Policing Large Scale Disorder: Lessons from the Disturbances of August 2011
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House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Policing Large Scale Disorder: Lessons from the disturbances of August 2011 Sixteenth Report of Session 2010–12 Additional written evidence Ordered by the House of Commons to be published 22 December 2011 Published on 22 December 2011 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited The Home Affairs Committee The Home Affairs Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Home Office and its associated public bodies. Current membership Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP (Labour, Leicester East) (Chair) Nicola Blackwood MP (Conservative, Oxford West and Abingdon) James Clappison MP (Conservative, Hertsmere) Michael Ellis MP (Conservative, Northampton North) Lorraine Fullbrook MP (Conservative, South Ribble) Dr Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat, Cambridge) Steve McCabe MP (Labour, Birmingham Selly Oak) Rt Hon Alun Michael MP (Labour & Co-operative, Cardiff South and Penarth) Bridget Phillipson MP (Labour, Houghton and Sunderland South) Mark Reckless MP (Conservative, Rochester and Strood) Mr David Winnick MP (Labour, Walsall North) The following members were also members of the committee during the parliament. Mr Aidan Burley MP (Conservative, Cannock Chase) Mary Macleod MP (Conservative, Brentford and Isleworth) Powers The Committee is one of the departmental select committees, the powers of which are set out in House of Commons Standing Orders, principally in SO No 152. These are available on the Internet via www.parliament.uk. Publication The Reports and evidence of the Committee are published by The Stationery Office by Order of the House. All publications of the Committee (including press notices) are on the Internet at www.parliament.uk/homeaffairscom. Committee staff The current staff of the Committee are Tom Healey (Clerk), Joanna Dodd (Second Clerk), Sarah Petit (Committee Specialist), Eleanor Scarnell (Inquiry Manager), Darren Hackett (Senior Committee Assistant), Sheryl Dinsdale (Committee Assistant), Victoria Butt (Committee Assistant), John Graddon (Committee Support Officer) and Alex Paterson (Select Committee Media Officer). Contacts All correspondence should be addressed to the Clerk of the Home Affairs Committee, House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA. The telephone number for general enquiries is 020 7219 3276; the Committee’s email address is [email protected]. List of additional written evidence (published in Volume III on the Committee’s website www.parliament.uk/homeaffairscom) Page 1 Tony Baldry MP Ev w1 2 Dr Roger Patrick Ev w2 3 Robert F Bartlett MA Ev w3 4 Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel Ev w4 5 Anthony Sims Ev w4 6 National Black Police Association Ev w5 7 Lozells, Handsworth and Birchfield Community Ev w9 8 Mothers Against Violence, Fathers Against Violence and Carisma Ev w14 9 Cheshire Police Authority Ev w15 10 Councillor Paulette A Hamilton, Handsworth wood ward Ev w16 11 Amnesty International UK and Omega Research Foundation Ev w19 12 World of Hope Ev w22 13 Cambridgeshire Constabulary Ev w25 14 Airwave Ev w29 15 Association of British Insurers Ev w31 16 Greenwich Action for Voluntary Services Submission Ev w33 17 Atmospherix Change Agency Ev w35 18 Liberty Ev w36 19 Birmingham City Council Ev w43 20 StopWatch policy group Ev w45 21 Youth members of StopWatch Ev w48 22 Southwark Council Ev w49 23 Zero Meridian (London chapter) of the National Association of Seadogs Ev w51 24 Croydon Xpress Ev w54 25 City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council Ev w56 26 Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management Ev w62 27 Derby West Indian Community Association Ev w66 28 Association of Police Authorities Ev w67 29 Stafford Scott Ev w71 30 British Insurance Brokers’ Association Ev w75 31 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People UK Ev w77 32 Sarah Hamilton Ev w77 33 E-ngage Development Ltd Ev w79 34 Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Ltd Ev w79 35 Kickz Ev w80: 81 36 London Criminal Justice Partnership Ev w81: 82 37 Police Federation of England and Wales Ev w82 cobber Pack: U PL: CWE1 [SO] Processed: [21-12-2011 09:21] Job: 015841 Unit: PG01 Home Affairs Committee: Evidence Ev w1 Written evidence Written evidence submitted by Tony Baldry MP I am writing further to the Chair of the Select Committee’s letter to Parliamentary colleagues inviting them to submit evidence relating to the Select Committee’s inquiry. I enclose a copy of a letter that I have sent to the Chief Constable of the Thames Valley—Sara Thornton (Annex 1)—together with an article from the Banbury Guardian.1 I hope that my letter to the Chief Constable is self-explanatory. I appreciate that the Select Committee is going to have to be considering a whole number of aspects of the Policing and Police’s response to the recent public disorder. However, I hope the Select Committee will pay particular regard to the impact of social networking and, in particular, the use of Facebook. It is extremely alarming that a 14 year old boy using Facebook can, within a very short space of time, generate an instant crowd that all too easily turns into a mob and in this case did cause some criminal damage and almost certainly would have caused more serious criminal damage if it hadn’t been for the speedy intervention of the Thames Valley Police locally. 