AS TENSIONS between police and the British government escalated yesterday over their responses to recent rioting, a Guardian/ICM poll indicated that voters back the police rather than the prime minister over the handling of the crisis.
The poll shows that under a third of voters think Mr Cameron has done a good job – while overall trust in the police’s fairness remains strong.
The strained relations emerged following remarks by a senior policeman that the interventions of ministers were an “irrelevance” when it came to quelling the violence. Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, refused to allow ministers take credit for the surge in police numbers in London and other cities that stopped the violence. He rubbished suggestions that politicians acted decisively in returning from holiday to deal with the trouble.
“The fact that politicians chose to come back is an irrelevance in terms of the tactics that were by then developing,” he told the BBC.
“The more robust policing tactics you saw were not a function of political interference; they were a function of the numbers being available to allow the chief constables to change their tactics.”
British prime minister David Cameron criticised the response in the House of Commons on Wednesday, saying that police acted as if the violence was a public order issue and not a criminal one.
Sir Hugh, a former PSNI chief constable, and a favourite for the vacant Metropolitan Police chief constable position, responded to the criticism in equally trenchant terms. He said the decision to cancel all police leave was taken by the police themselves and not by the home secretary Theresa May.
Relationships between the police and the government are already strained because of proposals to cut 30,000 from police numbers by 2015 and plans to impose an elected commissioner on each UK police force.
The riots began as a result of the shooting dead of a black man, Mark Duggan, in Tottenham, north London, nine days ago.
The independent police complaints commission, which is investigating his killing, apologised yesterday for giving the impression that Duggan (29) had fired at police before he was shot dead.
It said it had “verbally led” journalists to believe that he had fired at police, based on early information that an officer was in hospital. Ballistic tests found a bullet that lodged itself in one officer’s radio was police issue. “Any reference to an exchange of shots was not correct and did not feature in any of our formal statements, although an officer was taken to hospital after the incident,” the body said.
The number of people killed in the riots rose to five in the early hours of yesterday morning when a pensioner who confronted arsonists outside his home in Ealing, west London, died.
Richard Mannington Bowes (68) was on life support for four days after suffering head injuries. A 22-year-old man was arrested in connection with his murder yesterday.
An inquest into the deaths of three Asian men who were killed in a hit-and-run incident in Birmingham during the worst of the rioting was opened and adjourned yesterday and a large peace rally is scheduled to be held in the city tomorrow. Police across the UK have arrested 1,600 people and hundreds have already appeared in court.
It has become apparent that those involved in the riots were not all young or from underprivileged communities.
It include an “Olympic ambassador”, who was turned in by her own mother; a teenage undergraduate from a wealthy family; a serving soldier; and an electrical engineering student who received a six-month prison sentence for stealing water from a Lidl store.
The mood among the political classes is slowly changing from condemnation of the violence to seeking an understanding of what motivated so many people to trash their own communities.
Labour leader Ed Miliband said his party bore some of the responsibilities for some of the moral failings that led to the riots. “We did better at rebuilding the fabric of our country than the ethic of our country,” he said. “There’s a debate some people are starting: is it culture, is it poverty and lack of opportunity? It’s probably both.”
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said he was particularly perturbed by the fact that so many young teenagers were involved.
“We need to make sure we give people opportunities . . . that will create a sense of responsibility that was so absent in these horrific events over the last couple of days,” he said.