Plastic Bullets and Water Cannon

News International flunkey (and current Prime minister) David Cameron has been playing to the mob in his calls for the use of baton rounds and water cannon on the streets of England's cities. 

Has it really come to this? I’m not so sure. And I say that as someone who was attacked and robbed during rioting on my own high street this week.

Now let’s be clear, I’m not really the turn-the-other-cheek type and I don’t necessarily buy in to the ‘they’re just poor misunderstood urchins with no stake in society’ schtick. If I’m completely honest, there’s a part of me that yearns for these scallies to suffer the kind of backstreet reprisal that is altogether more reminiscent of the Irish Troubles.

OK, I’m still really angry now and sometimes we say and think terrible things when we’re angry, right? Let’s take my cat as a trivial example, when I trip over him on the stairs, I want to kill the fat bastard but that’s not an impulse I’ll ever act upon and I’d regret it deeply if I did.

By the same token, I know I won’t be angry forever at the wee guttersnipes who turned me over and once the dark thoughts of furious retribution abate, I guess what will be left is a desire for justice: punitive, restorative and rehabilitative. That and the hope that something good might come from the whole sorry experience.

The knee-jerk desire for a sharp visitation of pain on the perps is human and valid but it shouldn’t be the basis of a major policy change in operational policing. Nor should it be a decision taken with an eye to the opinion polls rather than the grim realities of shooting juveniles with plastic bullets.

Aside from that, there are certainly some grounds for believing that it was Metropolitan Police staffing levels rather than the unavailability of a more robust police response that contributed to the dizzying escalation from local flare-up to national conflagration. And by police staffing levels, I mean the numbers they themselves determined to put on duty over the period of the disturbance as opposed to overall force numbers: a political football thankfully outside our immediate remit. 

But to be fair to the Met, (not a phrase you’ll hear too often in my house), the breakdown in law and order played out with such astonishing speed that foreseeability is perhaps only a luxurious corollary of 20-20 hindsight. ‘For want of a nail’ and all that...

The question is ultimately one of pragmatism: which tactics are likely to be successful in countering serious public disorder such as England has experienced over the past week? It shouldn’t be about giving the chavs a thrashing, edifying as that might be in some quarters.

I would have real doubts about the efficacy of baton rounds and water cannons in any event. However, you don’t need to take my word for it. Take it from a real expert: the former chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland Sir Hugh Orde; someone who’s actually ordered the deployment of these measures on several occasions.

On Tuesday 09 August, the man whose name has been linked with the top job at the Met, told The Guardian that he “did not think it would be sensible in any way shape or form to deploy water cannon or baton rounds in London.”

Of course that begs the question as to why it continues to be acceptable to use plastic bullets in Ireland but never on the British Mainland. In the same report, Orde’s comments seem to provide an answer to that one. “What is happening in London is not an insurgency that is going to topple the country. There are 8 million people in London and it is a tiny proportion doing this. They are gangs of looters and criminals and although it is concerning it has to be kept in proportion.”

This past week was no insurgency, that much is true. In fact, as a manifestation of public disorder, it has little commonality with the Irish experience. Riots and civil unrest during the Troubles tended to be focused on specific locations or around particular events and because of this, confrontation between rioters and security forces took on many of the qualities of a conventional military battle.

There were clear lines and the middle ground was contested, there might be feints or diversions, attacks, counter attacks and repulsions but the location of the disturbance was generally static. The same ‘old school’ lines of battle are also evident in more politically motivated protest and disorder such as the student protest centred in Parliament Square last November.

However what we saw in cities throughout England over the past days was much more asymmetric. This was public disorder, flash-smash-and-grab-mob style; guerrilla rioting, fluid, sporadic and seemingly spontaneous.  Whether this was disturbance was a random tornado of anti-social behaviour or whether it had a guiding ‘intelligence’ is probably moot.

Another more important question remains; do plastic bullets actually work? More than forty years after their introduction and well into the Peace Process, Northern Ireland still occasionally experiences seasonal unrest that necessitates (at least in the opinion of the police) the deployment of either plastic bullets or water cannon. As could be seen during the recent Marching Season, a new generation of rioter is now growing up in Northern Ireland, learning to deal with these measures, just like earlier generations did. It would appear then that plastic bullets are no more of a deterrent now than when they were first introduced.

Whatever you think about the ethics of baton rounds; many of our European neighbours do use water cannons for crowd control. Again, it’s a tactical thing; for more static engagements, this piece of ‘artillery’ can be quite effective. But driving these unwieldy beasts around the 32 boroughs of London in search of flying columns of fleet-footed looters probably isn’t a goer.

I hate to be all ‘elf and safety’ but it might also be an idea to look at the plastic bullet’s fatality record before we endorse its use. Since the introduction first of the rubber bullet in 1969 and then the plastic variant in 1972, baton rounds have caused 14 deaths in Northern Ireland (the most recent being in 1989). Nine of the victims were 18 years or under; the youngest being 10-year old Stephen Geddis in August 1975.

A familiar refrain at victims’ inquests, particularly in the 1970s, was that soldiers and policemen didn’t understand rules governing use of baton rounds. How many trial and error fatalities would we be prepared to countenance while the police here in England got to grips with this lethal piece of kit? 


An edited version of this article appears today in Snipe, The Londoner's Arts/Music/Culture Newspaper.