By Paul Lewis and Ben Quinn
LONDON: The Metropolitan police`s embattled public order unit, CO11, once prided itself on being the world leader in containing disorder. At 3am on Monday, its exhausted officers slept in police vans lined up in Enfield town centre, bruised, exhausted and, for the second night running, entirely out-manoeuvred.
For hours they had been chasing groups of youths around Enfield, Ponders End and Edmonton, in north London, using dogs and batons to disperse anyone seen looting shops.
Any doubt that police were unable to control the violence was dispelled hours later, around 5pm on Monday, amid further outbreaks of looting in Hackney and other areas of the capital in broad daylight.
The home secretary [UK minister of the interior], Theresa May, who flew home from holiday to deal with the fallout from the riots, will have asked commanders of the UK`s largest police force: how did you lose control of London?
For the third day running, CO11`s territorial support group (TSG), nicknamed the “Muscle of the Met”, suffered the humiliation of requiring support from colleagues in neighbouring forces.
Some will rightly claim police cannot hope to contend with hundreds of roaming youths intent on causing destruction and breaking into unprotected properties in the middle of the night.
That challenge has been exacerbated since disturbances started on Saturday, initially limited to one street in Tottenham and, later in the night, Wood Green.
The contagion that saw looting spread across a 16km stretch of London in the early hours of Monday poses obvious resource issues. Analysts argued the Met suffered from a combination of bad luck, poor intelligence and overstretched forces. But there may be more long-standing and tactical reasons for its failure to quell the violence.
In Tottenham on Saturday police were accused of failing to open dialogue with protesters who had gathered outside the police station following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan.
“Years ago there would have been a lot of dialogue,” said David Gilbertson, formerly a Metropolitan police division chief superintendent at Tottenham. “We would have gone out of our way to ensure that the organisers of a protest group would have been brought into a station like that even if others were stood outside.”
It took hours for police to change from regular uniforms to riot gear, and even longer for them to begin almost half-hearted attempts at preventing looting.
Officers concentrated almost all their efforts in regaining the territory on the high road, lost during the earlier protest.
There were hardly any attempts to prevent looting, with police only marching in formation and sealing off roads.
“You have an obligation to protect life and property and to do that you need to have a strategy,” Gilbertson said. “The simplest thing to say is that you don`t let groups gather. If it has gone beyond that then you drive them beyond where they are likely to cause damage. There are some blindingly obvious places you don`t let them get near, such as shopping areas.”But there is a problem. During the last decade CO11 has mainly been restricted to dealing with protest. Pre-announced political demonstrations, which are either officially advertised or promoted via Twitter, allow police to plan in advance.
It is common for police to begin with a low-profile presence, wearing high-visibility jackets and soft hats; rows of TSG backup will usually be parked in nearby back streets. At larger protests CO11 will ensure metal barriers are erected, in an attempt to confine groups. Surveillance officers will be placed on roofs; plainclothes officers mingle in the crowd.
The Met`s preferred tactic in recent years has been the controversial “kettle”, in which large numbers of police are drafted in to contain protesters, sometimes for hours on end.
But roaming groups of youths cannot be effectively kettled. And unlike activists they will often return to the site of trouble, seeking direct confrontation with police.
The looters appear to have been more savvy. Large groups targeting shops have been melting into a nearby estate in seconds at the first sound of sirens arriving.
By the time looting began in other parts of north London and in Brixton in the south on Sunday, police had changed their approach. Large numbers in protective gear were on the scene with shields and batons waiting for trouble.
Mounted police officers were used to disperse youths as soon as trouble began. There were more than a dozen dog-handlers in Enfield alone. Police pursued groups as they travelled en masse through London, reacting quickly to any sign of looting by sprinting in and baton-charging everyone in the vicinity.
“The dog is gonna bite you, get back,” one officer shouted as men attacked a shopfront. It was a generally heavier approach; another officer shouted: “Fucking move or you`ll fucking get it.”
That tough approach could backfire. “What you have in a riot is a series of people with different commitments,” said Dr Peter Shirlow, an expert in Northern Ireland policing at Queen`s University Belfast.
“You will have the hardline, which is intent upon violence, you will have onlookers and you will have those who may be relatively sympathetic. What happens is that if the police are harsh with those who are more militant then you simply draw in those who are mildly connected, but still connected to those who are willing to use violence.”
So far the more heavy-handed and reactive policing strategy failed to prevent looting, although it has arguably prevented the kind of sustained attacks that caused huge fires in Tottenham on Saturday.
When riot vans lined a shopping centre in Edmonton Green after it was announced as a target on Sunday, groups of youths were simply diverted into side streets, finding smaller businesses to attack. Police were in tow, but always a minute or two after the damage had been done.
The seeming impossibility of controlling the looting leads to another question: if brute force won`t stop the disorder, could there have been a better approach to hearts and minds?
The dire relations between young people and “the Feds”, as some call police in north London, has been obvious in recent days. “We hate you,” one woman told a police officer who had come to attend to her stabbed friend in Ponders End.
While most of the BBM — BlackBerry Messenger — communications imploring others to take part in the protest have concentrated on looting and theft, many have encouraged people to “Guck da Fed”.
There is a sense that, through looting, young people have discovered a way to beat their police adversaries.
Dr Michael Rosie, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “A key lesson to be learned, as in all such instances, is that communication is fundamental. Police seemed taken by surprise by the rapid escalation in Tottenham — that suggests they need to be more proactive in talking to … the community.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service
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