ARMING FOR THE NEXT RIOT

Sir Kenneth Newman has just announced his plans both the public and his own men behind him

THE first policeman to talk to me about his memories of the Broadwater Farm riot said it was a pity, really, that the mutilation of PC Blakelock's corpse had been inter- rupted: 'It is a dreadful thing to say, I know. But they were going to put his head on a stake, and parade it round the estate; and if they'd done that, then everyone would have known what we are up against.'

The Commissioner's Public Order Re- view, published last week by Scotland Yard as the rioting season began, shows some of the conclusions Sir Kenneth Newman has d. rawn. The timing of their announcement In The House of Commons by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was a deliberate ,arning to rioters. But it is at least as important, when judging what will happen next time (and the one thing on which everyone is agreed is that there will be a next time) to discover the conclusions that were drawn by the men in the front line. They will be there again, and on their behaviour will ultimately depend the num- ber of casualties. There simply are not enough policemen in London to ensure that only the most highly trained are used to break up riots. Though a programme of shield-training, as the use of riot gear is known, is well under way, this is only the first level of specialisa- tion in the necessary skills. The long Shields and the flame-proof overalls make impressive defensive weapons: you can pour petrol on one of the overalls and set light to it without damaging the man within, though this demonstration is only performed on instructors, while the pers- Pex shields, of which the tops slope for- wards to deflect the hot blast of a petrol bomb away from the bearer's face, will resist most missiles as well. But they are extremely heavy; to run with them is exhausting even in training, let alone after ten or 20 hours of continuous duty. It is too much to expect tired and frightened men to laden a disciplined baton charge when laden with such equipment. For offensive work, more highly trained Zen are needed, with lighter and more wieldy weapons; round shields and the new, longer truncheons. The old SPG was the first attempt at such a force, formed in response to what are now only half- remembered, the all-white mod and rocker riots of the Sixties. There were problems when young men were trained exhaustively to fight, and then confined in Transit vans for 90 per cent of their working days; an officer who had learnt his trade before policemen were meant to talk like civil servants in public explained that: 'They used to come out of those vans ready to fight the fucking world, Andrew. Don't laugh, they were ready to fight the fucking world.'

Which will do for an epitaph on Blair Peach. The other problem with the SPG, which has contributed to its dissolution, is that it was a centrally stationed force. One of the aims of the present administration at the Yard has been to devolve power and manpower to the eight 'Areas' into which the latest reorganisation (the third in ten years) of the Met has divided London. This should mean more policemen on the streets — who are certainly needed, if only to reassure the public, when 14 square miles of London, in which perhaps 100,000 crimes a year are registered, are patrolled by between ten and 15 policemen at any one time. Hence the SPG is to be merged with the locally controlled 'District Sup- port Units'.

These `DSUs' provide a much more flexible reserve of very highly trained men. I have been to Wapping with four or five different units this spring, while resear- ching a book on the police in East London. Though everyone in riot gear may seem the same from the outside, a van full of ordinary, shield-trained policemen is loud with complaints of boredom and Met catering. The DSU were quietly spoken, and read Private Eye, or gossiped. Since they had spent the first two hours of their shift working off animal high spirits in a gymnasium, their van smelt of aftershave, where the other had smelt of farts. Their inspector explained that sport and exercise constituted his method of keeping a moral ascendancy over his men: to be an inspec- tor is a nervous rank. You may rise there by examination, but promotion beyond requires that you please your superiors as well. It is a commonplace that to be a young PC now requires a flexibility and skill which the older ones, who joined when society was, or seemed, more homogeneous, never needed; but to be a senior officer when the Commissioner is trying to change 'the whole culture of the organisation' must be even more worrying.

Some -- not all — of the DSUs consti- tute the 'Commissioner's reserve' constant- ly available at 20 minutes' notice to deal with trouble anywhere in London as it may break out. But since they are locally controlled, there is much for them to do even between riots. Some are used on football grounds; in the rougher parts of the East End they are stationed outside the dance halls at closing time, when the young men come out to fight.

This activity does something to diminish the danger of brutal or merely insensitive policing that everyone — including other policemen — associate with vans. The `carriers' are bare, functional, and un- pleasant. To ride in these, with their long periods of boredom and discomfort inter- rupted only by sudden anti-climaxes, is to understand how surprising it is that more policemen do not go sour. There is a special quality of frustration in these car- riers, which arises from the fact that policemen like their jobs. They will toler- ate inaction if that is what the situation calls for: most of their work at a football match is simply to stand around and be conspicuous. That may not be exciting, but it is good police work. In a carrier, on the other hand, you spend much time doing nothing, yet knowing there are things you should be doing. London is full of emergencies: the radio is tuned to Scotland Yard's 999 call broadcasts, and these rep- resent only a fraction of the potential 999 calls; yet any given carrier is almost certain to be doing nothing at any given time.

Integrating the DSUs into day-to-day crowd control work, as is now being done, gives them planty of non-violent contract with the public. All but a very few of the policemen I have met over the last four months have wanted to be liked and understood far more urgently than most of the people a journalist meets. This trait is also suggested by the psychological re- search which finds almost all policemen are extrovert. Either way, they would rather talk to people than hit them over the head. And though it is often said that the policeman in riot gear will have enormous difficulties in learning to function as a friendly neighbourhood bobby again, this seems to me the reverse of the truth. It is the friendly neighbourhood bobby, whose whole style of work is designed to avoid violence, who cannot adjust to the riot gear. When the cordon breaks, he will panic; and it is frightened policemen who hit people.

