Norman Bettison: Police don’t need water cannon to quell riots, we just want the public’s wholehearted support

This week we realised just how much we all take the social order of the country for granted.

The police service is at the heart of maintaining social order, but the service cannot achieve that objective on its own.

The maths are not in our favour. The average head count of police officers to population in this country is about one police officer to 500 (a low ratio compared with other countries).

If you permit rest and sleep, the number becomes one to 1,000. If we maintain a core 24/7 capability in every local area, then it halves further the number of police officers available for deployment to critical incidents. It is possible, and we have seen it elsewhere this week, that the police lines become overrun.

Sir Robert Peel was far sighted when he created the “modern police” in 1829. The fundamental principle of his unarmed constabulary was that “the people are the police, and police are to be the uniformed representation of the people”.

In other words, the police can only achieve their objective if they have the mandate of the people and the support of the people whom they serve.

If they don’t have the former, then they abuse their authority. If they don’t have the latter, then they are on a fool’s errand.

One thing that has troubled me, long before the first shop was looted in Tottenham last weekend, is that there has been diminishing support for the police as the arbiters of social order and equivocation about its role in maintaining the peace.

Individual human rights have been asserted as superior to community rights and justice, and so our mandate in maintaining public order has been steadily diluted.

Unprofessional behaviour by an individual officer, for example the unnecessary baton strike on Ian Tomlinson immediately prior to his death during protests in the capital in May 2009, is held up as a reason to limit the general powers and tactics that we professionals consider necessary for maintaining public order in the extreme.

Many commentators have a view, some from a comfortable armchair, about what the police need in order to do their job.

The job that every right-minded person is looking for the police to perform is to scatter the mob and make arrests where appropriate, and to keep the vast majority safe from the mindless acts of a minority.

You can keep your water cannon, plastic bullets, and curfews that are all subject of speculation at the moment. What would put greater power into the hands of the police is the wholehearted support and unequivocal mandate of the public, of which we are simply the uniformed element.

The irony of this week is that I think we now can count on it. The Prime Minister has been clear. The newspaper editorials are a rallying call and our own friends and family give us their “advice”.

My officers are heroes and, on behalf of a supportive public, are prepared to carry out your will within the law.

PC Ken Anderson is a typical example. He had his arm broken in the early skirmishes that took place in north east Leeds on Monday night.

I visited him in hospital and he felt that he had let the side down by going down so early in the evening and taking two further officers out of the front line to help him to safety.

We shall deal resolutely, with any behaviour that threatens the Queen’s Peace in West Yorkshire and will deal with the criminality by arrest, there and then, or through painstaking investigation afterwards.

At the time of writing, West Yorkshire has benefited from having a small number of sites of disorder.

It has meant that we have been able to concentrate our resources in scattering the mob and quelling intended trouble at an early stage.

I pity our colleagues in London on Monday, and in Manchester on Tuesday. They faced a combination of multiple site lawlessness and pockets of violent confrontation.

This means that resources are deployed to deal with one incident, leaving capacity low for responding to another which may be only around the corner. The incident played over and over again on the rolling news programme will be one of any number of incidents that officers are dealing with at that time.

Let me assure you that, even in the midst of this unprecedented national blitzkrieg of lawlessness, policing tactics are getting sharper and honed to better protect you.

We do not need more kit. The value of water cannon on the Continent and in Northern Ireland is in clearing densely packed areas of mass disorder. We have practised with them. They are slow, lumbering things that are used in a static or very slow moving situation – absolutely hopeless for the smash and grab behaviour that we are witnessing.

Similarly baton rounds, or what you may know as rubber or plastic bullets, are already a part of our armoury. Their real value is in keeping a distance between a crowd and the police lines. Shooting someone in the back running away with a pair of looted trainers is not the situation that they are designed for.

Van tactics have been refreshed in London to clear streets and barricades. I say “refreshed” because this was historically a tactic that the police employed until the 1980s when an individual was crushed in a deployment. What I now hear from everyone is support for the sensible and proportionate use of vehicles in this way.

If the disorder continues, you will see more “running lines” of police officers rapidly quelling disorder and clearing an area.

I wager that more than one person will cry police brutality and over-reaction. The question for society in general is whether you want the street cleared or not. We do not need the Army, we do not need any fancy new weapons, we just need to hear the unequivocal voice of our public.

In West Yorkshire, I am assuming that I have this support when I brief my brave officers tonight about their duty to keep you and your property safe.

Sir Norman Bettison is Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police.