The Riots

David T C Davies Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Barwell]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Decisions on individual sentences must be for judges and magistrates. It is reasonable for us as Members of Parliament to reflect in generality the views of our constituents, but the individual decisions must remain with judges and magistrates.

I wish to comment on some figures from my borough commander about the impact on crime resulting from that sentencing approach. If we compare Croydon in the period of 17 July to 14 August—including the day when the riots took place—with the period of 15 August to 11 September, property crime is well down, as we would expect because a huge number of property offences were committed on 8 August, but violent crime is down by more than 20%. That seems to show clearly that we are offered a false choice on crime and punishment, between those who argue for a tough punishment and that prison works and those who say that it and rehabilitation do not work and that people come out and reoffend. It seems to me that both those things are true: removing dangerous, violent people from the streets gives a break to the law-abiding and leads to a reduction in crime, but we must also reform our prisons so that they do a more effective job of rehabilitating people and changing their pattern of behaviour.

Finally, I want to turn to some of the underlying issues and come back to the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). It is important that Government and Opposition politicians reflect on some of their long-held views. When I listened to the statement and the debate on 11 August, some argued that the disorder was purely a matter of criminality and moral failing, while others argued that it was all about inequality and unfairness in society. It seems to me, again, that both arguments have some merit.

Clearly, there are issues about parenting and a lack of fathers. As a man, I certainly feel that there is a real role for making the case for the responsibility that men have, if they were present when the child was conceived, for the rest of that child’s life.

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I need to make a little more progress, because I am conscious of time.

Clearly, we need to be careful about generalising. Several of my friends were brought up by single mums who did a great job, so we must not demonise any class of parents. There is, however, an issue about a lack of fathers and definitely an issue about people witnessing or experiencing violence at home. The WAVE Trust report in 2005 pointed that out strongly. There is a great community group in Croydon called Lives Not Knives, which works with ex-gang members, and I sat in one of its seminars about a month before the riots and listened to four ex-gang members, all of whom had either personally experienced or witnessed traumatic violence at a young age. There is a clear link between that and violent conduct later in life. I welcome what the Government are doing to address problem families and community budgeting. More could be done to promote fostering and adoption to take young people out of the care system, and clearly we must address educational disadvantage, exclusion and truancy.

I shall end by mentioning three issues to which I do not have a solution, but are relevant to the debate. On youth unemployment I obtained figures from the Library showing the trend in general unemployment versus youth unemployment over the past 20 years under Governments of all political complexions. In 1992, youth unemployment was two thirds higher than general unemployment. By 1997, it was double general unemployment; by 2001, it was 140% of the general unemployment rate; and in 2005, it was 165% of the general unemployment rate. We must address the other factors that are making it much harder for young people to find work in our society, relative to the general population.

We must also address the culture of materialism in society, which is one factor behind the behaviour we saw. It is clear from the situation in Croydon that there is an inextricable link between gang culture and the drugs trade. We must address the issue of how we deal with illegal drug use in our country.

I do not pretend to have answers to all the problems, but the emerging evidence of what happened throughout the country in early August has clear lessons for public policy. I look forward to hearing the contributions from other hon. Members.

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[Mr Mark Field]

rose—

[David T. C. Davies]

rose—

[Mr Raynsford]

I see that I am not succeeding. Will hon. Members please accept that I wish to be brief? I do not want to take up too much time because other hon. Members want to contribute. I have said as much as I wish to on that particular subject, and I will move on because I have other points to stress.

As I said, there was no indication to suggest that the rioters came from one particular location. However, the hon. Member for Croydon Central, and his colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Malcolm Wicks), might be amused at one potentially misleading piece of evidence that I gathered quite early on. I came back from my holiday on 9 August, and one of the first things I did was ask my borough commander for evidence of who was responsible for the disturbances and where they came from. Having checked the people in the cells in Woolwich, he told me that a disproportionate number appeared to come from Croydon. There is a simple explanation for that. Croydon is not full of criminals who converged on Woolwich; rather, their presence reflects the fact that the riots in Croydon occurred earlier in the evening. Once the cells in Croydon were full, the police—quite properly, given Met procedures—used custody suites in neighbouring areas, and cells in Woolwich were used to accommodate a number of people from Croydon.

That is an important lesson in the potential misuse of statistics, and I cite it for that reason. One should be careful to dig down beyond initial, superficial statistics, and understand what lies behind them. I hope that the hon. Member for Croydon Central will forgive me for casting that aspersion on his constituents.

