The police need operational reform and community accountability not defunding

There's been a great deal about 'defunding' of police and criticism of the manner in which police operate. It has long been appparent that operational efficiency and the desire of senior officers to minimise individual initiative has led to poorer policing. The police will present reams of statistics showing how they catch more baddies, do more patrolling and generally do a massively better job that those dull, old-style bobbies of the 1960s. And, of course, it's not usually the police who are responsible for the crime - that's mostly down to the criminals.

It should, however, concern us that policing is increasingly militarised in style, that police officers are more 'other' and less citizens in uniform, and that managerial preference has reduced local beat centres in favour of huge barracks like this one in Bradford:

Even worse, as a citizen, entering one of these huge unfriendly buildings means entering another offensive space. For such large buildings the reception for the visitor is claustrophobic and assumes that any person walking into the building is a threat to the police on duty. The walls are plastered with irregularly spaced warning notices, stern instructions to any visitor and posters about crimes. There is not even the slightest attempt to make the place welcoming and every visitor must either stand and wait or else perch on an uncomfortable plastic chair screwed to the floor. Eventually you are seen by a person from behind a reinforced glass screen requiring you to almost shout so as to be heard. The sense in all this is that, whoever you are, the police will respond vigorously and agressively towards anyone who steps across their arbitrary behavioural line.

In these days of technology, this operational centralisation seems unnecessary. Why require officers to travel to a central location when instructions, reports and orders can be sent using mobile telephones, tablets or laptops? Even better, such an approach could allow for something similar to this example from Dallas:

...a homeowners’ association emerged and a nonprofit Munger Place Alliance Against Crime hired off-duty uniformed police officers and to pay the city for the use of their squad cars in order to patrol the neighborhood at random times in four-hour increments. The police officers met with the homeowners every month and reported their findings and experiences. Instead of a resident seeing a police car in the neighborhood and experiencing a tremble of apprehension, now a resident would break into a smile because the police were there on behalf of the neighborhood. They were not there to shake someone down for a minor infraction.

The impact in Munger Place was positive and, since the initiative started, has seen crime plummet and the area become, once again, a desirable area for people to live and work. Yet police services everywhere have eliminated local police stations, sold off police houses and ended the old practice of embedding police officers in communities by providing them with a home there. As we consider the future of work for everyone else, we should perhaps start to look at the future organisation of policing. It's very clear that in many of our large cities the police services are failing - you don't need to look much beyond London's knife crime epidemic to see how police appear (when they're not hounding essentially innocent people for saying something on Twitter) to have walked away from proactive and community-based policing.

As with so much in our public service, the cry from the organisations and their advocates is "more funding, more funding". There is little expectation that police services will reform as a condition for the additional funding and politicians simply parrot "1000 more police officers" to head off the critics in the same way as they intone "7000 more nurses, 500 more doctors and 20 more hospitals" to lay claim to caring about the population's health. In England the creation of Police and Crime Commissioners was supposed to improve the accountability of the various police services. Sadly, these PCCs were given no say over operational priorities, a limited control of the budget and precious little else - they quickly became elected mouthpieces for police leadership rather than people able to shape and improve our response to crime in local communities.

The more thoughtful criticism of policing (some of it from people involved in the BLM movement) has rightly pointed out that, for many communities, the police are seen as an intrusion even though most people living in those communities cry out for lower crime, safer streets and a trusted police presence. When the local police were literally local - based on the high street in a station you could walk to from home - people felt the police were 'their' police not 'feds' or 'cops' swooshing in with fancy cars, tazers and a bad attitude. In that little description of the change in Munger Place the most telling line is how people feared the police, "...seeing a police car in the neighborhood and experiencing a tremble of apprehension." Put simply, if you're a police service and this is how you're seen by the communities you serve, then you're failing. And the UK police are failing.

