iQotD

[avevale_intelligencer]

"Rioting is Nature's way of telling a government that it's not doing its job properly." --H. Sacristan

Of course that is taking the whole thing far too lightly, and I do not want anyone to think I am not desperately unhappy and worried about my friends and about all innocent bystanders who will suffer from this. Please, everyone, be careful, especially when travelling.

Comments

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"go round and arrest them in the morning when they have much less chance of escape is a lovely humane idea, but it relies too much on the hooligans going quietly home, and not returning day after day to set fire to different shops."

Not quite. It relies on them going to a location which the Police can trace them to. Tracing people *who have stopped moving* (temporarily, of course) is a hell of a lot easier (within a city such as London or Birmingham) than chasing kids who are on foot and fueled by adrenaline, through a labyrinth of city streets and back-alleys, in the dark, at the same time as trying to defend the nearby citizens from the six other gangs who are operating at the same time in the same general area.

An interview with a Manchester shopkeeper on BBC News tonight illustrates the point: In one evening he's lost his entire business. When asked if he's worried about the nights to come, he says "not really, I've got nothing left to lose now". But when asked about the police, he says "they've been marvellous, when they were here. The problem is there's just not enough of them to contain the problem."

Another interviewee was a lot more angry, but again her complaint about the police was simply that they weren't where she needed them to be when it mattered, which again is simply down to lack of numbers.

And this, IMHO, has been the problem with the approach to policing in this country over the last 20 years or more: The trend has steadily been towards fewer police, with more powers. The result is an overstretched and overstressed force, far too likely to abuse the excessive powers they now hold. Bring back the days of a humble bobby (armed with just a notebook and truncheon and an impeccable sense of customer service) on every corner, I say! =:o}

(Oh the irony: I've just been listening to a recent radio adaptation of one of the very earliest "Dixon of Dock Green" scripts, written in the halcyon days of the 1950s, when a delivery of "naughty postcards" was all it took to betray the operation of a (by definition - in those days - illegal) pornographer.)