Here’s something of a paradox: to judge by the commentary, Keir Starmer’s response to the recent public disorder has been pretty effective. The riots seemed to have burned themselves out, the courts are making high-profile examples of those involved, and it appears to many that the Prime Minister has passed his first major test in office.
Yet opinion polling says otherwise. To judge by the public reaction, the riots have brought an end to Starmer’s honeymoon after only a month. According to YouGov, nearly half of all respondents think the Government handled the riots badly.
This is not due to any latent sympathy with the rioters. According to another poll, the four most popular words the public used for those involved in the disorder were ‘thugs’, ‘rioters’, ‘racist’, and ‘far-right’. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
No, the problem is that the response was not tough enough. For confirmation, YouGov re-ran one of my favourite-ever bits of polling: ‘Do you think the police should or should not be able to use the following in the course of dealing with rioters?’. Here is the percentage in favour of each:
- Water Cannon (75%)
- Tasers (75%)
- Mounted Police (72%)
- Curfews (72%)
- Tear Gas (64%)
- Plastic Bullets (48%)
- Live Ammunition (19%)
These numbers are down a little from when YouGov ran the same question in the wake of the 2011 riots; then, almost two-thirds of Brits backed baton rounds and a full third supported letting the police shoot rioters in the streets. But the overall point stands: the British public strongly favour a pro-active and kinetic approach to public order policing which is entirely at odds with what they get.
You may remember the furore when Theresa May nixed Boris Johnson’s bid to purchase water cannon for the Metropolitan Police, but that’s just the start of it. According to police sources, not even officers with Level 1 public order training are taught to use “attenuating energy projectiles” (plastic bullets or baton rounds to you and me) – only the instructors maintain the skill, just in case. Meanwhile CS gas is not authorised for use in Britain at all.
Why? Press the question, as I have in the past, and what often results is a very hazy appeal to the famous ‘Peelian Principles’, the nine dicta laid down by Sir Robert Peel when he founded the modern police, and which are supposed to make British policing unique and special.
Read through the Principles and there is little to object to. But nor is there any obvious connection between them and the way they are adduced in favour of hands off, softly-softly policing. If the foundation of our model is that ‘the police are the public and that the public are the police’ it should matter to policymakers more than it does that if the public were the police, they would be the French police – not exactly known for a sang froid approach to rioting and public order.
Indeed, dig down into the actual details of what Peel said that the contradictions only mount. For example, the very first Principle is: ‘To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.’ Yet the police’s hands-off approach means that today, just as in 2011, a majority of the public favour deploying the Army to restore order.
The second Principle states that ‘the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect’. Once again, modern methods fail this test – even setting aside any question about two-tier policing, a majority of Britons do not have confidence in the police’s ability to ‘protect people and property from further unrest’.
The inclusion of property in that question is crucial. At present, police doctrine is not to go toe-to-toe with rioters in defence of mere property. Instead, aggressive tactics and kinetic methods are only employed when there is a direct threat to life. The practical effect of this is to elevate the wellbeing of the rioter over the rights and property of the law-abiding, a situation with which the public are clearly (and rightly) unhappy.
Defenders of the status quo might appeal to the sixth Principle, which enjoins the police ‘to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective’.
But that simply puts the spotlight back on the previous point: the public clearly have different and more expansive ideas of what the police’s objectives ought to be when dealing with riots. Why is it better to let someone’s business be looted or torched than let a would-be arsonist take their chances against a truncheon or baton round?
The Peelian Principles are often distilled into the phrase ‘policing by consent’. But modern policy seems to have an extremely warped interpretation of this phrase. Logic suggests – and the historical record of British riot policing backs this up – that it means the consent of the general population, not the consent of criminals and rioters.
Last week, I looked at various ways in which the Prime Minister could expand the pool of properly-trained public order personnel available to police commanders and make good on his promise of a “standing army”. But as I said then, there is only limited utility in having more people if they are not employed appropriately. The Police Federation seems to agree.
This is why the Government should carefully consider setting up a new, operationally-distinct public order force. Not only would it be an opportunity to install a new command culture at the top of public order policing, but having riot-control duties discharged by a discrete force would also assuage those who object that a more muscular approach to public order would damage the police’s community relations and undermine their ordinary work.
So far, Starmer’s Standing Army is just an organisational sleight of hand. But all the evidence suggests that the public would strongly support making it reality.
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