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"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" - the authoritarian basis for speech and behaviour laws

We've rather lost sight of this in the UK with our ever expanding surveillance state, PSPOs, ASBOs and hate speech laws:

"History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak with-out risking arrest is "one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation." Houston v. Hill, 482 U. S. 451, 463 (1987).

 This is a dissenting opinion in the case - and here we're reminded of the chilling reality of these laws, a quote from Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria:

  "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

 I've said for a while that we've set the police in a position where they can arrest anyone at any time on a host of pretexts - from covering your face through having a can of lager to singing a song.

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Targeting works (which is why ASBOs and PSPOs are ineffective, lazy, divisive policing)

"Broken window" theory (or, to use its pompous operational name, "order maintenance policing") is the idea that lies behind a lot of modern policing including, in the UK anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) and public space protection orders (PSPOs):

In essence, Kelling and Wilson argued that latent danger loomed everywhere, and everywhere people’s disorderly impulses needed to be repressed, or else. Their “broken windows theory” didn’t stay theoretical: Also known as order maintenance policing, this tactic propelled an entire generation of policing practice that sought to crack down on minor “quality-of-life” infractions as a way to stem violence.

The problem is that, as research now shows, all this sounds good but doesn't work - a great deal of time and money is invested in the idea that anti-social behaviour (essentially annoying but non-criminal acts) and petty crime are gateway drugs to more serious crime and that we should target deprived areas using aggressive approaches like stop-and-search, arrests for petty misdemeanours and large scale area campaigns. This, in most developed countries, inevitably means targeting areas with concentrations of minority residents (black or Hispanic in the USA, black or South Asian in the UK) leading to understandable allegations of racism and high degrees of mistrust in police and criminal justice.

What Stephen Lurie, Alexis Acevedo, & Kyle Ott have shown is that serious crime (they focus on violent crime) is much more concentrated socially than 'broken window theory" allows:

...in over 20 cities, we found that less than 1 percent of a city’s population—the share involved in what we call “street groups” (gangs, sets, and crews)—is generally connected to over 50 percent of the city’s shootings and homicides. We use “group” as a term inclusive of any social network involved in violence, whether they are hierarchical, formal gangs, or loose neighborhood crews. In city after city, the very small number of people involved in these groups consistently perpetrated and were victimized by the most serious violence.

We are talking about really small numbers of people - Lurie describes how:

This held true even in areas considered chronically “dangerous,” like parts of East Baltimore. There, the group member population totaled only three quarters of a percentage point, even as they were connected to 58.43 percent of homicides. Shootings tend to be even more concentrated than homicides. In Minneapolis, we found that 0.15 percent of the population was determined to be involved in groups, but this population was connected to 53.96 percent of shootings—a proportion over 350 times higher than their population representation.

The conclusion here is that we need to do two things: target resources (policing and other interventions) towards the very small numbers responsible for most of the mayhem, and spend some time explaining to the wider public that 99% of young people living in deprived areas with high crime levels are not criminals or even likely to become criminals. Right now with ASBOs, PSPOs and extensions of stop-and-search we are doing the opposite. These strategies act to give the impression to people in these areas that the police and public authorities do not trust them and consider them likely criminals. It is no surprise, then, that these communities - often minority communities - don't co-operate with the police or other public authorities.

We should scrap ASBOs, PSPOs and the whole structure of anti-social behaviour measures and direct resources towards targeting the small number of (mostly) young men who are responsible for most of the violence, burglary, robbery and assaults in our cities.

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It seems it's now policy not to make arrests (or a clip round the ear)

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Arrests have fallen in the UK by nearly a half. The police, unsurprisingly, blame this on reduced "resources" but it is worth noting that there are not 50% fewer coppers - not even the more deranged parts of the Labour Party are making that claim - so you can't lay fewer arrests at the door of so-called "austerity".

I guess this is a better reason:

“Officers are also encouraged to deal with offending behaviour proportionately and effectively, maximising public involvement, keeping people out of the criminal justice system and supporting reduced re-offending behaviour through positive intervention.”

