Saturday, 22 October 2011

2159 Acting Police Commissioner at Home Affairs Committee September 2011

The second witness before the Home Affairs Committee on September 11th 20011 in a session concerned with the policing of large scale disorder was the acting Metropolitan Commissioner, Tim Goodwin, who previously had been the Deputy, a post on the day of the session held by the man who was to be appointed the new Commissioner only a few days later, and who had been moved in from the Home Office Inspectorate when the previous Commissioner resigned.

Mr Goodwin was therefore in a difficult position because he was also being considered for the post of Commissioner at the time of the meeting, having admitted that he had applied when interviewed immediately after the rioting had occurred. At the conclusion of session the Chairman of the Committee and Labour Party Member of Parliament wished him well with his application. Mr Goodwin previously had the support of Ken Livingston, the former Labour Party Mayor who had gone on record that he thought Mr Goodwin should be appointed in terms of maintaining stability and continuity and that he had been acting Commissioner for several months when the previous incumbent had been on extended sick leave.

It is also fair comment that Mr Goodwin was extremely unlucky in being in charge when everyone was attacking the Metropolitan Police because of the death of the news vendor during the G20 demonstrations, followed by criticism of the failure to protect property during the Tuition fees rioting including the attack on the Prince of Wales and his wife; then truth of the News of the World Scandal came to light with the evidence of cover up by the Metropolitan Police as well as by News International; the Police service in general was expressing anger at all levels through Sir Hugh Orde of the Association of Chief Constables and through the Police Federation, over the decision to create elected Police Commissioners which continues to be seen as loss of power by Chief Constables and the existing members of the appointed police authorities, together with opposition to the changes to pensions, overtime, management structures and other changes necessary to meet the overall reductions in government finance.

With the resignations of the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner, Mr Yates, Mr Goodwin must have felt it was his time to come from out of the shadows and then faced in quick session that possibility of an American Citizen, the charismatic Bill Bratton, being appointed over his head, the killing of Mark Duggan by a police special unit in Tottenham where 25 years before there had been rioting over another death at the hands of the police, and then the dramatic escalation in public disorder throughout the capital and spreading to some major cities and towns in the England.

As representing the old order and culture of the Metropolitan Authority Mr Goodwin was probably not at the top of the list for the appointment as Police Chief especially as he appeared to side with Sir Hugh Orde and the Police Federation when they publicly rebuked the Prime Minister and Home Secretary for appearing to claim that it was a consequence of their intervention the police had put numbers on these streets to quell the riots. Their public display of anger was intolerable in a democracy and strictly speaking inaccurate because although the Metropolitan Police may have decided to dramatically escalate numbers they would have needed the authority of the paymasters to exceed their budgets, especially for over time.

Certainly the new Metropolitan Police Chief in his first appearance before the Committee stated that the culture of the Met had to fundamentally change with officers of ability and the right attitude to policing in contemporary London instead of the present situation in which it took 20 years for someone to rise to the top. He has the Assistant Commissioner appointment vacated by Mr Yates and another Assistant has retired to strengthen his team.

As a candidate for the top job Mr Goodwin was also in a difficult position because the Committee wanted to hear expression of regret for the policing over those first days in London as well as confidence that lessons would be quickly learned to ensure nothing similar happened again, particular during the year ahead with mounting public opposition and frustration over the management of the economy and the Olympic Games next summer.

The Acting Commissioner made the general point that while criticism was understandable it was made with the benefit of hindsight. The Chair of the Committee quoted the words of the Prime Minister that there had been mistakes made during the first days of the rioting with too few officers deployed and challenged the deputy Commissioner to get off sitting on the fence and say whether he agreed with the Prime Minister or not.

