Daily Times

The recent violent riots across the UK and the way the police has been tackling them put the credibility of the police, intelligence and New Scotland Yard into question. Many experts believe that the abrupt emergence of this violent criminal force and their ‘loot and burn’ action were due to the total failure of intelligence. Newspapers in London reported different news stories about the performance of the Metropolitan Police, surveillance system and national intelligence model during last week’s riots. The police was on the run, Scotland Yard still had to recover from the phone hacking and corruption scandals, and communities remained helpless.

The police were slow to react and the disturbance got out of control. The prime minister praised the police but said they had made a major miscalculation in their response to the riots. He called on a former New York police chief to help the UK police tackle criminal gangs but the Association of Chief Police Officers criticised the government and said that it had no trust in its force. Scotland Yard’s acting commissioner said that more than 3,000 rioters would now face punishment. In response to the UK’s police criticism, the US police chief said he was a “progressive” man who could lead British policing out of “crisis”.

The performance of the police has been very poor in tackling the few disorganised criminals last week. A total of 300 criminal gangs and their thousands-strong members have been running their criminal businesses across the UK for a decade. The question is: why did the police not carry out any thorough investigation into their networks in the past? Home Secretary Theresa May warned that the failure of the police in tackling the riots jeopardised a core British tradition. “Policing by consent is the British way,” May told MPs. The London police commissioner denied his commanders were ordered to “watch and wait”, rather than intervene. Senior police officers defended their force against the criticism of the PM.

Police and security agencies are responsible for maintaining law and order but, notwithstanding the allocation of extra resources to the police, the situation is getting worse. To win the hearts and minds of the citizens, the government needs to focus on a reforms agenda. Racism in the police department has badly affected its credibility. Muslim communities in Britain often complain against police discrimination and the stop-and-search policy under the terror law of 2000. The policing community has failed and the police are no longer welcomed into Muslim communities with their present face. There are complaints that the police do not hear Asian minorities’ complaints properly.

As previously pointed out, because of the failure of electronic intelligence, the police needs to reorganise the structure of old human intelligence. The installation of five million cameras along with a multi-dimensional surveillance system could not prove effective in countering the recent wave of economic terrorism in the country. Security experts understand that the national intelligence model showed its inefficacy during the protests.

The riots in London are said to be the worst in a generation. With the deployment of 16,000 police personnel and the arrest of hundreds of criminals, the crisis appears to be tapering off in the capital. Immigrants from Asia and Africa are living in poverty, low income families face acute financial pressure, while the behaviour of the Borough Councils is too sneering. Poverty is another cause of the recent violence. One and a half million children in the country live in severe poverty. Asian and African teenagers are playing into the hands of criminal gangs. The 300 gangs belong to over 40 nationalities that inflicted ruin on the country last week. Knife crimes and violence in schools and colleges are on the increase. Every week, some 800 knife crimes are reported. All these weaknesses, the weak performance of the police and the violent culture have badly affected the business climate of the UK. The Federation of Small Businesses complains that businesses are just shutting their doors. It is going to have a huge long-term effect on their profits. The British press has reported several causes of the recent shut down.

Some reports indicate that the wrong interpretation of multiculturalism, racism, inequality, poverty, the tolerance of criminal gangs in educational institutions, the poor state of education, the presence of hundreds of criminals in the country, drug trafficking, women and children trafficking, extremism, militancy, lack of education, the circulation of counterfeit currency, the networks of African and Asian extremist groups and the UK political and military involvement in the Middle East and South Asia are the leading factors behind the recent economic terrorism and criminality. The growing activities of terrorist groups in the UK have become a bold challenge for its security agencies.

In the UK, the poor state of education has left as many as a fifth of British teenagers functionally illiterate. Unemployment is widening the gap between the rich and the poor, making more young people violent. Sixty-one thousand people were officially recognised as newly homeless by various councils in 2010. Nepotism, racism and corruption in Boroughs, and the irregular allotment of houses to their favourite people have made thousands of poor migrants homeless. They have to wait for almost 10 years to get a house. A majority of homeless people are from ethnic minorities. This means that ethnic minority households are, overall, around three times more likely to become homeless.

In summation, the future of young people in the UK is bleak as they are becoming jobless and victims of the prevailing criminal culture and mafia groups. Communal violence may further shape itself in a more violent form, as terror and sectarian networks will harm the national security infrastructure of the country. The lack of institutional coordination and the present complex way of governance may create more economic and political problems in the near future. Reform in the police and intelligence agencies is a constant need while the government needs to focus on the domestic violent criminal culture and extremism instead of spending millions of pounds in tackling the threat of international terrorism. The UK may face more violence both at home and in Northern Ireland in the near future.

The writer is the author of Britain’s National Security Challenges and Punjabi Taliban. He can be reached at zai.musakhan222@gmail.com