It is now policy not to arrest people and for the police to behave a bit like a cross between a social worker and Judge Dredd - dealing with "offending behaviour" rather than catching criminals as used to be the case. This might be seen as a welcome return to the old-fashioned "clip round the ear" approach to policing where the coppers visited low level summary justice on badly behaved youth rather than arresting them. I've a fear, however, that the process of arrest, charge and the criminal justice process is such a nightmare of paperwork and mind-numbing bureaucracy that not arresting bad 'uns just makes the coppers' lives easier. What I do know is that, for all the "gee, Officer Krupke" banter, there's precious little evidence of this sort of policing "reducing reoffending behaviour".

I've always taken a care to listen to the explanations I get from the police and I also appreciate that the burglars aren't things of their creation but this mealy-mouthed, bureaucrat speak about how the police work seems to cover up an almost abject failure to do what the public wants - robust, hard, policing that targets the vicious, greedy young men who commit the crimes and upset the lives of decent, law-abiding people. It certainly doesn't appear to the majority of folk that the police are either present in their community or responsive to the needs of that place. Today's police seem to be stuck in cars, draped with ever more bits of kit and, when you get to speak with them, talking in an almost impenetrable language quite unlike how regular folk speak about criminals and crime.

The police have the time and resource to get filmed dancing at pride marches but not to respond promptly to a burglary at a frightened elderly couple's house, put more publicity behind getting people to report bad language on social media, and police "senior leaders" hide behind bureaucracy to excuse their failures. Blaming a 50% drop in arrests on resourcing is, quite simply, a lie but nobody is looking chief constables and crime commissioners in the eye and saying "pull the other one, mate". Yes more money for policing might be a good idea but only if that money gets spent on actual policing not a bureaucratic, politically correct pastiche of policing.

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The causes of bad policing...

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Since I'm going to write about rioting I shall start with an important caveat - when everything has been said and done riots are the fault of the rioter. There may be mitigation, perhaps a little explanation but there is never excuse. I remember Bradford's riots - thirteen years ago now but still a pretty vivid memory for many who recall what it was like:

Ilyas was captured on police cameras wearing an Afro-style wig and throwing burning cardboard through a broken window of Manningham Labour Club while 23 people were inside.  The club was burned to the ground after petrol bombs were thrown by a group of Asian youths.

That is the reality of riot as much as is the grievance that set light to the trouble. We should not forget this regardless of how we view the events that follow the riot. And we should remember that not everyone participating in the riot is doing so for reasons of protest - as we know from London's riots there are some who see the opportunity disturbance presents for a little light looting.

However all this doesn't explain or excuse another factor in the cause of protest and in escalating that protest to riot - bad policing. Here's a bit of an illustration in the words of NFL player, David Bass a native of Ferguson, Missouri:

“I was 15 and one of my best friends had just got a car from his mom, a white Lincoln, and he picked up my brother and I to go to The Loop. When we parked there were police behind us, and next thing you know, there are about 10 police cars surrounding us. They’re screaming, ‘Stay in the car! Keep your hands up! Hand over your IDs.’ People are starting to gather to watch. They took 45 minutes searching the car while we sat on the sidewalk."

 

I don't know whether Bass's memories exaggerate but, even if the incident was half as big it is still an unnecessary over-reaction from the police. An over-reaction that presages what has happened in Ferguson over recent days. A response that is all about bad policing and maybe a little bit of racism too.

But why is this? Why do police - whether in Bradford, in London or in a suburb of St Louis - get their actions so wrong? I've observed before that the police act too often as some sort of occupying army rather than the agents of a community protecting that community. Here in Bradford we have huge barracks with small windows looming over poor communities. Not just the buildings but the police vehicles and even the police are bristling with antennae and, when there's a disturbance it almost seems as if there's an excitement in the quasi-military response to riot.