26 August 2011 Annex 1 Firstly, on behalf of my constituents, I should like to thank the Thames Valley Police and all the Thames Valley Police Officers for all that they were doing both nationally and locally during the recent disturbances and I would particularly like to thank Inspectors Steve Duffy and Neville Clayton for helping ensure that matters didn’t get out of hand in Banbury. I enclose a copy of the front page of last week’s Banbury Guardian, which I think clearly highlights a new phenomenon in terms of maintaining public order and that is of the exploitative use of social media and social networking sites. In my experience from the time that I was practising on the Oxford/Midlands circuit, serious public order offences such as affray were invariably alcohol based punch-ups between large numbers of youths—usually of different factions (punks versus skinheads etc)—which were not necessarily pre-planned but which had simply got completely out of hand. It is a crazy situation where any 14 year old boy is now able to use social networking sites to incite and organise a public disorder. Clearly that is an offence and I see that the Courts are already imposing deterrent sentences of four years’ imprisonment in similar cases but I suspect that every Member of Parliament in due course would be interested in ACPOs’ views on whether there is any specific action or powers that need to be given to the Police technically to cause social networking sites, which may be reasonably thought to be inciting of a criminal offence, to be taken down. As we both know, it is not always easy to mobilise significant numbers of Police Officers at “short notice”. Policing public order has largely been based on the ability to reasonably predict events on the basis of information or intelligence but unchecked and uncontrolled abuse of social networking can clearly easily lead to “mob rule” not just in terms of mindless public order riots in town centres but one could well imagine a situation whereby local residents, either rightly or wrongly, believe someone living in the neighbourhood was a “paedophile” or that they decided to take the law into their hands for some other reason and used social networking to mobilise a large number of people at a particular place at a particular time and I think it is clear that people acting in a crowd take on the mores of a mob and people in a crowd will very often do things that they would never dream of doing as a single individual. 1 Not published. cobber Pack: U PL: CWE1 [E] Processed: [21-12-2011 09:21] Job: 015841 Unit: PG01 Ev w2 Home Affairs Committee: Evidence Written evidence submitted by Dr Roger Patrick The recent riots in England appear to be linked to a rise in gang related criminal activity. The evidence presented suggests that the impact of Performance Management on Policing in the UK has been, and still is, an obstacle to the effective implementation of strategies to counter this threat to civil society. The police imperative to improve overall performance in relation to national and force wide priorities has led to an under- investment in long term strategies designed to respond to gang related activity. In some cases this has resulted in officers being re-deployed from deprived areas to more affluent neighbourhoods. 1. The evidence presented is based on a study of the impact of Performance Management on Policing over the past decade. Some of the findings, in particular the tendency to improve performance by concentrating resources on activities which are the subject of performance indicators, may be pertinent to your inquiry. 2. Investing resources to curtail the activities of criminal gangs appears a poor investment in such an environment. I refer to this phenomenon as “skewing”, encapsulated by the term “what gets measured gets done”. This type of activity falls under the general heading of “gaming” and the research concluded that police forces were improving their overall performance by employing such tactics. A detailed survey of the re-organisation of the West Midlands Police in 1997 highlighted how this force systematically re-deployed officers from inner city areas to more affluent suburbs (Patrick 2004). Whilst this evidence may be somewhat dated the methodology of super-imposing police numbers before and after the re-organisation on geographical maps showing levels of deprivation is sound.