Policing Large Scale Disorder: Lessons from the disturbances of ...

Ev w4 Home Affairs Committee: Evidence
6. I hope none of this is seen as critical of the Metropolitan Police or any other police force. The lack of
rioting has led to a loss of experience and understanding of best practice. Leadership style has become more
relaxed and moving from the day to day to life threatening responsibility may have been hard for some, which
is a certain case for realistic and difficult training as undertaken certainly in the past, by the Metropolitan Police.
7. To sum up it may assist your committee when making recommendations to understand:
September 2011
(a) The number of trained Police Support Unit officers as against 10 and 20 years ago.
(b) The costs involved of training and equipping a Police Support Unit.
(c) The level of training and exercising including regional exercises.
Written evidence submitted by Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel
I feel compelled to write to you as a national officer of Association of Professional Ambulance Personnel
(APAP) and a front-line paramedic with over 30 years experience, with the intention of offering an ambulance
perspective from our union to any planned enquiries/investigations into the civil disorder that took place in our
city centres over the last week or so.
Only today, in an interview for BBC radio Berkshire, I highlighted the contrast in the provision of the
personal protective equipment (PPE) that ambulance crews in London have had at their disposal, in comparison
to those working in other parts of the country.
London Ambulance (my trust), is the only trust that affords its crews body armour as part of the package of
PPE that they carry with them at all times and crews were required to wear it at all times during the height of
the civil disorder that blighted our capital city.
The public disorder was obviously not confined to London, but ambulance personnel in the rest of the
country were not given the “privilege” of this enhanced protection as London Ambulance continues to stand
out as a beacon of common sense in an otherwise barren landscape. You may find it surprising, but body
armour is conspicuous by its absence in virtually every other trust other than in Dorset and Essex where
provision is a legacy from the premerger of ambulance trusts in 2006.
APAP has campaigned tirelessly since 1997 for body armour provision to be made available to all front-line
personnel in England, and we have received the same tired arguments about why this goal should not become
a reality.
I am writing to you to offer to give oral evidence to your committee on this and the wider issues surrounding
the terrible events that occurred over the last week or so.
As something of a bit of background, I am attaching a synopsis of our union and one of a number of articles
I have written on the subject of body armour. I am also attaching two recent press releases for your perusal with
some press copy from the BBC. I did give oral evidence on behalf of APAP to the Health Select Committee in
1994, when it investigated the London Ambulance computer crash of 1992.
I felt this correspondence was important considering recent events and look forward to hearing from you
soon.
September 2011
Written evidence submitted by Anthony Sims
I expect the following have been posed many times since the recent events of serious disorder:
1. It seems obvious that if the police had been positioned to quell the disorder on the Saturday, the
subsequent events would not have resulted in such destruction and disorder. Why were they not
prepared for such an event, given the “local” history of similar escalations?
2. I know that if the government, London authorities and police had been asked to confirm that plans
for policing during the Olympics were on-track/in-place they would have ridiculed anyone
questioning their “positive” responses. It is obvious that they were under a mis-apprehension! If
these events had occurred in the weeks prior to the Olympics or during the Olympics (and anywhere
in the country)—on a scale remotely approaching the level just witnessed—cancellation would have
been the only realistic outcome and the damage could have been far worse, with resources at that
time concentrated in London. Why is there such naivety in those who should know better—with our
experience of dealing with terrorism over many decades and, particularly, following the disastrous
response to the bomb attacks in 2005 (the latter showed how poorly prepared we really were)? Is
now the right time to even consider cuts to policing, let alone the government forcing them through?
3. Given the sight of so many onlookers—taking snaps and finding the whole series of events so