From this recent BBC article it seems that Sir Hugh Orde is more down to Earth in his approach to policing here in Britain because he puts the context within the European Union and the laws that have to be observed in Europe. David Cameron’s approach is quite clearly a forceful one as he accused the police of acting timidly. Cameron’s newly appointed personal advisor Bill Bratton wears 2 handguns when he is out on patrol. Bratton has 400 gangs in his neck of the woods to deal with and Sir Orde points out that getting to a stage where 400 gangs can even built up is a sign of bad policing. I am not certain how many gangs operate in the UK.
Bill Bratton has advised that the UK police cannot arrest their way out of the problem, that either indicates that he thinks shooting is better than arresting or that he thinks that the underlying social problems have to be addressed.
I think what has to be on the forefront of tactical thinking is the fact that the riots have to be broken up quickly to prevent loss of life and victims. The longer those riots would have gone on, the more people’s lives would have been at risk and there were already a number of deaths and people had to escape fires and run or jump for their lives.
It’s a little bit strange that David Cameron gets himself a personal advisor from the US on board, who has no legal powers whatsoever in the UK and cannot think in the local context. There also has been wrangling between government ministers and police chiefs over who has the final word on policing orders and strategies. Obviously the police have to be seen to be politically neutral. Theresa May reacted cleverly to publications about a possible rift with the police over cancelling all leave. One report said she ordered all leave to be cancelled whereby police said that she has no power to do so. Mrs May praised the police for their actions.
The riots were completely unpredictable and with current police numbers impossible to quench quickly on the basis that no water canons or plastic bullets were used. I don’t think using those methods would have alienated the youth more because there is little in social actions proposed to help them out of the dilemma they are in, the youth that is. There is little social investment in young people and their families and instead of proposing some, the government wants to favour benefit cuts and homelessness for riot participants and their families. It would have done the youth a favour to cool them down quickly and disperse them even faster because then they could not have committed the crimes that later happened when the riots progressed further north.
It seems that Mr Osborne is more concerned cutting the 50p tax rate than devising help packages for our young citizens.
The riots leave a bitter taste in everybody’s mouth who expected a caring attitude from our government towards young people. It’s really just cracking down the whip and getting rid of the responsibility by sanction and imprisonment.
The problem that has arisen is the lack of consistency for what is needed to deal with such sudden riots and what the political and social answer to those discontented is. David Cameron does not even want to hold an enquiry and forget about it as quickly as possible whilst Ed Miliband called for one.
The former advisor to Ken Livingstone made a sympathetic statement for the youth but then under Livingstone, there was a much higher rate of youth on youth crime, when he constantly had stabbings in London, which have receded under Boris Johnson. Yet under Livingstone we did not have youth rioting. It seems we have a choice between rioting and stabbing but that is a choice nobody really wants to make and all we need is a way out of this malaise.
From other comments made around the net, I wonder whether this riot was a political uprising on the scale of an attempted revolution and think that David Cameron’s approach will not help stem it at all. He simply drives the problem into the Underground and that can get well out of hand. It seems to be Cameron’s tactic not to get involved in any social tit for tat and just get rid of the unhappy youth by making them criminals and keeping them criminals and outlaws a bit similar to the good old Sheriff of Nottingham. I think Cameron’s strategy is political suicide and will lead to a further detriment of the UK gentry.
Putting it into the context that Mark Duggan’s uncle was a crime lord, according to the Mail online, I wonder how much criminal and how much political context this whole riot actually has. History has proven that politicians always call those who are in more or less violent opposition criminals. Yet it has to be seriously considered as a tactic that local opponents of current upper classes want to flood the UK with drugs in the hope that those upper classes drug themselves out of their minds and become hapless victims of their own habits. The recent confiscation of a very large haul of drugs cannot have been welcome by UK drug barons.
It is only in the drug context that I can understand why Cameron wants to involve a US cop (Bratton) as advisor. I see little hope that the current government can come up with a digestible approach that is coordinated across all service areas of government.
I am often tempted to compare today’s civilisation with the Roman Empire and scientists now belief that the sanity of Roman Emperors was afflicted by the lead in the water they drank because their water viaduct pipes contained a lot of lead. Could it be that the lead of Roman times is replaced today by class A drugs? After all the use of drugs spreads more and more into upper circles and I believe that today’s society is very much inflicted with drug abuse. We see that society is pretty stagnant and corrupt too.
