arrested and 34 dispersal orders were issued during the incident.
One of those who received a dispersal order was TikTok prankster Mizzy—whose real name is Bacari-Bronze O’Garro—who claimed on X, formerly known as Twitter, he had “nothing to do” with the original video.
Braverman Criticises ‘Lawlessness’
Ms. Braverman wrote on X, above a video of police clashing with youths: “We cannot allow the kind of lawlessness seen in some American cities to come to the streets of the UK. The police have my full backing to do whatever necessary to ensure public order.”She said: “Those responsible must be hunted down and locked up. I expect nothing less from the Met Police and have requested a full incident report.”
On Wednesday evening a Metropolitan Police spokesman said, “Officers have arrested 34 people with dispersal orders and made nine arrests.”
“Four people were arrested on suspicion of breaching the dispersal order, one person was arrested on suspicion of going equipped to steal, one person arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer, and one person was arrested on suspicion of a public order offence,” he added.
Mayor Berates TikTok ‘Nonsense’
Following “online speculation,” the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, urged people not to travel to Oxford Street and criticised “nonsense” circulating on TikTok.It is not clear if the London event was influenced by an incident in the United States on Tuesday when around 30 thieves, some of them wearing balaclavas and gloves, ransacked an Yves Saint Lauren store in Glendale, California, and stole around $300,000 (£235,000) worth of luxury goods.
Sgt. Victor Jackson told KTLA the robbery appeared to be a “flash mob” and explained: “In this circumstance, they kind of overwhelm the staff of the store. They all come in simultaneously. The staff doesn’t know how to respond, they’re trying to figure out what’s happening.”
Flash mobs were popular in the early days of social media, from 2003 onwards, but tended to be benign with people being encouraged to come along to public places and take part in mass dancing, food fights, or pillow fights.
But in recent years flash mob robberies have taken place in the United States with large-scale shoplifting and looting triggered by social media posts.
TikTok, an app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, was launched globally in 2018 but owes its exponential growth to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns, which caused many people to have extra time on their hands after being laid off from work and not allowed to go outside to visits shops, bars, or cinemas.
The app has been downloaded by almost 2 billion people globally and has 3.7 million active users in the UK. It is especially popular with teenagers and 26 percent of its users in the UK are aged 18–24.
In May, broadcaster Piers Morgan called Mizzy a “complete moron” after questioning him on his show about his antics.