Reading between the lines of the Public Order Review's description of the Broadwater Farm riot, it may be seen that the senior officers present were at least as worried by the prospect of such a loss of control over their own men as they were anxious to protect the shopping centres of Wood Green and Tottenham from looting. Perhaps this overestimates the extent to which they were in control of what was happening; most policemen see their job as passive and reactive. They are trying `to keep the lid on', no more. Even the flat language in which they describe chaos has a purpose in that it suggests a measure of control. You get into a `situation': in other words someone is going to be injured. If the 'situation' goes wrong, you have an incident', and in the exhausting, howling, banging chaos of an 'incident', you will learn what the training has been worth.

But at Broadwater Farm 'the wheel came off'. The external noise and what seems to have been a collapse of radio discipline made communications unusable: the control room at Wood Green, a mile to the west, was convinced that the rioters' purpose was to get at the shopping centres around (all that was looted on the estate were two Indian-owned shops) and did not for several hours realise how serious was the situation at Broadwater Farm. The senior officers at the front were strangers to each other, and to the men they com- manded, which in an organisation as per- sonal as the Met makes a great difference.

All this put an enormous strain on the men in the front line: they bore it well, but walking among the waiting police who surrounded the estate the following day, it was apparent from their mood that the next time there was a riot, it would not be policemen who were killed. No doubt this was also clear to potential rioters — but that is not the sort of deterrence and prevention which the Commissioner is trying to cultivate. One might say that the most serious damage done at Broadwater Farm was inflicted on the trust of PCs for their supervising officers. It is foolish to talk of a 'crisis of morale': policemen love their jobs — otherwise they couldn't bear the strain — and they love grumbling, too. But the astonishing bitterness of Woman Police Sergeant Meynell's report found many sympathetic listerners. She was in charge of the home beats on the estate before the riot, and the burden of her detailed complaints was that she was forced by the indifference and arrogance of her superiors to endanger the lives of the ten PCs working under her, and to tolerate the emergence of the central blocks of the estate as a de facto `no go area'.

So the crucial sections the Public Order Review are the ones which seem most boring from the outside; not the new weapons, but the thought behind them. The systematic training of selected senior officers in groups matters, because it means that they will know each other next time, when they must work together. So, too, does the adoption of a new and simplified system of radio control, in which the call-signs identify the function, rather than the physical location or rank, • of commanding officers. This system has been tested at Wapping, where it works well.

The violence at Wapping is not of course comparable in intensity or duration to that of a full-scale riot. It is frightening enough at times, but no petrol bombs have been used on the Highway yet, though at least one TNT lorry has been thus attacked in a street some distance away. Yet the prob- lems of using and controlling large num- bers of policemen drawn from quite diffe- rent duties all over London are the same. The need to devise a structure of command which will transmit orders and intelligence through quite different channels from those which the normal, geographically based organisation uses, is common both to riots and to sustained operations like Wapping. Nor is it a need which ever arose before.

In the same way, the sorting and dis- semination of information about potential riots has now been much better organised, so that a weekly summary of potentially dangerous incidents now circulates to ev- ery room in which the daily shifts are briefed.

The difficulty with these organisational changes is that they must be understood if they are to work, and they coincide with so many others which tend to diminish and make more difficult the ordinary role of the police. There really is very little which the police, and even more police, can do about crime figures on their own. Rioters are much easier to put down than burglars.

Sir Kenneth Newman is attempting a very difficult thing: he is trying to persuade the public that the police should have more powers, while at the same time reorganis- ing his force so that it can come to terms with the fact that its powers will never be sufficient to do all the work which a good policeman sees waiting for him every morning. In this he has not been wholly successful. There is, since the murder of PC Blakelock, a wide public acceptance of the idea of using plastic bullets. There have long been officers trained in their use. But the chattering classes' acceptance of the police, on which in the last resort their capacity to use force depends, is still conditional.

Within the force there is still consider- able resentment of the change, which the Commissioner is trying to make. This is partly a result of innate police conservat- ism, and of a corresponding distrust of anyone who claims to have a blueprint.

More importantly, it is because the Com- missioner's changes of style and organisa- tion coincide with larger ones over which he has little control, but which are consi- dered by the lower ranks to be part of the same process. Their cumulative effect was explained, one thoughtful evening, by a successful (and I would say good) police- man: 'We used to have a force where some coppers were bent, and a lot weren't. But everyone what needed nicking got nicked — and the public trusted us. Now we've got a force that's one hundred per cent straight. We can't nick anybody — and nobody gives us the time of day. Think about it.'

The man who said that is assiduous and successful in the cultivation of his local communities. Yet he would quite under- stand why 'community policing' seems to the lower ranks a synonym for racial discrimination, whereby white drug dealers may be harrassed as much as the law allows, while black ones must be left to enjoy their 'culture' — a point made in Sergeant Meynell's report. Perhaps the Commissioner's most serious problem where public order is concerned is that, while he knows that weapons are only effective in proportion to the -thought behind their use, he has not yet found a language to explain his thoughts to the men who hold the truncheons.