And from what we've seen, the USA has even more of a problem - a police force now armed to the teeth on the back of false fears about terrorism. This militarising of the police - in terms of equipment and operations is what, in part, creates the tension between a poor community and the police whose job is to protect that community. Plus the fact that, regardless of the additional tension that stems from racial difference, those police officers are no from that community. Here in Bradford there are probably no police officers living in West Bowling or on the Allerton estate - like the social workers and community developers the police live elsewhere and visit just to ply their trade.

 

The second cause of bad policing is the tendency to see everything out of the ordinary as a threat to order - whether it's people saying unpleasant things on Twitter, folk gathering to protest some perceived injustice or simply the reaction to a crime or spate of crimes. And since "something must be done" us politicians respond with regulations that give the police more powers - we criminalise harmless possession, define disorder is such a way as to make almost any public action arrestable and we make the definition of 'anti-social behaviour' so wide as to provide the police with the power to make criminal things that even the politicians haven't defined as criminal.

 

As a result of these powers coupled with an aggressive quasi-military approach, we have replaced the idea of policing by consent with a different approach - policing as social control. With each additional power the business of law enforcement becomes less PC Dixon and more Judge Dredd with the police exercising almost arbitrary power underwritten by compliant magistrates and legislation so broadly defined as to remove any ability for peaceful resistance to the orders of a police officer.

In the end society has to respond to riot, looting and violence because decent people expect us to do just that. But we also need to ask whether tear gas, water cannon and armoured vehicles are the best way to respond. For my part I'm not sure they are the right approach since they reflect a macho, testosterone-fuelled response to disorder and merely act to build up resentment, grievance and the seeds of future disorder.

 

We need to return to the idea of policing by consent and rediscover real community policing - not merely as an operational strategy but as the entire purpose of policing. We do not need huge barracks where the brass hats dish out the orders for the day in some sort of war room. Rather we need what we lost - local police based in local police stations, the sort of places with a welcoming blue light over the door and police officers with familiar faces seen every day - more akin to Officer Krupke than to today's flak-jacketed cop with his face hidden in a helmet.

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Petty bans and pointless policing...nannying fussbucketry Northern Ireland style!

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The story's about the Northern Ireland cops (how times have changed) threatening a couple of skinny-dippers with being put on the sex offenders register. But tagged on the end is another bit of tin-pottism and microcosm of pointless policing:

Police in the North Down town also warned that they were on the lookout for people bringing alcohol to the beach, with officers patrolling the platform at Helen's Bay railway station. 

Yesterday Kathryn and I went up to the RHS Gardens at Harlow Carr near Harrogate to listen to a little light jazz and eat a picnic. Along with hundreds of others we sat in the sunshine drinking beer and wine without any bother, any need for dire police warnings and certainly no trouble. It's really about time we trusted people to behave sensible on a public beach and to stop this nannying and unnecessary clampdown on taking a couple of beers to drink on the beach.

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A local take on arresting boozers...

****

West Yorkshire Police plan on finding the time to tweet all the alcohol-related incidents over a 12 hour period - clearly they're at a loose end.

However, they've reported the number of arrests for drunk and disorderly:

"In the twelve months leading to August 2013 there have been a total of 3071 arrests for those who are drunk and disorderly."

Which is eight a day. Across West Yorkshire's two million or so population that's hardly an epidemic of drunks.

The campaign - called 'In Focus' (compelte with its own hashtag, #infocus) is part of ACPO's 'let's go on about drinking rather than address the real problems facing police forces in England' campaign.

All a little sad really.

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How the police waste resources...and then blame the public

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Shock, horror, scandal! One drunk takes 17 - yes, folks one seven, seventeen - coppers to respond. Now leaving aside that I don't believe a word of it, what a waste of resources. This is today's instalment of Chief Constable Adrian Lee's tinpot fascist campaign against people having a good time.