Let me turn to the immediate response to the riots. The situation on Tuesday 9 August was transformed by the deployment of large numbers of police officers in Woolwich and the other parts of the capital affected, and in other areas of the country. Throughout the day, I was bombarded with texts predicting all sorts of problems and threats to various places. I was told that the O2 Centre and Greenwich park were to be attacked, and that various other landmarks in the area would be targeted. That was a measure of the electronic media world in which we live; communications are fast and such rumours can spread quickly. However, although the rumour mill was working overtime, in reality none of those places was trashed or attacked. The presence of large numbers of police completely transformed the situation, and on 9 August, and on subsequent days, there was calm in London. It was not calm elsewhere, and I am aware of problems in other cities, but in London the deployment of the 16,000 police officers, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, had the crucial impact of deterring further trouble. I hope that the review being conducted by the Metropolitan police will reflect on that and make appropriate recommendations.

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[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman is exactly right. With great sadness, I say that, for the first time in many years, there is a strong sense of “them and us” in communities such as the one I represent. It seems that the Metropolitan police is unable not to close ranks or not see briefings on a particular incident filter out before the facts have been properly and independently assessed. Of course, for those who were looking on at the incident—this was in a place with busy traffic, and many people were in the local area—the account that they picked up in the initial radio and television broadcasts and the papers the next day did not accord with what they themselves had seen. Immediately, in the hours that followed, there was a trust deficit and a breakdown of the sense of policing by consent, whereby the community and the police work side by side and recognise that, in any organisation, things can and do go wrong, and individuals can make the wrong judgment. Of course, I do not pass judgment on what happened.

Then we had the Independent Police Complaints Commission, which has sought to apologise for its press office briefing in which it was said that Mark Duggan had fired a gun. It turned out that that statement was wholly premature and wholly untrue. My community needs to believe in the IPCC after the catastrophe that was the Police Complaints Authority. Mistakes such as that statement are catastrophic for that trust.

All of us who are parents know that feeling when our children leave the house: we have this paranoid sense that something is going to go wrong and we think: “They are not going to come back. Somebody is going to knock on my door.” Every parent who experiences the death of a child deserves a better service. The fact that things did not happen in the appropriate way is surely something that shames us all. This family found themselves stuck in the middle. The local police say, “It is not our responsibility. We have to back off now.” The national organisation says, “Is this our responsibility? Are we meant to do this?” The following day, after the liaison has not gone appropriately, people find out from the television what has happened, and rumours begin to circulate because of a disjunction between what communities saw and what is being briefed and said. There is a peaceful protest outside the police station, which is not unusual in the context of my constituency and other constituencies in London when someone dies following police contact. The appropriate senior officer is not there. It takes some time to get someone there, then answers are not forthcoming in the way the family expect and want. We know what happens as a consequence.

The Metropolitan police understand that there must be an inquiry on the matter to see what led up to the riots. The IPCC is also inquiring into those initial few hours and what role they played. The consequence of the actions has been huge.

I, too, have sat with the deputy borough commander and looked at the footage of what took place in Tottenham on that night—that was at my request. The scenes that I saw were some of the most depressing I have ever witnessed. I have sat with families who have been victims of knife crimes and I have done some inquest cases that involved some horrific things, but the scenes that I saw were depressing. I expected to see anger and frustration on the faces of some of those who were attacking Tottenham high road, but instead I saw joy and happiness. That is why it was so depressing.

I was categorical in my condemnation of what we saw in Tottenham on that Saturday night and Sunday morning. There can be no excuse whatever for the large-scale arson that we saw in London. The fact that no one is dead as a consequence is truly amazing. We saw 56 properties burn to the ground and 50 families lost their homes and all their possessions. Young children are still experiencing nightmares as a consequence of what happened and independent shopkeepers, the vast majority of whom have migrated to this country, again face financial ruin as a consequence of riots. That is totally unacceptable. People who get up every single day to go to work had their businesses burned to the ground. I caution those who rush to make excuses for this kind of behaviour because it is wholly unacceptable and we must remain firm on the choice that people have to make.

