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Apparently there’s £4.90 worth of damage.
cheap
I mean – ‘cheap joke’
Manchester and Salford are quite posh now, I think.
Riots hit Bradford overnight, doing almost £2,000,000 of improvements.
From one of the BBC journalists last night:
“people are following us around with shopping bags, asking where the riots are”
Got to love my home city.
Gloucester as well, apparently. Will Bath be next?
Anything Londoners can sort, Mancs can sort better. Innit.
The arrest numbers I saw did look like almost a third of total arrests during the riots were in Manchester, with Liverpool not far behind, despite only having one night of it to London’s four.
Tougher policing, or just more used to dealing with this sort of thing?
Accounts from my friends in Manchester and Salford suggest that it’s not so much tougher policing, as more clued-up policing.
The problem with policing in London on Sunday/Monday wasn’t a lack of force, it was a lack of coordination and of absolute manpower. The looters flashmobbed, looted, ran away, and regrouped. That isn’t how riots have historically happened: normally, the mob is trying to claim a specific territory, and the authorities are trying to stop them. Like a traditional war, with a front line.
Short of shoot-to-kill for fleeing suspects (not how we’ve ever done things in England and I hope never is), ‘tougher’ wouldn’t have achieved anything against the kind of behaviour in London at the weekend. The way to deal with it is through a combination of understanding the looters’ tactics, and having enough of a police presence arranged in the right places that there just isn’t anywhere to run.
In London, once the cops worked this out on Tuesday, the rioting stopped almost immediately (presumably because the scrotes either got arrested fairly rapidly, or worked out that they would get arrested if they didn’t stop). Manchester and Liverpool police had the benefit of a three-day London case study to work into their own plans.
[…] post about how the riots went down in Manchester, and a question on Tim’s blog about Liverpool and Manchester cops making more arrests more rapidly than London cops, I do have a few thoughts on police […]