He replied that he wished he had the benefit of hindsight but all that they he and his colleagues had done was make the best decisions they could to respond to the situation as it appeared to develop. He made the point that the situation was unprecedented and what happened had taken the force by surprise. He may not have been aware that to some of us this was a damning statement because what happened was predictable and should have been the subject of contingency planning. I am amazed frankly if the Home Office, Police forces throughout the UK and in the Metropolitan Police had not planned and conducted exercises in policing management to deal with such a situation.

Twenty five years as a local authority chief officer I attended a week long Home Office Course on the conduct of a major civil emergency in a situation after military handed over responsibility to civilian control but within a formal state of emergency and before normal democratic controls were restored. As an example of the key decisions under consideration was that of authorising the army to shoot looters who had been assessed as not surviving radiation in order to protect uncontaminated food and water supplies for those who had not been radiated or were medically assessed as being able to survive. Police Chiefs will have been given the opportunity to share the experience of managing major civil disorder within Europe and in the United States together with the experience gained from the troubles in Northern Ireland. They have known how terrorists, international criminal gangs together with the growth of the youth gang culture and its associations with drug racketeering used the Internet and the mobile phone to communicate. They will have developed significant intelligence information gathering networks on the ground in addition to digital communications.

I begin first with what happened and the numbers and tactics used. It was the Assistant Police Commissioner Lynne Owens who provided the information that there have been only 2500 officers trained to deal with pubic order situations in the Met force of over 30000.

On the first night there were in fact only 380 of the 2500 trained available and 100 others were called in from neighbouring authorities that is 480 in total. On the Sunday there were 1275 trained officers on duty of which 124 had been brought in from outside the Met. On the Monday there were 1900 of which 550 were brought in. The numbers were being increased but my point is that that they were still inadequate. At an earlier moment in the meeting, the Acting Commissioner said that if the Assistant Commissioner had her way the number trained would be doubled and she later said that the cost of training a third, that is 10000 would be an extra £8 million which is frankly piddling in the great scheme of things, especially seen against what the rioting is said to have so far cost. I believe that every officer who is used to attending events which involve the public in numbers, including sporting and entertainment events should be appropriately trained.

In fact they already are to some extent was revealed by the Member of Parliament for Monmouth in the E debate on the riots held in Westminster Hall. He said:

“When people talk about robust policing, let us not mince our words, what we are talking about, at the extreme, is police officers rapping their batons and walking forwards in 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 baton’s up and are getting ready to strike, and that is the photographs that will appear in the Sunday papers the next morning. The policed officers might actually be quite scared of doing it, they do not 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 but to go forwards. Yet in 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 police officer go for them? Look 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 the person off and get them to move backwards. But no one sees that, just the photograph. Police officers therefore come under incredible criticism.”

He was wrong of course fundamentally wrong as was Acting Commissioner in his comment that “I think we would be having a different conversation if we had a young person on life support at the moment as a result of a brain bleed or some other injury. I take great pride in the fact that we filled up prison places as opposed to hospital beds, and I think that is the British way. I do not think that we should throw that out in response to certain criticisms.”

The problem is that while much of the debate has been about having special squads, baton charges cracking heads, using tasers, rubber bullets, water cannon or armed snipers the nub is the use of physical force in numbers to restrain someone who is about to commit an offence if they do not respond to verbal requests to stop.

Mr Goodwin himself referred to the Commander at Sutton (and who was shortly to retire because of his age) who not only drew a baton but led the charge against the intent on rioting and looting in Sutton High Street and who quickly dispersed. He went on to say that 43 officers who had not been specially trained or part of an elite unit had been commended for their actions with other to follow.

There is a world of difference between a legitimate approved marshalled protest march that gets out of hand because of those who join in to disrupt and cause trouble and people setting fire to building in which there are men women and children who have nothing to do with a criminal act, an insurrection or a protest. This is the issue with the news vendor killed during the G20 demonstration as he was walking home.

I do not blame the individual officers who make mistakes but those who manage and train them. The immediate response to what Mr Goodwin said about young men in a coma is that in Birmingham three young men were killed protecting their community. In Ealing an old man was killed doing what the police were failing to do. In Croydon a young woman had to jump from a burning building to save her life as did mothers with children just about get out of their homes home in Tottenham.