We had a debate earlier this week about some of the underlying causes of gun violence. I remember a difficult period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when young people such as me had a choice about whether to get caught up with the mob. I made my choice back then and I stand by it now. I will not, 25 years later, change my mind about the difference between right and wrong when it leads to such loss for ordinary, decent, hard-working people. The attack on the community and the police was ferocious. I saw scenes on the video that looked a bit like Grand Theft Auto. Young people were lining up trolleys to barricade themselves away from the police. Extinguishers were thrown at the police and a gun was pulled on them. We saw people casually setting fire to buildings.

When I was rung by the police on the Saturday evening and told that a car was burning outside the police station, my first response was to wonder why the car was left in the way that it was by the police. I then hoped that the fire would be put out quickly. A second car was set on fire, then a bus was set alight. I wondered why the initial policing was not there, because Spurs were playing and there was a huge police presence in the area.

What took place across the rest of the country in the days ahead was mirrored in the London borough of Haringey. The Tottenham retail park was looted for hours and no police were present. When the manager of Comet showed me the photographs and the CCTV footage of what took place, it was clear that there were more people in his shop that night than are ever there during the day. Although the lights were off, it was like Christmas day because the lights from people’s mobile phones could be seen. People were looking for goods and helping themselves. The place had nothing left in it by morning, and that is one of the biggest and most successful Comets in the country. We do not need to talk about JD Sports; that had the same image in the Tottenham retail area. Wood Green, one of our important shopping areas in north London, was totally ransacked for hours and hours.

What happens when good, hard-working people who live in those areas see no policing? Bad news is the consequence. Young teenagers who may never have been involved with the police get caught up. The same is true of those who are in their 20s, which was the profile of many of those who were arrested. This cannot be the formula for proper policing by consent. As MP for Tottenham, I understand the consequences and issues of that night. I have to raise million of pounds to regenerate the area. Who will provide that money?

I am pleased, of course, that the Mayor of London has allocated initial funds for the riot area, but the irony is that the two areas of London that were bidding to become enterprise zones were Croydon and Tottenham. The reason that we spent most of last year fighting each other to get an enterprise zone, and demanding of the Mayor that we get one, is that the scale of regeneration necessary in Tottenham, even before the riots, was on a par with that in other parts of the country that have seen far greater regeneration. I am talking about Salford and parts of Manchester, parts of Birmingham and the Olympic area. Tottenham will need a far bigger story than the neighbourhood renewal that is being proposed. I believe that the community in Tottenham deserves that regeneration. We need jobs. I need the other half of the BBC. I need some major back-office Departments or quangos. Tottenham deserves that, Edmonton deserves it and the wider north-east London area deserves it. I hope that the community will now get it.

[Katy Clark in the Chair]

There has been some suggestion that if Spurs stay in the local area and renew their ground, that will be enough. Of course it will not be enough. I want Spurs to stay in the area, but a football club cannot possibly be the anchor of regeneration in an area that is struggling so much, such as Tottenham. There are big questions about the policing, and therefore about what the regeneration response will be as a result of the damage that was caused.

I want to raise a couple of other issues in relation to the broader issue of policing with consent. The first is that I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to police with consent if the police do not reflect and look like the community that they serve. I hope that hon. Members will understand that I am not talking now in a sort of old-fashioned, socialist, equal opportunity kind of way. I am talking about pragmatic policing and how to police a busy urban area. It cannot be acceptable that, despite the advances that have been made, we have 32,441 police officers in the Met and only 867 of them are from a black or black British background. Just 4.7% of the police officers in the country are from ethnic minorities.

We all know London and we all recognise that there are boroughs in London, such as my own, where more than half the people in the community are from an ethnic minority background. If we are not to walk down the road that America has walked down—with armed police—and if we are to maintain our model of policing with consent, what does that consent really feel and look like? And how can we accelerate this process? It will take a lot more than good will and fine rhetoric. It will take some serious, positive action to get a move on with the kind of numbers that we now need if we are to protect the integrity of a police force that does not routinely carry guns.

[David T. C. Davies]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. It might surprise him to know that a lot of police officers—maybe even the vast majority—would thoroughly agree with him on that point and would desperately like to see black and Asian members of the police force, as I would myself, but some of the responsibility lies not with the police, who have thrown open their arms and said that they want this change, but with leading and influential members of the black community in parts of London. We need to encourage them to go out and say, “The police force would welcome your application and it really wants you to join,” because that is the reality. The police feel that they are not getting support from those influential members of the black community. I hope that we will get it soon.

[Mr Lammy]

This debate is rather circular, because the hon. Gentleman will understand that the kind of summer that we have had and the run-up to it have not done a great deal to encourage the very young people I need to join the police force to go out and do so. Nevertheless, I lay bare the scale of the problem.

