We can't lose sight of impact of disorder

As we continue to move forward and recover from the events of the last few weeks, it is important we don’t lose sight of how our communities and our police forces have been impacted and what we can learn for the future.

The recent unrest has shown us how challenging public order policing can be.

Officers and members of the community services faced sustained violence, witnessed the destruction of community buildings and saw hostility rise. All this was fuelled by mob mentality, misinformation and anger towards a range of wider societal issues.

Despite the hostility and obvious challenges, it was heartening to see communities come together and rally against the violence. There has been a real sense of support and solidarity for officers emerging in a way which we haven’t seen for a while.

As well as the support there has been growing curiosity, in policing and a lot of commentary on how we do our job. Questions have arisen about why and how decisions are made on the ground in these situations, whether we can cope, could we have done things differently.

The reality is that public order policing is complex and is possibly one of the most difficult environments an officer can work in.

Protests and demonstrations by their very nature are reactive. They involve large groups of people, who generally have similar interests and motivations and are reacting on mass to situations they feel incredibly passionate about.  Often these events are accompanied by a counter-demonstration, adding another layer of complexity to our decision making and planning.

And it doesn’t take much for a peaceful event to evolve into something else.

Although what we saw play out in our communities recently didn’t start as a peaceful movement, we hoped it wouldn’t end how it did. Officers endured abuse, harassment and violence. They were assaulted, pelted with missiles, including petrol bombs, and had to make some really tough decisions.

Commanders running operations like that are under immense pressure to balance the safety of their officers with those in attendance and the wider public.

My own role as public order lead for the NPCC can be equally as dynamic. As gold commander, I take overall accountability for how protests are policed nationally and work with 43 forces – all of which have their own diverse makeup and complexities – on the strategy, which then feeds into which tactics are deployed on the ground.

Here in the UK we don’t have full time ‘riot’ or public order officers. The cops you saw on the news don’t spend their days preparing for disorder to happen but work in the community, responding to reports of antisocial behaviour, burglary and domestic abuse.

The skills they have can be invaluable in diffusing tensions and liaising with key figures and being able to negotiate and influence the behaviour of someone during the heat of the moment can be crucial to de-escalating a situation. What they learn in these moments will no doubt stay with them their whole careers too.

We train our officers to a high level and they are all issued with PPE ahead of deployments – but injuries can happen. We know that a total of 280 officers were physically injured in recent weeks but the psychological harm and impact will be felt for years to come.

It is worth remembering that our officers, staff and volunteers don’t just serve the community – they are also part of it, for us it’s personal and professional.

We are thankful the violence has ended but we know the ripple effects will continue to be felt by many and the root causes remain. While these are complex and not something which sit in the policing remit, we will be looking to support our partners boost cohesion, ease community tensions and ultimately bring people together. 

Policing leads will now be looking towards the future and establishing how we can be better prepared should this happen again, how we can prevent future disorder and what can we do to dispel myths and the disinformation that added fuel to the flames.

We will also we working closely with the likes of the Police Federation and Oscar Kilo, the national wellbeing service to make sure out workforce is fully supported to return to business as usual, and are offered the relevant support and assistance, so they too can put the horrific events of the last month behind them.