Four policemen to arrest one drunk - two in a patrol car! Aren't the police patrolling the town centre anyway? What this report tells us is that policing in England is a bureaucratic mess and that, under the leadership of men like Mr Lee, the service couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Apparently police resources would be better deployed elsewhere:

And those resources would be put to much better use in local communities rather than being called into town centres every weekend to deal with people who wouldn't cause problems if they hadn't consumed so much alcohol

I've really no idea what those "resources" would be doing in "local communities" at midnight on a Friday other that sitting about drinking tea or pointlessly patrolling empty streets. I guess they could use the time to keep up with the paperwork that people like Mr Lee create for them?

Drunken assault is anti-social. But then so is much of the rest of the things police deal with - burglary to feed a drug habit is anti-social, shoplifting is anti-social. In truth all crime is anti-social, the police spend most of their time dealing with people who, for whatever reason, cause problems. It's why we have them, it's what we pay Mr Lee and others to do.

It seems however that, in Mr Lee's world, the problem is with the public not the incompetence of police systems.

Oh and while we're about this - there is no such thing as "24 hour drinking" but since the liberalising of licensing laws alcohol consumption has fallen. Every single year and the biggest fall is amongst the young - the very people Mr Lee blames for the police's bureaucratic uselessness.

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Things that West Yorkshire Police could safely cut...

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Received an e-mail this morning from Bradford Council's press and marketing operation - telling me about the latest of West Yorkshire Police's jolly campaigns: "Neighbourhood policing: here for good!"

You may already be aware, that the Chief Constable, Sir Norman Bettison, has launched a Police campaign, ‘Neighbourhood Policing Here for Good.’ Please see the attached poster.

The campaign will aim to reassure the public that West Yorkshire Police is still committed to Neighbourhood Policing and the principles of 'Our Commitment.'

The campaign will be driven by the Force’s 48 Neighbourhood Policing Teams who will be provided with materials such as posters and flyers. The message will also appear on the Force website, social network sites and be distributed via Bluetooth messaging.

 
And you wondered what your local police were up to, didn't you? Posters, flyers, grand tours by the top brass, receptions for us councillors (and others of the local 'great and good') - I'm curious as to how many criminals this will catch and how many crimes it will prevent. Approximately none at all, I suspect.
 
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So why won't our police take advice?

***

I was struck by the incredible arrogance of Sir Hugh Orde:

"What I suggested to the home secretary is a more sensible approach, maybe to look across far wider styles of policing and - more usefully - at European styles; they, like us, are bound by the European Convention.

"My sense is, when we've done that, we will find the British model is probably the top."

 Rapidly followed by the ranks - lining up to say that, of course, the police weren't too "timid" and that standing watching while the looting goes on is normal police tactics. And, more to the point, I suspect the British public rather agree with Bill Bratten - and with his disciple, Middlesbrough mayor, Ray Mallon, who said of the riots:

We must not be caught flat-footed again and must master the weapons of our enemies. We won’t do that with water cannon and rubber bullets. But we must give frontline professionals freedom to police effectively, without fear or favour to anyone, or section, of the community.

They cannot do that with a pair of handcuffs marked “political correctness” around their wrists. They need to know we expect them to police proactively.

Because we have seen the depolicing of our streets. Day by day we ­surrendered territory to wreckers. We let them win little victories and must now fight a battle. We can, and must, win back the streets.

Personally, I'm unsure as to whether US-style policing is either a good thing or effective. But I do think we should listen to the man who, almost single-handedly, transformed the approach to law enforcement in two of America's toughest cities. Not to do so would be the height of arrogance and complacency - an indication, in my view, that Sir Hugh Orde is not suited at all to be Britain's 'top cop'.

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Not a good week for police leadership

 

We all watched numb and speechless as looters rampaged through the high streets of London, Manchester, Birmingham and elsewhere. And we rightly condemn those looters and say that there are no excuses for their behaviour - rioting is the responsibility of the rioter, no-one makes them do it.