Many of us here today will have landed in cities in America, looked at the police force and the local community, and thought, “Wow! I wish we had that here!” If it can be done on the streets of New York, it can be done here. That is what we need to learn from Bill Bratton, who has come to town. The same thing must be done here or I am afraid that our whole policing model will become very hard to maintain.

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[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

I declare an interest as a serving special constable with the British Transport police. Because of the time and my own interest in policing, I want to frame my comments around that.

I congratulate hon. Members on both sides of the House. The debate has been thoughtful and has done away with a lot of the generalisations that were made at the time. For example, I cannot tell the House how much I welcome the fact that nobody has talked about single-parent mothers. If there is one thing that I personally loathe, it is the demonisation of single-parent mothers in generalised fashion. Instead, we have heard, rightly, about the problems of families. We have heard about the issue of absent fathers: it takes two people to create a child, and if one of them is absent it is often the father, so if we are going to demonise anyone let us start with them rather than the mothers. Thank heavens we seem to have moved on from demonising the mothers.

I found the speech of the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) interesting, and I was surprised how much I agreed with much of what he said, although I see things from rather a different perspective: to me, the issue was not a race one at all. In following the riots on the television and, on one night, with a mobile support unit, they did not come over to me as a black issue—it was definitely a black and white issue. I did not notice anything with the Asian community, but perhaps that was a misconception. Certainly I and the police officers I worked with on the Wednesday night, when things had gone quiet, did not see it as a black issue at all, but as very much a problem for black and white communities. In fact, on that Wednesday night, our first response to a 999 call was to do with a group of white extremists—members of the English Defence League or something—in south London. As it happened, on the way to that call, because the Met had already taken over, we were diverted to deal with black youths in Lewisham. Perhaps that is my misconception though: I did not notice it in the press, but the right hon. Gentleman did, so I must take that on board.

The right hon. Gentleman made an important comment about getting more black and Asian people into the police force. I served for a while in Stockwell and have policed in Brixton. I was not comfortable with the fact that, often, the only police officers on duty were white, but a lot of police officers felt the same way. If we asked, the vast majority of police officers would answer that they really wanted black and Asian people to join the police—they really want the police to be representative because it makes their lives easier. I have spoken to black and Asian people—I spoke about this recently to a DJ who I imagine is quite influential—who say that they still do not trust the police. I gained an impression a little from the right hon. Gentleman that he felt the same way. May I just say this? In any organisation consisting of thousands of people, one will find some idiots—there is no doubt about it—but the vast majority of police officers are not racist and do not judge people by the colour of their skin.

Furthermore, in any station, police officers do not want to get into a situation in which half of them are sitting on one side and half on the other, whether because of skin colour, religion or something else. That is not a good idea for a police officer. If police officers have to press the orange “help urgently required” button, they do not want to think that half the other officers will not come because of things they have said or done in the police canteen earlier. Believe me, and I think that I speak for most officers, when I am in the police canteen I want all those officers to be my friend because I want to feel that they will come for me if I need their help, and vice versa. There is not as big an issue as perhaps there was 20 years, and I urge anyone in the black and Asian community, and in particular in the Black Police Association which had a policy of actively discouraging black and Asian people from joining the police, please, to get behind the police. If there are problems, black and Asian people can change them by joining the police and being part of the police service—it would help us all very much if that happened.

Various speakers have talked about stop and search. I have stopped and searched a lot of people over the past five or six years. It is embarrassing to stop and search people if they are not found with anything. I have always attempted to do stops and searches with as much courtesy as possible, and in an apologetic way, but there may be officers who have failed to do that, which is highly regrettable. They are making their jobs and those of their colleagues much harder if they fail to stop and search people courteously. I find it hard to believe comments by the right hon. Member for Tottenham that officers are no longer obliged to note down if someone gets injured in a stop and search. As well as a stop-and-search form, an officer is expected to fill in his personal notebook, and any officer who failed to put in a personal notebook that someone had received an injury would definitely be in breach of duty. That notebook is inspected by inspectors regularly.

Getting rid of stop and account was a good thing because, frankly, if someone came up to me and asked for the time and I answered them, technically they could demand a stop-and-account form, which led to all sorts of spurious cases in which officers were filling out long forms because people were trying to waste their time. There is no reason why police officers should not be able to go up and speak to someone. I agree, if they are going to undertake a search of any sort, that there ought to be some record, and there still is.

