David Davis: As our cities go up in flames, what on earth has happened to the police?

Yet our cities are in flames, several people have died, our Cabinet and Parliament has been recalled, and lawlessness is so rife that ordinary citizens have taken to organising the defence of their own streets.

What on earth has gone wrong?

The first thing to recognise is that it was impossible to predict the exact sequence of recent events – the shooting of Mark Duggan and the immediate aftermath. But the art of policing is all about dealing with the unexpected.

The single thing that has most astonished the British public was the sight of rows of heavily equipped police officers standing by while rioters and looters engaged in brazen acts of vandalism, arson and theft.

A police officer called to the scene of a bank robbery would not park across the street and wait patiently for it to finish, so why were the Met’s riot police little more than spectators during the looting?

Some senior officers have denied this, but the TV pictures speak for themselves. Other officers have said that the criticisms and court cases the Met faced after the G20 and other political protests have inhibited them from taking firm action.

This is astonishing. The idea that you use the same tactic against blatant and provocative criminal activity as you do against peaceful protesters exercising their democratic rights beggars belief.

What do I want to hear David Cameron tell the House of Commons today?

There are three sets of answers I would like to see. They relate firstly to the immediate tactics of the police, secondly to how we deal with the causes of this criminal outburst and thirdly to the organisation of the police.

In terms of the immediate tactics, I want to hear that all our police forces use completely different rules of engagement for violent disorder and peaceful protest.

Occasionally the first will spawn the second, but this is not an excuse for confused leadership in either event. The police are right to show restraint towards peaceful protesters – their civilised methods merit respectful treatment. Those engaged in mindless criminal activity, on the other hand, show no respect for people or property, and they should not expect any from the police in return.

Second, we must deal with the causes. Some have blamed poverty and unemployment. Others point to a lack of youth clubs or bad parenting. Although these people may have a point, many of the rioters and looters were not the poor or unemployed.

We should always remember that poverty and greed are very different things. Among those arrested were two chefs, a graphic designer, an opera house steward and a social worker, not to mention a number of children. What these unlikely rioters should have realised is that they were not just stealing TVs and trainers – they were stealing their community’s future.

Unemployment is not a cause of crime, but it can be easily exploited to fuel crime.

However the problems of gang culture are significant and worsening, but dealing with gangs is not impossible. One of the better models was first tried in America – Boston’s Operation Ceasefire – and recently copied to good effect by Strathclyde Police in Glasgow.

Under this programme, convicted gang members were offered the chance to reduce their jail time in return for putting down their weapons and taking part in a programme designed to boost their personal skills and make them employable.

In Boston, there were no teenage gang murders for two and a half years after the programme started. In Glasgow, the project cut violent crime rates in half amongst the four hundred former gang members who took part.

This shows that effective, intelligent policing can fight gang culture and cut gang-related violence. However, London’s Met Police have singularly failed in this respect, as the rising tide of gang violence shows.

The Met’s failure to tackle gang culture and control the capital’s streets is only the most recent in a litany of disasters which brings me to the third necessary answer.

From the bungled arrest of the ricin plotters to the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, the failure to investigate the ringleader of the July 21 suicide bomb plot, the arrest of Damian Green, the admission that not one of its 100,000 stop and searches under Terrorism Act had led to a terror-related arrest and finally the “Hackgate” scandal, the Met has stumbled from one blunder to another.

The result: its reputation, and its confidence, has been severely damaged. Failures of the sort are failures of leadership and we are suffering the consequences of a decade of politicised policing.

To get on during the New Labour years, senior officers had to be a strange mix of health and safety conscious, politically correct target-chasers, in a world where bureaucracy swamped initiative.

This has left the senior ranks of the police force very stretched in terms of the sort of free-thinking, innovative officers that will be required to deliver the reform of the police that Britain now so desperately needs.

Our police force needs urgent reform. This will be difficult. Slashing through the bureaucracy that handicaps our ordinary coppers sounds easy, but it is not. Rebuilding the confidence, competence and reputation of our police force will require toughness and courage.

We have some very good senior officers in our police force now, but in my view, not enough for the size of the task. So we should not be afraid to look outside the force, or outside the country, to find the best candidates for leading tomorrow’s police.

Only with real and drastic change at the top can the police’s – and particularly the Met’s – reputation be restored.

David Davis is the Conservative MP for Haltemprice and Howden. He was Shadow Home Secretary from 2003-08.