(Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron, under
attack over his leadership during the rioting and looting that swept English
cities this week, has enlisted U.S. street crime expert William Bratton to
advise the government on handling gang violence.
"I'm being hired by the
British government to consult with them on the issue of gangs, gang violence
and gang intervention from the American experience and to offer some advice and
counsel on their experience," Bratton told Reuters in New York.
British police flooded the
streets again on Friday night to ensure weekend drinking does not reignite the
rioting that shocked Britons and sullied the country's image a year before it
hosts the Olympic Games.
Steve Kavanagh, deputy
assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said 16,000 officers,
instead of the usual 2,500, would remain on duty in London in their biggest
peacetime deployment -- a measure of the perceived public order challenge.
Other forces, including those
in Nottingham, Birmingham and Liverpool, said they would maintain a high level
of policing over the weekend, though they said they did not expect further
trouble after a couple of nights of quiet.
Even in normal times,
alcohol-fueled street disorder is common across urban Britain at weekends.
Cameron, describing the four
nights of looting, arson and violence, in which five people were killed, as
"criminality, pure and simple," said the initial police response had
been inadequate.
His remarks drew a sharp
reaction from the police service, which is facing deep cuts in numbers as part
of a government austerity drive aimed at cutting the large public debt.
"The fact that
politicians chose to come back is an irrelevance in terms of the tactics that
were by then developing," said Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief
Police Officers, referring to Cameron and other senior ministers who cut short
their holidays after two days of mayhem at home.
Bratton, credited with curbing
street crime as police chief in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, said he would
help the British government develop strategies on dealing with widespread
rioting and gang culture.
"The government is very
interested in trying to quickly come up with strategies and plans to dealwith
the issues and concerns identified during these riots," said Bratton, a
former police chief and now chairman of private security firm Kroll.
A Downing Street spokesman
said Cameron had spoken to Bratton on Friday, and that Bratton would join a
series of meetings in the autumn, working unpaid and in a personal capacity.
Bratton has worked with the British police at other times over the past 20
years.
Cameron himself has not
escaped criticism. A ComRes poll for The Independent newspaper showed that 54
percent of Britons say he failed to provide leadership early enough to control
the riots, while an ICM survey for The Guardian showed that only 30 percent
thought Cameron responded well to the riots and 44 percent thought the
opposite.
More than 1,200 people were
arrested during and after the unrest. One London looter, 24-year-old Natasha
Reid, turned herself in to police because she could not sleep for guilt after
stealing a television, according to her defense lawyer.
In another case, Chelsea
Ives, 18, one of thousands of people enrolled as "ambassadors" to
help visitors to the 2012 Olympics,
was identified by her mother who saw her on television after allegedly throwing
bricks at a police car. Ives denied charges of burglary and violent disorder.
Courts have sat through the
night to process those accused of crimes ranging from assault to stealing a
bottle of water.
Offenders include a
millionaire's daughter, a charity worker and a journalism student, but most are
unemployed young men.
Some police forces have taken
unusual steps to crack down on the protesters and deter future violence.
Greater Manchester Police
launched a 'Shop A Looter' campaign using social media sites like Facebook and
Twitter to encourage people to inform on those suspected of looting, and posted
pictures on its website (here)
of people convicted of
offences.
Those pictures included a
46-year-old man sentenced to four months in prison for assaulting a police
officer and a 28-year-old man sentenced to eight months for stealing clothes.
"The fightback has well
and truly begun," Cameron told an emergency session of parliament on
Thursday, outlining a range of measures aimed at preventing any repeat of England's
worst riots in decades. Targeting street gangs became a top priority.
The trouble began in London
after police shot dead a black man and refused to give his relatives
information about the incident, but then degenerated into widespread looting
and violence in many parts of the capital and other major cities.
HARSH MEASURES
The Conservative Party, which
irked right-wing supporters by going into coalition with the left-leaning
Liberal Democrats last year, is desperate to show it is tough on crime.
A Conservative minister said
on Friday he would see if he could make it easier to evict people from
government housing for rioting. "...I don't think this is a time to
pussyfoot around," said communities minister Eric Pickles, adding that his
plan would require legal changes.
"These people have done
their best to make people frightened on the streets where they live. They've
done their best to destroy neighborhoods, and frankly I don't feel terribly
sympathetic toward them."
British media reported that
one London council was already trying to evict a tenant from such housing after
the tenant's son was charged with offences linked to the riots.
A 68-year-old man who was
attacked as he tried to put out a fire set by rioters in London on Monday night
died of his injuries, officials said on Friday.
Three men were killed in
Birmingham, central England, when a car drove into them as they tried to stop
rioters, and a man died after being shot during riots in Croydon, south London.
The scale and ferocity of the
rioting, not only in inner-city areas but also in some middle-class suburbs,
has generated a law and order debate with starkly different views.
"There's got to be a
curfew put in place. I would have put in as many police as possible
straightaway -- they did that eventually. I probably would have used teargas
myself," said Graham Sawyer, 46, a construction site project manager from
Romford, east of London.
(Additional reporting by Peter
Griffiths, Mohammed
Abbas, Tim Castle, Adrian Croft and Olesya
Dmitracova in London
and Ray Sanchez and Daniel Trotta in New York; editing by Tim Pearce)
Source : Reuters
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