Mr Goodwin gave me the impression of hinting why more officers were not deployed when he said that they had been preparing for the Nottinghill Carnival “Obviously we wanted to ensure that went well.” (which is a coded way of saying we had to budget for that) and that we had the EDL events in East London which had to be policed which added to the costs (although in fairness I believe he was attempting to explain why the total costs of the bill to the Home Office and Treasury had become so high as there had been additional policing for these subsequent events because of what had just happened. However it would be surprising if on the first days and nights in question the issue of additional costs of cancelled leave and extra overtime payments has not been a factor in limiting the additional officers brought onto the streets. My view appeared confirmed by the separate comment of the Assistant Commissioner present who said the basic problem had been numbers available and this included those trained to deal with public order situations and its costs. The question should have been asked by the Committee: did any Commander on the ground request a greater deployment of human forces which was turned because of financial considerations?

I have previously mentioned before that the special unit who killed Mark Duggan did not inform the local Police Commander in advance of the intended presence in his area. The Commissioner explained that issues such as notifying the family and the hour spent waiting at the police station were investigated as part of the IPC investigation but he was able to comment “it is fair to say there are different views and impressions of what was said and was not said and we need to get to the bottom of this.”

An insight to what happened on the Saturday night in Tottenham was revealed by Assistant Police Commissioner Lynne Owens following an exchange in which the Acting Commissioner said that special police units moved up to Tottenham from their holding area but not used. She said “There were not deployed and they were not authorised for deployment. There are three stages in baton round deployment. The first is release from their storage. The second is their authorisation at Gold level, at strategic level, for support, and then down to Silver Commander the authorisation to use them tactically. “Our gold commander made a detailed entry in his log on the evening detailing the rationale for not deploying them, part of which was the community relations implications that the Commissioner has already alluded to.

Mr Goodwin was also asked that if more robust tactics had been used on the Saturday would it have prevented the disturbances from spreading. He said “I think that is one of us to reflect on when we can talk to those involved, but I get the sense certainly the Sunday night the four other boroughs would have probably followed however we had responded. But in terms of the copycat sheer criminality that then occurred, the speed at which people took advantage of police officers being elsewhere was something we have not experienced before. This is a very difficult question for me to answer and I think I would like o go through the evidence first.”

Asked if the cause of what happened was the same, different and spontaneous he said: “I think that while they are linked they were different experiences. The first one on Saturday night was an outburst of anger that led to the disorder. We then saw images of looting which apparently was being untracked by the police. We were, in fact arresting some of them, As a result of that I think encouraged a few more to look at the opportunity for smash and grab activity, which then went into Monday that we saw such across such a broad area.”

This then turned attention to the composition of the criminal activity was also covered in the interview with the Mayor.

Lynne Owens spoke of the changing picture from arrests as the number of those arrested who were involved with gangs had dropped from 28% to 19%. The Acting Commissioner then disclosed what I have been arguing all along is that the police targeted known criminals and gang members in the first instance although this may be balanced in time by the fact that the more hardened or professional criminals involved hid their faces and would have arranged alibi’s to prevent identification and prosecution. Lynne Owens ensured that the committee placed in context the comments of Mr Goodwin in relation to gang membership that it was criminals who set the example for others to follow opportunistically. She said the figures of 20% should be taken as an indicator until all the arrests had been made and they were able to question if individuals were members of gangs.

In the final moments of the session the Committee returned to the issue of accountability and decision taking. Mr Godwin said I am in charge and accountable. He with the management team alone had decided to increase the numbers on the Street at their meeting on the Monday night, he had briefed the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary of the plans on the Tuesday morning and that the Prime Minister and Home Secretary had been supportive bringing together the effort of all the different ministries to respond to the crisis, ie they ahd agreed to pay!

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