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.
