It’s a gloomy sort of morning ritual, posting on the riots of the previous night. I’m sure CoffeeHousers have seen and heard the specifics already: further burning and looting in parts of London such as Ealing, Croydon and Hackney, as well as bursts of violence in Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere. Businesses and livelihoods have been obliterated, areas set back years. Among the few mercies is that no-one, so far as we know, has yet been killed as a result.
One thing that’s becoming clearer through the smoke is that the Met Police are overrun, unable to properly deal with criminality at hand. The arrest figures tell a story by themselves. “At least 334 people have been arrested and 69 charged following the riots across London over the past three days,” reports theBBC website. There were often more people in a single frame of last night’s news footage.
Already, Labour types are seizing on the coalition’s cuts to police funding as a Reason Why. But while those cuts may now be more politically difficult, will they really be having that much of an effect on the ground? After all, the total number of police officers in the Met has fallen by around 900 over the past year. That still leaves over 32,000 officers across the capital, rivalling the NYPD.
To my eyes, the Met’s problems go far beyond numbers, and are no doubt aggravated by the sporadic, connected, hyperactive nature of the riots. This is something both familiar and new for our bobbies: vandalism and looting, orchestrated by BlackBerry Messenger.
It raises some urgent questions for David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and the acting Met Commissioner, Tim Godwin; foremost among them, how to protect people should these riots spill into a fourth, fifth, sixth night? There are calls for them to sanction the use of water cannons, which would be a start. The only hitch, as the Telegraph notes, is that the Met doesn’t have any. They would have to be shipped in from Northern Ireland.
Alongside a curfew, the more extreme option is, of course, to use the Army in a supporting role. Although that would break through all sorts of symbolic barriers — soldiers on the streets, in under a week — it might also give the Met the bulk and mobility they need. The simple fact is that the rule of law has been eroded over the past few days. If it is not upheld, then there will be deep social and economic consequences to meet. Even more than there are already.
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