But, like others, I was struck by the supine response of the police on the street. A response succinctly described by David Davis:

The single thing that has most astonished the British public was the sight of rows of heavily equipped police officers standing by whilst rioters and looters engaged in brazen acts of vandalism, arson and theft. A police officer called to the scene of a bank robbery would not park across the street and wait patiently for it to finish, so why were the Met’s riot police little more than spectators during the looting? 

We watched reports of the Wolverhampton hairdresser protecting her shop and confronting looters - while police stood by and watched. Yet the full order of riot police were deployed to respond to deal with 'vigilantes':

"...more than 1,000 officers battled with dozens of middle-aged men on the streets Eltham, south-east London."

More than 1000 police to deal with sixty men some of who appear to have committed the heinous crime or drinking some beer and singing "we love England". But police bosses really don't get it - those men, whether from the EDL or not - weren't about to riot, smash up shops or loot. It could have been handled with fifty coppers. But then the police don't like local people looking out for their own community, especially when those local people are white, male and working-class. And the top policemen still don't get it:

He said it was “ironic” that media pictures showed looting in areas where there were “no police available” while officers were being diverted to stop vigilantes elsewhere. 

Got that? The police deemed it more important to send 1000 officers to handle 200 men in Eltham who weren't looting or rioting than to send officers to deal with the actual looting? We'd watched the day before as the police ignored looting, standing mutely - clearly frustrated - because their senior officers were too scared to confront the rioters properly.

And who were those 'vigilantes' - here's a description from Enfield where 300 men took to the high street to defend their community:

On the train to Enfield, I had been reading dozens of tweets claiming the anti-riot patrol was a front for far-right organisations and an excuse for racist chants and violence. The reality was nothing of the sort. There were no weapons being carried and no violence erupted at all. Yes, the majority of people there were white and working class, but there was also a range of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Indeed I found, if anything, people on the patrol were overly awkward about the fact they were white. One guy told me he had been worried he'd be seen as a racist by taking part: 'There's no getting around the fact that a lot of the rioters are black,' he told me, 'but you can't just do nothing just in case someone calls you a racist.'

These are the people the Metropolitan Police leadership "can do without". Ordinary men with the gumption to protect their streets to act in the interests of their community - condemned for doing so by the leadership of our police.

This has to change. We can't allow the police leadership to fail us as they did on Monday night. As David Davis points out - amidst all the furore about police cuts - that there are more police officers employed today than at any time in our history. Which begs a question - where on earth were they all on Monday night?

We've always been told - as politicians - that we should have no say over the police's "operational decisions", yet we know that the decision-making by the Metropolitan Police over the past few days has been risible. And the leadership of the force should therefore be accountable - it was their decision-making that was wrong. It was not - in proximate terms - the fault of politicians.

When we had riots in Bradford, I didn't feel let down by the police - despite the poor tactics on the night. Lots of brave men and women faced a very angry situation and hundreds were injured. I suspect that many people in places hit by looters felt let down by the police. Certainly, we don't pay thousands in personal and business taxes to pay for a police force that doesn't protect us.

If one change comes from all this it must be a more accountable, more local police force. We have to move away from ever larger forces, from concentration of operations into huge, impersonal barracks and from the disconnection between the police and the communities they serve. This isn't about political control of the police - although elected police commissioners will be welcome - but about the police being of and from the community. Not "community policing" as some form of operational tactic but a real community police force - one that would welcome people who stand up for their community and not treat them as unwanted "vigilantes".

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In the end riot is the fault of the the rioter...no-one else

“The fact that we were all safe as kittens under a cookstove did not, however, assuage in the least the fine despair and the grotesque desperation which seized upon the residents of the East Side when the cry spread like a grass fire that the dam had given way. Some of the most dignified, staid, cynical, and clear thinking men in town abandoned their wives, stenographers, homes and offices and ran east. There are few alarms in the world more terrifying than ‘The dam has broken!’ There are few persons capable of stopping to reason when that clarion cry strikes upon their ears, even persons who live in towns no nearer than five hundred miles to a dam.”

