We thank our witnesses very much for coming before us for our first oral evidence session of the new Home Affairs Select Committee of the new Parliament. We are very grateful that you have come and are very pleased to see you. As you know, we are looking at the policing response to the disorder that we saw in the summer, which affected people up and down the country. We are very keen to hear from you all. We have a number of questions for you. I will let you introduce yourselves, then I have to make a statement regarding sub judice and then we will get on to questioning.

I am Mark Webster, the Chief Constable of Cleveland Police.

Good afternoon. I am Lauren Poultney, the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire.

Good afternoon. I am Chris Noble, Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police.

Good afternoon. I am Judi Heaton, Chief Constable of Humberside Police.

Thank you very much. For clarity, as Members and witnesses will be aware, criminal proceedings are ongoing for events in Southport and against participants in the summer disorder. As such, in line with the House’s sub judice resolution, we do not intend to inquire into the specific circumstances of any individual case. We will start with more general questioning about the policing response. Bell Ribeiro-Addy will start.

Could you briefly outline the methods employed in your force’s response to the protests and disorder?

Would you like us to go in turn? Any particular one?

Start at the beginning in that order and we will go across.

We had two specific incidences of disorder, the first on 31 July, which was two days after the Southport attack; that was the second major seat of disorder in the country. A few days after that, we had a second incident in Middlesbrough. On both occasions there was no notification to the police of any formal protest, but what we picked up through community intelligence, social media and neighbourhood policing was an intention to partake in what people often refer to as a protest or a vigil. Ostensibly they were both intending to be peaceful, on initial pass at least; that was what was described to us. Neither protest had specific organisers, so there was an inability to impose any conditions. I will deal with them in general terms. Both were resourced appropriately, ideally to facilitate protest, but also with the ability to have a contingency to deal with any disorder, if that should happen. What we had was a facilitative strategy that would allow legitimate and lawful protest but would not tolerate criminality. Both, over the course of time, descended into disorder—I can explain in more detail if you want me to in later questions—and at that point the policing response changed with the contingency resources that we had. Initially we set out to facilitate protest, but we had to deal with criminality and disorder should that occur, which of course it did.

It was a very similar situation in South Yorkshire. We were notified about three days in advance that a protest was due to take place at a hotel where asylum seekers were housed. A command structure was set up, a gold, silver, bronze command, which is the approved professional practice for policing for public order events. The intelligence was assessed and what was believed to be an appropriate response was put in place. Very similar to the account by my colleague, it was an approach that would facilitate peaceful protest and be able to deal with any disorder that arose as a result.

From a Staffordshire perspective there were two significant areas of disorder. The first one was on Saturday 3 August in Hanley, which is in Stoke-on-Trent. Between 11 am until about 12 midnight we had various ongoing seats of disorder. Probably a little bit different from some of the other areas, we did have some degree of awareness in advance that there was going to be “a protest.” We got the sense very quickly that it was going to be anything but lawful and nonviolent protest and there were also a number of altercations and violent episodes between various communities within Hanley as well. In Tamworth, which was the day after, there was very little information. The key period of disorder was between 7 pm and 11.30 pm; it was very significant disorder over a number of hours directed at police officers, including petrol bombs, rocks, masonry, fireworks, trees being used to stab at police officers and officers having petrol poured on them and attempts made to set them on fire. Across both of those seats of disorder we have now made 187 arrests, with a number more to come.

Humberside Police were notified on the Tuesday before the disorder that occurred on Saturday, 3 August. Essentially this was to be a peaceful protest that happened quite routinely in the centre of Hull. The same organiser notified us that they had had more interest because they put it out on open social media rather than a closed group; they recognised that there were more people attending than normal. On the back of that and the incident over in Merseyside, we decided that we would also stand up a public order command approach. Normally we would have 10 to 15 local police officers, but we employed the public order approach to that and, like my colleagues, we stood up the full command centre. The protest did take place and quite quickly descended into disorder, with missiles being thrown. The disorder moved to outside an asylum seekers’ hotel, where attempts were made to protest outside, and then it splintered into various streets in Hull. It took a while to get under control. We saw disorder for seven hours in total; we made numerous arrests along the way, but did some mass arrests as well towards the end to quell the disorder. Thankfully, it confined itself to that day.

Chief Constables Noble and Heaton touched particularly on when everything descended into disorder. Chief Constables Webster and Poultney, when did you realise that you had reached a point where it was not a demonstration but in fact a riot, and at what point did the policing situation change?

