[Memnoch]

There appears to be a slight difference in opinion between US and UK police authorities on how to deal with these types of riots. David Cameron has apparently hired some bigknob US police chief, Bill Bratton, to advise him on an unpaid basis on the "zero tolerance" approach. Excerpts from the Telegraph below.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Bill Bratton, the former New York police chief, said many young people, especially gang members, had been “emboldened” by over-cautious policing tactics and lenient sentencing policies. To be effective, a police force should have “a lot of arrows in the quiver,” said Mr Bratton, advocating a doctrine of “escalating force” where weapons including rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper spray and water cannon were all available to commanders. Speaking in New York, Mr Bratton, 63, said police forces should be more assertive in their dealings with offenders, leaving no doubt that crime would always meet a firm response. “You want the criminal element to fear them, fear their ability to interrupt their own ability to carry out criminal behaviour, and arrest and prosecute and incarcerate them,” he said. “In my experience, the younger criminal element don’t fear the police and have been emboldened to challenge the police and effectively take them on.” “What needs to be understood is that police are empowered to do certain things — to stop, to talk, to frisk on certain occasions, to arrest if necessary, to use force,” he said. In particular, he said, gangs must “understand that provocation will be met with appropriate response”. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...e-adviser.html

This has been in turn met with criticism by the Met police. From Boston.com.

"I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them," Orde said of Los Angeles, which the 63-year-old Bratton oversaw until 2009. "It seems to me, if you've got 400 gangs, then you're not being very effective. If you look at the style of policing in the states, and their levels of violence, they are fundamentally different from here," said Orde, a former commander of Northern Ireland's police and deputy commander of London's Metropolitan Police. Orde made his comments to the Independent on Sunday newspaper. "America polices by force. We don't want to do that in this country," said Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers in the British capital. Ian Hanson, chairman of the federation's Manchester branch, said local officers knew better how to police their own communities than "someone who lives 5,000 miles away." http://www.boston.com/news/world/eur..._riots/?page=2

Comments? Police by force or softly-softly approach?