One of the great problems, however, is that it is quite difficult to stop and search people outside section 60 or section 44 areas. I can think of numerous instances, such as one in Liverpool street when I stopped someone for committing an offence for which I would not expect to carry out an arrest—begging, in this particular case. I then did a police national computer check and the person had a long record of carrying knives, violence and drugs. Under the circumstances, a quick stop and search might seem quite reasonable—not a strip search or an invasive search but an airport-style pat down of the people in question, just to check that at that moment they did not have a knife or drugs on them. Police officers, however, are not allowed to do so and, because of that, many people are walking around London with knives and guns because they know that it is actually difficult outside section 60 or section 44 areas for the police to stop them. The first time I was able to carry out a search—I will not go into the details, but the set of circumstances allowing me to do it were strange—I found a handgun on the 16-year-old involved, which made me think that there must be a lot of other 16-year-olds walking around with handguns who were pretty safe from being caught.

There has been some mention of tactics. One of the criticisms of the police has been that they did not get involved—when the car was on fire or whatever—at an early enough stage in the proceedings. Again, I look at it from the police officer’s point of view. They feel the pressure from politicians in rooms such as this. We have seen a number of riots over the past few years, and outbreaks of mass disturbance. After some riots, we have seen police officers criticised for their use of force. When people talk about robust policing, let us not mince our words: what we are talking about, at the extreme, is the police officers rapping their batons and walking forwards in an aggressive and forceful fashion. That is how they are trained to do it; they are trained to look forceful because at the moment that the baton comes out nothing less than an aggressive approach will work and remove people. The problem with that is that, as the police officers are walking forwards, they have their batons up and are getting ready to strike, and that is the photograph that will appear in the Sunday papers the next morning: the great British bobby looking out aggressively, probably shouting, and with a large metal baton ready to strike someone. The police officers might actually be quite scared as they are doing it; they do not really want to be in that position and they do not want to strike anyone but, once they are in that position, they do not really have much choice other than to go forwards. Yet, opening up the Sunday papers the next day, members of the public in suburbia and Members of Parliament see the picture and say, “This is an outrage! How dare the British police officer go for them! Look at how aggressive they were!” The police are trained to be aggressive: we spend two days a year training to look aggressive, because we hope that the aggression will put a person off and get them to move backwards. But no one sees that, just the photograph. Police officers therefore come under incredible criticism.

After one of the riots, a police officer was prosecuted for obeying exactly the instructions that we are all given: tell people to get back, if they do not go back, push them back, if they still keep coming forward, strike them with a baton. It does not matter whether the person in front is a large male or a small female—believe me, a lot of police officers have been assaulted by small females, and we are not trained to make that differentiation. If at all possible, we will protect ourselves from anyone, and rightly so.

[Tom Brake]

Is the hon. Gentleman at all reassured that, in relation to the policing of the riots, I am not aware of anyone having made any complaints about how they were handled?

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[David T. C. Davies]

We will wait and see what happens.

I want to make the point that the use of force in that way is a necessary option for the police, and one for which they have been criticised. The police then moved on to use what the press call kettling—the police call it something else—in which, basically, they keep a line and keep everyone within that line. They have been criticised for that, by Members—

[Malcolm Wicks (Croydon North) (Lab)]

Some of us want to talk about the riots.

[David T. C. Davies]

If the right hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will wait until the Chair has a problem. I am answering remarks made earlier on.

Police have been criticised for kettling, and the point I am making—this is why it is relevant to the riots—is that the criticisms of the police that they stood back and did nothing are totally unfair because Members of this House, in all parts, have in the past criticised police for using tactics that would have dealt with those riots in the first place.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham also spoke about specialist police forces coming into an area from outside. With the sorts of operations to which he referred, such as firearms units, the police officers would necessarily have to come in from outside, because of the level of training required to carry out such operations. I think it would be unwise to try to pass judgment on such a matter before a full report has taken place.

I congratulate hon. Members on the way in which they have addressed the matter. If I were them, however, I would think carefully about making general criticisms of the police without a full understanding of the pressures that they are under. I hope that all hon. Members in the House will do their best to encourage their communities, particularly black and Asian communities, to persuade their members to join the police, hopefully to ensure that such riots do not happen again.

[Katy Clark (in the Chair)]

Order. The wind-ups will start at 5.15.