On the day of the protest at the hotel in Manvers, initially the protest went as we anticipated and was in accordance with the intelligence that we had. The counter-protesters were on scene first; they started to arrive from about 9.30 am. The main protesters arrived at about 11 am. To start with, everybody kept in the areas that had been identified for them to protest from. After about an hour and a half, the counter-protesters said that they wished to leave. The atmosphere was quite tense, so they decided to leave, which dissipated part of the challenge. They were escorted by police officers away from the scene leaving just the protesters there and no counter-protest. At about the same time the number of protesters accelerated quite significantly. We went from having about 100 in number to probably about 500 arriving by about 1 pm, and it was at that point that there were significant attacks on the police officers there. Without the counter-protesters there to shout at and show their frustration to, the protesters very quickly turned their attention to the police officers and the occupants of the hotel.

If I deal with Hartlepool first, initially there was a post that invited people to come to take part in a vigil. We made a couple of proactive arrests very early on of some of the people posting, on suspicion of offences involving inciting racial hatred. The attempt there was to nip things in the bud early on, but those posts had generated significant interest. We then had people coming into Hartlepool, and while I am quite sure some would have wished to take part in a vigil, that is not what we ended up with. The numbers started to swell to perhaps 200 or 300 people. It was clear that we had to deploy our protest liaison officers, who attempt to have conversations with protesters, but many of the 200 or 300 showed no signs whatsoever of wanting to listen or engage. Then the group started to move towards two sites, a mosque and the Salaam Centre. There was a party of kids in the Salaam Centre who the police, in liaison with parents, moved out of the way. What had now become a large group of 200 to 300 people was moving towards the mosque and the Salaam Centre. That was the point at which we made the judgment that this was no longer going to be a vigil or a lawful protest, and at that point there was a lot of policing resource put into it. Hartlepool is a little bit like a grid system, with a lot of houses and lots of diversity within those houses. The grid system and the resources allowed us to police that effectively, but it became very violent. We had police vehicles set on fire, an awful lot of damage to commercial and business premises and residential premises and, as Chris has mentioned, people who were determined to cause serious harm to officers. There were bricks thrown at people’s heads, parts of window frames thrown through the lines and so on. That became very violent and we made several arrests, eight initially on the night, and we subsequently arrested another 53 people in connection with Hartlepool. Middlesbrough was slightly different. Again, we made proactive arrests to try to reduce any potential for disorder, but there was a lot of gathering, and quite early in it was clear that groups were gathering who were not intent on protest—people with balaclavas and other things, which gave the public order commanders an obvious signal. Numbers there swelled to 1,000 and equally there was a strong police presence. We made a significant number of arrests on the day. There was a lot of damage and more fire utilised as a weapon. I think we made 43 arrests on the day, and so far we have made 109 with more to come. Again, the level of violence meted out against officers was quite incredible.

Given the level of violence and the threat to life of the general public and people in hotels and mosques, for example, and the police themselves, what tactics did you employ and how did you make the decision to use these tactics? I will start at the other end for a change.

We started out with a low-key approach, because normally our protests or the speeches at the town centre were very peaceful. We started with that approach, but we had very much overpoliced it; we were anticipating that we might need extra resources. So they started out in their standard uniform, and then very quickly it became clear, as my colleagues have said, that disorder was going to happen, with missiles being thrown between the people originally protesting and then some counter-protesters. As usual the police ended up in the middle of it and they become the target. We very quickly ferried out some of the officers to get kitted up into their public order attire, leaving some of the others; we did that swiftly. They were then in their level 2 uniform, which is overalls and helmets, and then we moved into level 3, which is slightly more robust. That disorder went from being peaceful and normal to full-scale disorder in approximately 40 minutes, so it went very quickly.

It can be very context-specific, and from my perspective as a chief constable it is trying to square the circle of responsibility to communities, those protesting, and my own staff as well. There is always a lot of planning in the background about contingencies, resources behind the scenes, officers wearing yellow coats over the top of their so-called riot or protective gear. There is always that thinking in the planning phase. In Hanley, we had prior knowledge. We had a degree of engagement with the organisers, so we tried to engage with them to get a sense about what this would look like. When it became clear that it was not going to be a protest, it was disorder, because we had more resources we were able to engage in a much more dynamic way with both communities involved in the disorder. In Tamworth we had very little knowledge; therefore our core priority was to protect the individuals in the hotel—135 individuals and some staff—which meant that for several hours police officers were essentially bearing the brunt of individuals trying to get into the hotel to set fire to it. Until we secured additional resources, we could not have the same type of dynamic tactics—making arrests, dispersing the crowd and so on—that we had in Hanley. It was very context-specific.

