Having spent a pleasant day with our daughter in Birmingham last Monday we went our separate ways when she caught her train back to London at 18.57. Not long after we had a call from her saying that police were being deployed in Birmingham city centre so we abandoned any ideas of eating out at Jamie’s for the first time.
Earlier in the day we had joked about the Tottenham riot spreading to Ealing where she now lives. Rather like Bournemouth voting Labour we thought. Little did we know. When my daughter went to catch her bus home at Ealing Broadway Tube station, 15 minutes before the shops opposite were trashed, the police presence amounted to two normally clad officers and a van. Whether this meagre presence was a look out posting or an advance party we do not know. But, such was the speed of the descending looters and the absence of advance notice on the part of the police, the results were a ‘free for all’ in Ealing Broadway and other Boroughs. There were no police deployed in many areas where they were needed. West Ealing for example, just along the Uxbridge Road, seems to have become a help yourself festival.
Later that evening when we were back home in the hills we watched the footage of the Debenhams Store in Clapham being looted, rather like an early Christmas sale, and it brought to mind the images from Wind in the Willows and the occupation of Toad Hall by the Weasels from the Wild Wood. Even then I couldn’t help totting up the bill which the Metropolitan Police were going to be presented with under the Riot Damages Act 1886. It now seems that the costs to be borne by the police, and the Met in particular, are going to be much wider. I am however prepared for it to be argued that looting, was not in law a riot.
All this has made me wonder whether the police are suffering from a loss of institutional memory. Yes, responses to public disorder take a time, but not being ready by Monday evening? This recent festival of looting was a unique event. Since the founding of the new police with the Metropolitan Police Act 1928, there is nothing in the books of this scale. But, this is the second time the police have been caught on the hop recently. The first was the slow response to the Millbank invasion. By contrast the riots of 1981 were responded too quite quickly with the Mutual Support system being activated to deal with riots in several major cities during one weekend.
By the time of the Miners strike of 1984 Mutual Support had come into its own as a means of dealing with flying pickets, aided and abetted by inventive, and sometimes illegal interpretations of ‘an, anticipated breach of the peace’. On the other hand, few people knew how few police were left on duty in non mining areas.Very few in fact.
On Monday evening the ‘Flying Looters’ were much more difficult to deal with due to their speed of travel, their modern communications, and a large amount of cheek. The penny had dropped in the twisted minds of gang leaders and aspirational thieves alike, namely, that when the mob strikes quickly in large numbers, in several locations, the police cannot cope. The slower the police are in responding, the bigger the impact on property and individuals.
That the mob can quickly get the upper hand can be seen from the Castle Morton Festival beneath the Malvern Hills in 1992 which started with one or two vans arriving on a Friday afternoon. These were the first of a convoy moving into Worcestershire from Gloucestershire. The result, as explained by local residents in the part of the Committal Proceedings in a prosecution for common law Public Nuisance, I attended, was that by the next day a small town had been created which not only damaged resident’s property but in effect made them frightened prisoners in their own homes for nearly the following week. In the meantime the mob ruled, the common became a no-go area to the police and a major drug exchange seems to have been set up. The West Mercia Constabulary recognised the power of the mob and explained their observing role as, ‘taking a low profile’. By mid-day Saturday they had little choice.
( As far as I am aware this case was the last prosecution for common law public nuisance before it was replaced by a statutory offence. A trial was eventually held in Stoke on Trent but I lost track of it due to an illness. If anyone has any information with regard to the outcome please leave a comment as this will probably prove to have been the last spontaneous public assembly of its kind.)
So, if there was an institutional memory, if there was someone somewhere on duty who possessed some of it, I would have expected various contingency plans to be triggered on the Saturday. Yes, this was a ‘public order’ issue, but these often spill over into periods of opportunist looting. Prime Minister Cameron’s purported claim to having made some kind of difference at his first Cobra meeting when he claims tactics apparently went onto a crime fighting agenda is a distinction without a difference, and a claim now disputed by senior police officers. Whatever the parties to this spat might say the facts speak for themselves. A small peaceful vigil marked the beginning of a mobilisation of the mob.
Could there be a connection with all this and the many early retirements, cost cutting already implemented and low police morale? Does the Prime Minister's obvious wish to import an American cop as the new Metropolitan Commissioner stem from a low opinion of British policing and an ignorance of what has been achieved in policing since 1981? I for one, as a policing critic, do not think that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the model. More often than not problems arise from ethical and resource deficiencies. Is Prime Minster Cameron's wish to import an American policeman to Britain's top policing job now saying that the police have deficiencies in the human resources department as well? Present Government policies will do nothing to help any of these deficiencies.
Whatever the causal links, the fact remains that the events of Saturday 6th August 2011 did not bring any more police into London through Mutual Support until Tuesday and by the time they did arrive the scenes of Clapham and Croydon were already emblazoned in our minds. Large scale destruction of this kind is not supposed to happen in Britain. The looters knew they were in control, the police knew they were in trouble, but PM Cameron also apparently knows things will be better next time round, even though there will be fewer police. Such is his knowledge of the history of policing since 1981 he thinks that an American cop, who actually increased police numbers in New York, can come to the rescue with regard to one of the suspected causes of the problem. Unfortunately he has no idea of the lead time for a cure for gang culture. I can also tell you now, he will not like the advice his American buddy will give and I will have no sympathy for him. Those who live by the gimmick often die by the gimmick and our current Prime Minister seems to have a plentiful supply.
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