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The Riots

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.