The police establishment has delivered its initial verdict on this summer’s rioting, following the massacre of children at Southport. Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary and a former chief constable for Merseyside, yesterday published the first part of a report ordered by the Home Secretary to examine the policing response and make recommendations. The review very clearly states that forces underestimated the power and potency of ‘extreme nationalist sentiment’ and that this was a significant aggravating factor in the rioting that disfigured communities across the country. Is this a justifiable focus?
Many of the places and forces where the worst of the violence happened feel abandoned
In the aftermath of the riots, senior organisations like RUSI and policing commentators such as former Met Commander Neil Basu argued forcefully that those involved in serious rioting should be prosecuted under terrorism legislation. This has failed to materialise in a single case, even at the charging stage, let alone on conviction. It is darkly ironic that the only person who faces terrorist charges is Axel Rudakubana – the alleged Southport attacker – for possessing an Al-Qaeda terror manual and producing the highly toxic substance ricin.
There is little evidence that looting a vape shop or burning a library constituted any sort of ideology beyond the sharp end of a gleeful criminal impunity which is the result of progressively surrendering our streets to thuggery. We must wait for the second report to consider the obvious mistakes made by Merseyside police in withholding the identity of the suspect in the Southport attack in its aftermath. In my view, this mishandling in an admittedly dynamic situation did more to fuel the later disorder than any real or imagined neo-fascist conspiracy.
This does nothing to excuse the nihilistic and outrageous behaviour of mobs intent on violence across multiple cities and towns across the UK. No context should protect those who attacked police lines with extreme ferocity or who were intent on incinerating a building and the terrified human beings within it.
The policing report focuses on the mental and physical toll of police officers who were seen on our screens, outnumbered, exhausted and poorly equipped, being set upon by rioters who would have celebrated fatalities. Time and again, the tactical response of police officers on the ground seemed insufficient to protect themselves or the public.
What is striking is the way rioters were allowed to get so close to officers, whose protective clothing often differed according to the whim of senior officers in charge. In Northern Ireland, where the prospect of officers being murdered by rioters is a real and present danger, non-lethal baton rounds are used to create distance, show intent, reduce injury and effect arrests. In the rest of the UK this option effectively remains on the shelf. In an age of record police resignations driven in part by a sense that senior officers are detached from front-line realities, including the welfare of officers standing behind shields in chaos, this part of the report and its recommendations must stick.
Most readers, brought up on a diet of police procedurals, understand the concept of ‘gold command’, the top of a tripartite system of managing serious incidents where there is one overall strategic leader with the authority and resources to make executive decisions. The report makes clear that as far as spontaneous incidents are concerned, this vaunted system of national command and control did not work early enough or well enough to potentially nip disorder in the bud.
It seems extraordinary given the multi-million pound bureaucratic architecture of policing structures – the national police chiefs council (NPCC), the college of policing, the Home Office, policing and crime commissioners, the inspectorate itself, Cobra – that this should be the case. It took over a week following the Southport disturbances for the NPCC to authorise a national mobilisation of public order police. It is staggering that there is still no single point of authority that can order forces to provide mutual aid in such situations. A baroque and sclerotic pipework of decision makers often located at a political rather than an operational level must be taken to task and streamlined. Cooke found that there was no way of even knowing how many public order-trained police officers there were across the country. Heads won’t roll for any of this.
Finally, the report contends that police should have been more aware of the turbulence within our society, fuelled by endless months of violent activism, protests and sectarian disorder when building an intelligence picture to anticipate community tensions. But it seems depressingly obvious that this phenomenon is more a new baseline than an uptick. Welcome to the age of extremity where the best we can expect from a demoralised and often demonised police service is to manage violent hatred, not intervene to enforce the law.
The risk of placing handy labels like extreme nationalism on what happened over the summer is obvious. It ignores the many other factors that coalesced in a week of anarchy just about staunched by the bravery of cops on the front line who are increasingly disillusioned. Many of the places and forces where the worst of the violence happened feel abandoned by conventional politics and politicians. Southport, Hartlepool, Rotherham and Middlesborough, liminal places far away from metropolitan sentiment, share many of the same socio-economic markers for deprivation. Police officers who should be in these neighbourhoods building trust and spotting problems early are non-existent. Riots, like acts of terrorism, are part of a conversation. The response of government to this report must not seek to hear only palatable voices.
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