I’m no PhD in criminal justice, but it seems to me like a curfew is one of the first steps you’d take to combat the sort of rioting that took place in London and other UK cities. Is there some reason why this wasn’t done?
Because it would be a massive infringement of civil liberties, and would have a huge impact on the local economy.
Difficulty to enforce, too? Either you have an army of cops to arrest everybody out after curfew - but if you have an army, you can enforce things the normal way too;
or you have the army under martial law ready to shoot anybody out and about - but shooting people nilly-willy is not the British way. It’s the last resort because it’s an admittance that everything else has failed.
Two things to keep in mind: last night, the news told of tens of thousands of cops getting ready … but London has a population of 7.5 mil. Even if only a fraction of people are bad apples, it’s still a lot of people against few cops.
Secondly, what’s made these riots so difficult to handle is twitter and SMS allowing the protesters and rioters to disperse away from the cops and meet up three streets away in minutes. The cops can’t be on every single street, so they are playing catch-up … and apparently loosing.
This pieceon BBC News indicates a number of police regrets including under-reacting and initially treating it as a public order issue more than a criminal situation.
I would think with so many already rioting any attempts to enforce a curfew would be guaranteed to be violent and that would add more fuel to the fire. But they are considering curfews and wider dispersal orders as part of a long list of things they might have done differently.
About 16,000 police were deployed in London on Tuesday night, about half of the force in the capital. That was a substantial increase over the numbers on the streets over the weekend.
But wait, wouldn’t it be a more effective crackdown if the cops were loosing their shots? 
I was reading an article stating that the main issue the British police has is the lack of a specif anti-riot police, resulting in a lack or absence of training, poor or even dangerous crowd control tactics, and, as the author wrote, a lack of “force projection capacity” (mobile police reserves, short reaction time, etc…) at the national level.
Don’t the burning buildings and roving gangs of balaclava-clad youths have just as big an impact on the economy?
For what it’s worth I found this story, which seems to say that the High Court ruled that even with a youth curfew, police could only detain people “if they are involved in, or at risk from, actual or imminently anticipated bad behaviour.” That would explain the video we saw of Metropolitan police watching as groups of masked kids ran by.
One reason is because it would be a really radical step for the UK - I’m not sure there’s been a curfew anywhere in this country in living memory. It made more sense to try putting more police on the streets before trying measures like curfews (the extra police was immediately effective as it turned out). Secondly the riots weren’t concentrated in certain areas, they were literally spread across the entirety of Greater London, from Oxford Circus in the city centre way out into the suburbs in every direction. How do you realistically enforce a curfew across 400 square miles of dense urban environment, housing about 7 million people? It’s certainly not a step you want to take lightly.
It would be very effective at making everyone in London feel like the govt was out to get them, and not very effective at stopping people committing other crimes. Also, the media has WAY exaggerated the riots.
This is true. After watching the news over the weekend I was half-expecting to encounter a smoking, ruined city when I came into work this week. I commute by bike for four miles across the centre of town and saw not so much as a broken window.
If you were to implement a curfew, where would you implement it? In areas where there has been trouble? Too late. Across the whole of London? Total over-reaction, as 90% of the capital was totally unscathed, and it would simply prevent people going about their business as usual. I don’t leave work till after 10.30pm some nights, so how would I make my way home if there was a curfew?
I don’t feel like the media exaggerated it. In what way? If all you did was look at the footage of the fires and debris in Lavender Hill, or the building alight in Croydon, or the street in Ealing where every shop front was smashed and assumed that every street in a 400-square-mile city would look like that then you weren’t following it very closely. If you’d actually been in those areas during the riots it felt exactly like it looked on the news, and there were a lot of “those areas” across the city.
I’m from London, you know. The media would have you believe the streets are unsafe to walk on.
TBF, we were on holiday and only arrived home today, but I do have an awful lot of friends here and everything in my area (Bethnal Green, hardly suburbia) is completely normal. And we would have been prevented from getting home if there were a curfew.
I live in London, and I actually didn’t know about the riots until about the third night. I had vaguely heard about some disturbances somewhere, but to be honest I was a bit busy with other stuff, didn’t look at the news, and only realised that something out of the ordinary was going on from references other people made to it.
Bethnal Green wasn’t an area that had problems though. It did seem as though a lot of the “riots” were in very small areas - i.e. we were watching the police face down rioters on TV less than a mile from our flat, but it was all fine (unusually quiet in fact) outside. On the other hand, the footage of Croydon looked genuinely terrifying, with many buildings on fire.
I’m not sure how much effect a curfew would have had, if only because most law-abiding people were staying at home to keep safe anyway.
Yeah, it’s weird that this area seemed to be almost riot-free; it’s not exactly a quiet area. There was some trouble - a couple of pubs got smashed up - but TBH, it’s not like there’s never any crime here on the average weekend anyway.
Even the people I know in Croydon and Tottenham were just going about their daily business most of the time. But while in the US, every single person who heard my accent commented about the riots; the impression seemed to be that I was returning home to a warzone. A burning building looks much bigger and scarier on the TV in your living room than it does in real life when it’s a quarter of a mile from you.
It would. And to put the original question in perspective (although I cannot tell where the OP is from), curfews are very common in the US. For example, Georgia has a curfew for under 18s in normal times, let alone when there is rioting. My opinions on this fact are not appropriate for this forum.
Wait, what? What happens to you in Georgia if you’re under 18 and out after dark?
Well, it is not “after dark”, it is after 11pm weekdays, midnight weekends. Apparently the punishment is:
It was quite scary if you happened to be in the middle of it.
One good thing is that the criminal fraternity have shown their hand or, more correctly, their faces - literally on cctv - and they did it all at once.
There’s about 1500 cases going throught the courts at the moment and there will be a lot more as people start to get identified through video and forensics etc.
So it will make a bit of a dent in their numbers (the criminals)
One silver lining of all this may actually be that crime falls because a sizeable number of criminals are going to get jailed all at once. A city only has a finite number of criminals so a big event like this will take out a significant percentage of them in one go (in the sense that they will all have to serve jail time at the same time).