UK doesn’t have enough officers or prison places to curb riots, says former prison officer and governor

We spoke to former prison governor Ian Acheson.

He’s now the Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.

We began by asking him if the police and security services should’ve seen these riots coming.

Ian Acheson: I know there’s been some criticism of a lack of preparation. It seems to be in relation to Rotherham in particular, and the hotel there that was besieged by people that were intent on, if they could I think, killing the occupants, that there was intelligence that did exist, that should have meant that the police response, the defensive response, around that hotel was much greater. I think what you saw were police that were almost overwhelmed and we could have had an absolute tragedy that would have ignited this civil disorder into something much worse, had that occurred. There needs to be a re-examination of police tactics. We simply don’t have enough cops around in the country to be able to sustain the rates of injury and assault.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: One of the lessons of 2011, I remember, was the police were out on the streets relatively quickly. Quite fast, we saw a lot of officers out trying to give reassurance. Do you think that’s happened yet? I’m in Birmingham, where there have been warnings of gatherings today, and I haven’t seen any police on the streets.

Ian Acheson: I do have some sympathy here for the policing posture, it’s extraordinarily complex. Sometimes, and I think there’s some research that followed 2011, putting more police officers on the ground can actually aggravate the situation and draw more people in than would otherwise be the case. So there’s a very fine balance that has to be met. If, as Sir Keir Starmer has said, there’s a determination to put these people behind bars, I simply have no idea where they’re going to go, because we do not have the capacity at the minute in the prison service to deal with the population that exists, let alone a surge of angry and alienated young people. The state must now dispense with any navel gazing and deal with the problem of total incivility and impunity, that is allowing these awful acts of destruction to happen.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: What about the extremism itself? What do we now need to do about that?

Ian Acheson: I’ve argued to government over a number of years that our counterterrorism policy, our national policy contest, which, as you know, contains all those P’s: prevent, pursue, prepare and protect, needs an additional arm to it, called promote. That is about figuring out how we deal with extremism in pockets of the country, often pockets that have other multiple problems like social inequality and deprivation and so on, and how we stop those communities. A lot of them are in the former mill towns across the north of England and along the eastern seaboard of the country. How we analyse the problem here where social integration seems to have failed, and we need to do something to stop that inevitability of these people being radicalised or mobilised in some way, or believing they’ve got the impunity to act in the way that they did on our streets. That requires a complex and probably uncomfortable conversation about why those people, I’m talking about young people, are behaving in the way that they have.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy: We have this confluence of media, by which I mean new chat television channels and social media, and politicians and newly elected politicians who are feeding into this rhetoric. And that’s a new thing for us, isn’t it?

Ian Acheson: Yes, and I think there is a responsibility on all of us who talk about these awful events, to speak in measured tones and be united in saying that there is no excuse for this behaviour at all. There is no contextualisation about assaulting police officers, about trying to burn down hotels, about destroying your own neighbourhood, about looting and damage and destruction. That has to be straightforwardly condemned. And it must be.