As you ratchet up and make decisions on new equipment and riot gear, who makes that decision? Is it you or the person on the ground?

I can speak for Staffordshire but it will be pretty consistent across the country, because how we are trained and accredited and debrief events is at the core of UK public order policing. You have a bronze commander on the ground, normally an inspector, who is dealing with what is in front of them. Sometimes they will have to self-authorise, for want of a better phrase, because they have to keep people safe; therefore, they will direct a change of dress or various tactics. In slightly slower time you will have an opportunity to engage with a silver commander, who is normally removed through radio comms. Then there will be a plan in place that will give bronze commanders a very clear sense about what they want them to achieve and to an extent how. Even further removed in the strategic space you have a gold commander, who again will have overview of what is going on and be very thoughtful about what resources are needed, community context, engaging with appropriate political representatives at the right time and setting overall objectives for what they are looking to achieve, with an eye on what has gone before and what may come afterwards. That is the classic response that probably in different degrees will have worked out across our areas.

I think it is consistent. I will say, and I think you will expect me to say, that the courage and determination of our officers was phenomenal. I had special constables behind shields as well, so not only officers who were being paid to do this but specials who were not being paid to do this. In terms tactics, police dogs are invaluable in public order situations. I know that my colleague in Staffordshire had instances of offenders trying to break glass and put it under the feet of police dogs, for example; that is a sign of how much they fear the use of police dogs. Drones and other tactics to identify potential offenders later down the line are very valuable. We are still working towards arresting and processing 87 people, and ID evidence at the early stage is valuable to pursuing them later.

We have heard from all of you about your individual issues and challenges around the riots. Was there any suggestion, and if so at what point was there any evidence, that this was nationally co-ordinated by the so-called protesters? If there was, was there any national sharing of information tactics and intelligence to support that in a counter sense?

At the moment there is no sense of a controlling mind or hand behind it on a national level. When we work through the investigations, as we seize devices and as investigations progress—obviously we will be protective of those—it will be interesting to see even within local areas what level of control or guidance there was, or whether essentially there was a mob mentality, copycatting, or people reacting on the day. In Staffordshire, we have seen a little bit of a mixed bag with people getting caught up in this, getting involved in violence with no excuse, and they will be dealt with appropriately. Then there are other individuals in the background who seem to have more of a role of messaging people—not quite control but giving at least a degree of a sense that this was more about disorder than protest. As yet I have not seen any evidence that this was a nationally co-ordinated set of outbreaks as opposed to more local events.

To follow up, there might not be a controlling mind but they were very similar types of protest or disorder. Did you guys work at a national level to share intelligence and techniques and so forth?

Yes. If we think back to previous instances of disorder—for example disorder in Leeds, Swansea and Bristol over the last two or three years—there have been debriefs, live time which is shared across the country, and an opportunity through the College of Policing for knowledge-sharing events, where we can learn vicariously from other areas. That work was done. It is a little bit more challenging in live time where you have multiple seats of disorder across the country, but in our regional structures, the national structures—I think you will get a bit more of a sense of that in January as well, hopefully—there was sharing of intelligence and awareness of what was going on. I think that will be a key area for policing to reflect on: was it effective enough, was it quick enough, and how does it translate into securing more resources to mobilise across the country? I think that is a key area of exploration for us.

We will come on to that. Ben will have questions about intelligence sharing in a moment, but Jake Richards and then back to Bell.

I will try to be brief. Chief Constable Poultney, I want to ask about the Manvers hotel, which was the biggest event in South Yorkshire. What assessment did you make of how many officers were going to be needed in the build-up to that, and how did that change throughout the day? I ask because a constituent of mine is a police officer and he told me that he did a 20-hour shift that day without any break for food or even to go to the toilet. How is that assessment done, how is it reviewed and what has been done since? Chief Constable Heaton, colleagues in Humber have raised a number of issues in response and I think it is fair to give you the opportunity to comment on them. They speak of members of the police chief officer group not being in the region during the days leading up to the riots and during the riots, a lack of media comment in the aftermath, and that some officers had to use taxis and personal vehicles to get to hospital when they were injured. They wonder if there has been an internal review of your force’s response to the riots.

