Tom Gallagher: Police and politicians fight their own war of words over response to rioting

over the handling of the riots – and how to regain control of lawless urban districts.

The President of the Association of Chief Police Officers in England and Wales insists that the police performed well. This is contrary to widespread criticisms from MPs of all political persuasions.

Sir Hugh dismissed claims that the unrest was only stemmed when politicians demanded tougher tactics, saying that the rapid return of David Cameron and the Mayor of London from their holidays was “an irrelevance”.

He went further in several weekend interviews, claiming that the restrained British model of policing was still a global exemplar. He used this opportunity to deride the Prime Minister’s intention to appoint Bill Bratton, the former police chief in New York and Los Angeles, to advise him on policing needs following the riots.

Sir Hugh said: “I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them... If you look at the style of policing in the States, and their levels of violence, they are so fundamentally different from here.” Orde hopes to become the next head of London’s Metropolitan Police and he has plenty of allies at the top of the civil service. Senior mandarins in the Home Office persuaded Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to confine applicants to British citizens only – despite the Prime Minister’s keenness for fresh outside thinking.

Many police chiefs share the world view of bureaucrats in London’s Whitehall who believe that the best that can be done is to contain unruly cities and that tough tactics involving regular use of water cannon or tear gas would only exacerbate conditions.

For several decades, police promotion has been based on academic prowess rather than life experience. Police chiefs have been taught by university criminologists, most of whom would probably recoil in horror at the bold words of Sir Kenneth Newman, then London’s police chief, when violence erupted in Tottenham in 1985: “There is a psychological hang-up in this country about the use of force by the police. I have fewer hang-ups than most.” Sir Hugh Orde says that chief constables will resign if plans for local communities to elect commissioners become law. There is satisfaction with the present arrangement whereby selection committees appoint city police chiefs.

Surviving in office often depends on mollifying influential interest groups. These often lean sharply left and believe that policing should largely be about managing community relations and not maintaining conditions where the individual safety of citizens can be guaranteed. Sir Hugh Orde was able to enjoy a large measure of operational independence from politicians when he served as Northern Ireland’s chief constable during the latter stages of the Peace Process there.

American peace-negotiators like Senator George Mitchell, along with Bill Clinton, played a key role in giving it momentum. But Orde recoils from drawing on policing experience from big US cities with diverse populations and sometimes intractable criminal cultures.

The fact that rates for serious crime have fallen across much of the US, whereas they have steadily increased in Britain as a new culture of bureaucratic form-filling and disengagement from troubled communities has ensued, leaves him unimpressed.

He openly states his preference for closely working with European police forces and has so far displayed little concern with the absorption into British law of European human rights legislation that is widely seen as buttressing the rights of hardened criminals and anti-social elements at the expense of law-abiding citizens. Orde affirms the need to police by consent – even when communities have fallen under the sway of criminal gangs or residents whose lifestyle and public behaviour often places them on a collision course with other inhabitants.

Low-key policing that is sensitive to the concerns of ethnic minority communities where sometimes there was suspicion of authority dates from 1999 when Sir William’s Macpherson report into the mishandling of the killing of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence branded the police as “institutionally racist”.

The police have endured a crisis of confidence ever since and often appear unsure about what tactics to use to restore order, as shown by the delay in intervening when the car carrying Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked by a mob last December.

Britain’s bruising experience of dealing with violent unrest in Northern Ireland showed that it could only be effective when broad trust existed between politicians and the forces struggling to restore law-and-order. During this prolonged crisis, it is hard to recall such a level of open disagreement about basic strategy between police chiefs and their political bosses.

This does not bode well for next year’s London Olympics where, to the danger of terrorism, is added the need to protect millions of visitors from a large anti-social group of Londoners whose existence has shocked the rest of the world.