British police hit out at plans to hire US crime gang expert

BRITISH police chiefs yesterday hit back at Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to enlist a US crime expert after last week’s riots, as the conservative leader vowed “zero tolerance” against street violence.

Cameron, criticised by some in his party as being too liberal on crime and punishment, has taken a tough stance after four nights of looting and arson hit cities across England.

“We haven’t talked the language of zero tolerance enough, but the message is getting through,” Cameron said in an interview in the Sunday Telegraph.

The prime minister, who has suggested the initial police response to the riots was too timid, has enlisted former New York, Los Angeles and Boston police chief William Bratton to advise his coalition on how to tackle street gangs, which he blamed for much of the violence. But senior police officers, who have criticised the Conservative-led coalition’s plans for police cuts, have reacted sceptically to the plan. “I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them,” Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Independent Sunday.

“It seems to me, if you’ve got 400 gangs, then you’re not being very effective. If you look at the style of policing in the States, and their levels of violence, they are so fundamentally different from here,” said Orde, a front-runner for the role of London police chief.

Cameron has dismissed suggestions that political and economic grievances lay behind the violence which killed five people, calling it “criminality pure and simple”. More than 2,800 people have been arrested and courts have worked around the clock and during the weekend to clear a third of those cases.

The riots have shocked Britons, many of whom are still asking why the mass disturbances occurred, and were allowed to spread so quickly from London to other major English cities with arsonists and looters seemingly taking over many streets with ease.

A ComRes poll for the Independent Sunday and Sunday Mirror newspapers found only 29% of voters thought Cameron and his government had handled the riots well, while 48% were dissatisfied.

The mass disturbances, the worst in decades, began in Tottenham, after a demonstration against the police shooting of a suspect.

Most offenders are unemployed young men, though they have included a millionaire’s daughter, a charity worker, a journalism student and a soldier.

The Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner, have been more restrained in their comments, and deputy leader Simon Hughes, writing in the Observer, advised against “knee-jerk solutions including over-hasty moves to change the social contract and approaches to sentences.”

Planned police cuts include reducing the national police budget by 20%, with the loss of about 16,000 officers, as the government deals with a record budget deficit. Theresa May, the interior minister, said the planned cuts would go ahead. She told Sky News: “I know it is possible to make cuts in police budgets without affecting their ability to do the job the public want them to do.”

Finance minister George Osborne told BBC Saturday that throwing money at the problem was not the answer, saying the country needed to tackle deep-seated social problems. The ComRes poll showed 70% of people thought the cuts should be immediately reversed.