A comprehensive intel review was undertaken of the planned protest at Rotherham. All of the intelligence that we had suggested that this was going to be a peaceful protest and that was what all the social media that we were able to see called for as well. There had been a previous protest in the same location about a year previously, so the template for that, which was policed successfully, was used as a starting point. We started the day with two full PSUs, with protest liaison officers, non-protected serials and dogs, horses and drones available to us. As the events escalated after 12.30 pm, 1 pm, it very quickly became apparent that that was insufficient for us to be able to maintain safety at the location and our absolute priority was to protect life, to preserve the lives of people there, people inside the hotel. We put in a request for mutual aid from a number of other forces and we were able to secure mutual aid, which started to arrive very quickly. Initially it came from West Yorkshire and the British Transport Police, who were nearby. As the day progressed it came in from locations further afield as well, but there was obviously a travelling requirement upon them. I am very conscious that officers worked some really long hours, and they were long, hard hours when they were at significant risk from people who were intent on causing harm to them. I have heard accounts from officers who were there when the building was breached and curtains were set alight. They managed to clear those who had breached back outside again but remained in the building to keep it safe while it was filled with smoke. There were some incredible acts of bravery that day. I am incredibly proud of the police officers in the work that they did and there was some superhuman effort by them. The tales of people not being able to eat, drink, go to the toilet—absolutely that was the case. I am very grateful to a local premises that opened its doors and provided a refuge to officers and gave them food and drink while we got stuff to the frontline to them as well.

Very briefly I note, if I have the chronology right, there were events elsewhere in the country that had become violent on the Friday night and perhaps even on Thursday. On reflection, do you think perhaps more capacity should have been organised from the outset for that Saturday protest?

We will come on to questions specifically on mutual aid, so if you could just focus on your own forces.

Knowing what we know now, of course there are things that we would do differently, but based on what we knew at the time, those who devised the command structure were confident that it was the right level. Of course, knowing what we know now, there are clearly things that we would reconsider and potentially do differently.

The question was around chief officers being in the region and they were, certainly on the lead-up. We had the intelligence on the Tuesday. Chief officers were working long and hard on the planning of that. We were around during the weekend. Given the length of time of the disorder, the gold commander, who incidentally is not a chief constable, was one of our most experienced public order commanders, and then of course we had to change over. That was a chief officer on the Saturday night. On the Sunday, I had two chief officers there and I was there. We were around and we worked continuously for the next two to three weeks, including weekends, so there were chief officers around. We did quite a lot of the media. An assistant chief constable took the lead on that for me. Sadly, my comms officer was away on holiday so we had a limited lead for that, but we did do quite a lot of communication during that time. On taxis and vehicles taking people to hospital, I was not aware of that particular issue. I will certainly take that away and look into it, but the Police Federation was really supportive of our very brave and enduring officers on the frontline. I will take that away but the federation were also very supportive and there providing water and so on. We even got into conversations about isotonic drinks and things because, if you remember, it was a very hot day and it was difficult to be kitted up like that for a long time. Welfare was definitely a primary focus, but when you are in the heat of it, it is really difficult to do everything.

Has there been a formal internal review? That was my last question.

Yes, we have had what is termed a hot debrief.

Chief Constable Poultney referred to some incidents a year ago and Chief Constable Noble to some previous incidents in Leeds. Can other chief constables comment on how the approaches that you adopted during the disorder differed from other events that you have faced?

In Cleveland, in Teesside we police a very challenged area. There is an awful lot of drivers of social deprivation. We have high levels of crime and signal events on occasion, so we have very difficult events that will have a greater impact on the community. We had a terrorist-inspired murder within the 12 months prior to the disorder, so all of those factors are considered in what we call a community impact assessment, which is refreshed regularly. How does this feel? How does this feel to the neighbourhood police in Leeds? What is the tension, the indicators, the mood? Are any of these signal events likely to need to be input into any policing operation or any response to disorder? That is a quite comprehensive process and it took place in both areas prior to this disorder, one of them a day prior and in others a few days prior. There were no indicators in that that any of those factors were likely to indicate tension that would lead to this level of disorder. I certainly think that the planning in Hartlepool was appropriate. There was no indication of signals prior to that spontaneous event that this was likely to happen. That then informs a policing approach to facilitate a legitimate protest. Equally in Middlesbrough, while that came a few days after and I think there was what Chris Noble referred to as copycat incidents across the country, all of that is considered then in the policing response. In the policing response in Middlesbrough, when that turned to criminality and disorder, you saw very quickly a very proactive arrest strategy. You saw a lot more arrests, drones up, the police helicopter up identifying people, mapping clothing for future investigation. We always learn from what goes before and we assess what kind of incidents may be feeding the mood of a community prior to any operational planning.