So it is as James Thurber explained. Once the hue and cry is out nothing – no reason can contain the progress of the mob. And, just as Columbus residents charged to higher ground because some poor fool had told some other poor fool the dam had burst – and the second poor fool had believed the first, we find the cry will be out for something to be done.

But we should consider carefully before – in the passion or pain of the moment – we commit to do things. The consequences of those commitments might prove more dangerous and intrusive that the things we are using them to prevent.

So to riots. Firstly, we’ve had riots before and shall have riots again. Such disturbances are a feature of urban living – not a good one but a feature nonetheless. This isn’t to say we should simply bow to the inevitable nor is it to excuse the act of riot but it is a necessary precursor to the judgments and decision we make about reducing the risk of such behaviour recurring.

In understanding this we have also to understand that, when people on the left speak of ‘poverty’, ‘social exclusion’ and ‘deprivation’, their words contain a grain of truth. It is poor places that, in the main have riots. Yesterday there were no riots (so far as I know) in Kingston or Sutton, in Pinner or Ruislip. I haven’t read reports of disturbances in Purley or looting in Richmond. The places worst affected – Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, Peckham – read like a listing of London’s most troubled places. 

So, while drawing a causal relationship between poverty and riot is an insult to poor people who don’t riot – which is most of those poor people, we cannot simply dismiss those socio-economic arguments, to say that these matters are not a factor.

However, we must not stop at this point – as too many on the left are wont to do – or worse start seeking to link our vested interest (“it’s the cuts that did it you know”). Instead we need to add some of those things us on the right speak of – the problems with criminality and a criminal sub-culture within these places.

I recall canvassing round The Showfield in Keighley in the run up to the 2001 General Election. This is a tight little area of small terraced housing just north of the town centre. Its population is overwhelming Mirpuri, although there’s a smattering of Bengalis. I’m with a young lawyer brought up in the area – his dad was an important local man (a community leader, I guess we’d call him) – and he was introducing me to local families.

Walking down one street we saw, leaning on a new-ish Subaru Impreza, two smartly dressed young men. My friend the lawyer turned around and walked the other way. In response to my inquiry as to why, he explained that these were drug dealers and he didn’t want to be seen talking to them since ‘everyone’ knew him and them.

Except it wasn’t everyone – I was then told that the families of these men were proud of them. They were doing so well, nice car, smart clothes, nice presents for mum and for their sisters and plenty of money to help what was a poor family out. The families either knew and turned a blind eye or else had no idea where the money came from.

But then neither economic hardship nor criminality or a ‘gang culture’ fully explain. Part of the rest of the answer lies in the Thurber story – we are inclined to follow, often without really applying our brains so as to assess what we were doing. After the Bradford riots, in court appearance after court appearance, young men were unable to explain just why they had done the things they did. This doesn’t excuse that behaviour but it perhaps begins to explain how it is that people of otherwise good character get involved in riot and in looting.

The next reason, I believe, is a failure of policing. This was evident in the riots in Notting Hill back in 1976, at Brixton in 1981 and in Bradford ten years ago. And central to the problem of policing is the disengagement of the police from communities. Despite all the rhetoric of “community” that police use today, their actions and organisation belies this tale.

I look at modern police stations, great stone barracks with narrow windows, often barred – looming over poor communities. In Bradford we see these great lumps at Toller Lane, Dudley Hill and the new one, Trafalgar House.  These do not give off the signal of an involved, community service but of something akin to an occupying force. And when, as we see in these London places, the gang culture fertilizes a distrust and dislike of the police, the result in a complete disconnection between those charged with maintaining order and the “youth”.

And yes, the failings of policing and the disengagement of those charged with enforcement also plays its part. But still we are stuck with the incentive to riot, to loot – the view that you won’t get caught and if you do the ‘sheep’ defence, especially linked to race, with serve to minimise any consequence. 

