Tim Worstall

11 responses so far ↓

• 1 Ian Bennett // Aug 10, 2011 at 7:34 am

  Apparently there’s £4.90 worth of damage.

• 2 j king // Aug 10, 2011 at 7:58 am

  cheap

• 3 j king // Aug 10, 2011 at 7:58 am

  I mean – ‘cheap joke’

• 4 Gutbucket // Aug 10, 2011 at 9:35 am

  Manchester and Salford are quite posh now, I think.

• 5 Matthew // Aug 10, 2011 at 9:48 am

  Riots hit Bradford overnight, doing almost £2,000,000 of improvements.

• 6 Richard // Aug 10, 2011 at 10:47 am

  From one of the BBC journalists last night:

  “people are following us around with shopping bags, asking where the riots are”

  Got to love my home city.

• 7 Richard // Aug 10, 2011 at 10:50 am

  Gloucester as well, apparently. Will Bath be next?

• 8 JamesV // Aug 10, 2011 at 4:12 pm

  Anything Londoners can sort, Mancs can sort better. Innit.

• 9 Richard // Aug 10, 2011 at 8:56 pm

  The arrest numbers I saw did look like almost a third of total arrests during the riots were in Manchester, with Liverpool not far behind, despite only having one night of it to London’s four.

  Tougher policing, or just more used to dealing with this sort of thing?

• 10 john b // Aug 11, 2011 at 6:58 am

  Accounts from my friends in Manchester and Salford suggest that it’s not so much tougher policing, as more clued-up policing.

  The problem with policing in London on Sunday/Monday wasn’t a lack of force, it was a lack of coordination and of absolute manpower. The looters flashmobbed, looted, ran away, and regrouped. That isn’t how riots have historically happened: normally, the mob is trying to claim a specific territory, and the authorities are trying to stop them. Like a traditional war, with a front line.

  Short of shoot-to-kill for fleeing suspects (not how we’ve ever done things in England and I hope never is), ‘tougher’ wouldn’t have achieved anything against the kind of behaviour in London at the weekend. The way to deal with it is through a combination of understanding the looters’ tactics, and having enough of a police presence arranged in the right places that there just isn’t anywhere to run.

  In London, once the cops worked this out on Tuesday, the rioting stopped almost immediately (presumably because the scrotes either got arrested fairly rapidly, or worked out that they would get arrested if they didn’t stop). Manchester and Liverpool police had the benefit of a three-day London case study to work into their own plans.

• 11 Banditry » Riot strategy, or ‘why calls for tougher cops are missing the point’ // Aug 11, 2011 at 7:36 am

  [...] post about how the riots went down in Manchester, and a question on Tim’s blog about Liverpool and Manchester cops making more arrests more rapidly than London cops, I do have a few thoughts on police [...]

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