President's Column - Mob Rule
“The UK is a very crowded and compact place, so gathering large numbers of officers is far more feasible than in places like New Zealand. Even so, the Government there was very fortunate the planned 20% cuts to officer numbers had not yet been implemented, or they may have been caught very short.”
Mob rule
How many of us watched the recent UK riots and asked ourselves, could that happen here? Any one of us who has been confronted with an out of control party full of booze-emboldened idiots throwing bottles and hiding behind the anonymity of the mob, would probably have thought “yes.”
The next question is: how well equipped are we in New Zealand to deal with it? With the recent publicity around the anniversary of the Springbok tour, older police will remember how it took the mobilisation of virtually our whole Police force of the time to stop the protesters from achieving their goals. The anti-tour protesters, while reasonably well-organised, had nothing like the communications available today. It was superior communications as much as organisation, which allowed police to prevail. Those communications ensured we had our invariably inferior numbers in the right places to stop them from disrupting the games.
Add modern communications like cell phones, mass texting, and social media to such situations, and all of a sudden our advantage quickly dissipates, as it clearly did in the UK. The best crime prevention measure is a belief you will get caught. The bigger the mob, the better the chances for law breakers within it to succeed. Modern communications allow the covering mob to form much more quickly.
Given that scenario, the only way to regain control is to have superior numbers and equipment; hence the deployment of 16,000 officers to London alone in order to quell the riots.
The UK is a very crowded and compact place, so gathering large numbers of officers is far more feasible than in places like New Zealand. Even so, the Government there was very fortunate the planned 20% cuts to officer numbers had not yet been implemented, or they may have been caught very short.
We can but hope any New Zealand government contemplating reductions in staff numbers will take note.
Also, following the miners’ riots in the 1980s, the English forces gained a reputation as the world’s best in public order policing. They realised they had lost a lot of that expertise when student riots against education cuts got out of control last year. Memories can be short when the financial axe is wielded; just ask the Pike River families about Mines Inspectorates.
We just hope that if text-fuelled rioting visits us, we don’t suddenly find ourselves caught badly short, especially of trained police officers able to pick up a PR 24 (oops), able to be mobilised, and with the institutional knowledge and might to be able to bring the mob to heel.
In the 1980s that was most of us. I wonder whether an increasingly siloed and specialised NZ Police will have that flexibility?