In the end though there is no excuse, there can be no exoneration for the rioter. To appreciate the terror of the innocent caught in a riot, I always think back to 7th July ten years ago:

Ilyas was captured on police cameras wearing an Afro-style wig and throwing burning cardboard through a broken window of Manningham Labour Club while 23 people were inside.  The club was burned to the ground after petrol bombs were thrown by a group of Asian youths.

The 23 people inside were eventually led to safety after hiding in the club's cellar to avoid the flames. Police described the incident afterwards as the single most serious incident of the riots.

This is the truth of riot, not the romantic idea of revolution, not some sort of punishment meted out on the ‘rich’ or on the ‘government’. No, riot is the terrorising of innocents – men and women like those cowering in the cellar of a club while it burns above their head.

There is nothing grand or clever in all this – whatever your explanation for riot may be. However much we must attend to the economic, political and social factors helping contribute, in the final analysis the riot is the fault of the rioter.

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Not very liberal...or democratic for that matter!

But then this is the Liberal Democrats after all!

A group of more than 115 leading Liberal Democrat councillors has called on the Government to abandon its plans for elected police commissioners.

The group, which includes LGA Liberal Democrat leader, Cllr Richard Kemp, and Portsmouth City Council leader, Cllr Gerald Vernon-Jackson, have called on the Government to drop the idea and replace them with local police boards.

In a letter published today in The Times, the councillors said the recent controversies about phone hacking and tabloid journalists mean there is a need for'a clear separation between politicians and the police'.

Surely having the person in charge - the police commissioner - accountable to the public is an improvement to democracy? More liberal? Less likely to be corrupted?

Apparently Cllr Kemp and his pals want something else:

For this reason, we ask the Government to drop the proposal for elected police commissioners, and to replace them with police boards that will work with local government and provide the transparency that is so badly needed.'

And how this is more transparent than electing the police chief, I have no idea? It simply fiddles about with the current system of Police Authorities - unaccountable, distant bodies made up of appointed individuals.

But then the Liberal Democrats always struggled with the idea of being liberal and democratic, didn't they!

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Crime falls again....

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Kent Police - surely to be followed by other forces - are crowing about the reduction in crime within the County:

The figures are for the rolling year October 2009 to September 2010, and  show that all crime in Kent has fallen by 3.9 per cent, compared to the same period in the previous year (08/09).

This means there were 4,389 fewer crimes in Kent and Medway.

Kent Deputy Chief Constable Alan Pughsley said: 'We are pleased these very serious offences have seen major reductions in Kent, where figures were low in the first instance.

"We aim to make Kent as safe a place as possible, and we are completely committed to tackling violent crime and to bringing those responsible for it to justice."

The 'very serious offences' refers to a nearly 7% drop in violent crime - a pattern being repeated across the country. However, I do wonder about some of these figures - almost all the drop in volume crime relates to a drop in criminal damage and vehicle crime. The other volume crimes - the things that really affect people have all increased:

• Burglary up by 2.3 per cent, or 286 crimes
• Robbery up by six per cent, or 53 crimes
• Theft up by 3.8 per cent, or 1,023 crimes

It seems to me that the drop in crime has little or nothing to do with policing - or else the drop would be in the main targets of police activity such as burglary and street crime. However, there is a clue to police activity in these increases:

• Drugs offences up by 8.5 per cent, or 338 crimes
• Sex offences up by 15.6 per cent, or 205 crimes.

The police spokesman claimed that these increases were entirely down to their efforts:

'The increase in the number of drugs offences recorded actually highlights our commitment to detecting and dismantling not only organised crime groups involved in the cultivation, production and trafficking of drugs, but also individuals who peddle drugs in our communities.'

The point here isn't to criticise the police but to observe that the drivers of crime are not the number of coppers, the strategies used or indeed policies on sentencing. The factors most influencing crime relate to its ease - hence the drop in car crime since it got harder to steal cars - and the dutch courage needed. It should be no surpirse to see that (since licensing liberalisation) reducing consumption of alcohol has led to reduced violent crime and less criminal damage.

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