Chief Constable Heaton, how does it compare with other public order policing events?

Certainly in Humberside we have not had anything at all, ever, and hopefully we never do again. As I said earlier, the intelligence was that it was intended to be peaceful. That was what we anticipated but in the light of the tension nationally and the issues in Merseyside it was clear that there was the potential for it to escalate, so we put in extra resources as described earlier. We have never had anything like this.

You have all referred to protests and even I have referred to protests and we continue to refer to protests, but it became very clear very quickly to the public that it was not a peaceful demonstration and the rioters were quite racist and xenophobic in their rhetoric. I want to get a grasp of how wary you were, when they first broke out, of the violence, given that we all knew the incident that sparked it, and how the police in your different areas—I think you touched on this, Chief Constable Heaton—were able to come or have their gear ready to be able to respond to that kind of incident. I am trying to get a grasp of how soon you knew and how prepared you were for that. It seems that you were quite prepared even though the premise seemed to be that it was going to be peaceful.

Maybe if I talk generically initially and then colleagues can come in locally. One of the big challenges around policing public order and public safety is how you strike a balance and how you remain proportionate in your response. There is case law and statute law about making sure that even in the planning phase you are always planning to minimise the use of force, so that is baked into the policing mindset around the approach. In engagement with key individuals, whether it is protest or a veil for something much more sinister than that, there will always be an attempt where we possibly can to have conversations and engage and to involve police liaison teams, community engagement and so on. Even though there were some indications in Staffordshire days before that there may well be the potential for violence at some of these incidents, we cannot prejudge that and automatically apply force at the start. We have to deal with what is in front of us and ensure that we are very flexible to respond, which is why officers may be wearing protective gear underneath yellow coats. It is just us being thoughtful about not sending out any cues, which again on occasions may well provoke disorder. As for a particular spark, it is very difficult to say. Sometimes it can just be stones being thrown at the police or across community boundaries and areas, and then it can degenerate from there. It can be even post-event. Whenever we have the benefit of looking at things in slower time, it is still difficult to identify one event. Elements such as social media have become very significant in the last five, six, seven years. When we were dealing with the 2011 riots and disorder, which is different to what we have been dealing with, while you had Blackberry Messenger in play, for example, and there was a sharing of information, it was nowhere as dynamic. It was encrypted and there was not the ability to go viral. I had an individual who was tweeting from the account of Tommy Robinson who tweeted something about a number of British white males having been assaulted by a number of Asian males with 4.8 million views. We responded to that in eight minutes to clarify it had not happened. We need to make sure that we can speak with that level of authority and accuracy, but that is a dynamic that can both generate and prolong disorder, which is relatively new in the challenges we are facing.

I want to move us on to other topics but Bell can go quickly on that one.

Were the powers that you had sufficient to deal with the disorder that you found yourself in? Did you utilise any of the new powers under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act or the Public Order Act?

We used section 60 powers quite extensively. I think there were no powers out there that we were calling for that we did not have access to.

There was no use of any of the new powers?

The recent power, for example, around protest policing?

Yes.

They may well have been considered at the very start in what we were dealing with, but this was disorder and ultimately riot on some occasions. The powers would have been very different from considerations around protest policing, which is where the vast majority of recent legislative changes have taken place.

We touched on intelligence sharing but Ben Maguire has a question on that.

A question to all of you and I have one or two follow-ups to this one as well. How easily were you able to share intelligence about suspects with other forces both during and after the disorder?

Forces are brigaded in regions usually for support. In the north-east region that at least three of us are from—sorry, Chris—we are all reasonably familiar with each other. Our staff work together and often train together. The conduits, the intelligence functions, know each other so that works well for regional intelligence sharing. I am quite sure that Chris is unlikely to say anything otherwise about his region. We also have regional organised crime units and the National Crime Agency. Depending on what intelligence support we need—for example if we have people overseas who we believe have posted on social media—a different part of that apparatus will support us in that work. My view is that it works well. Some of it is quite complex. With social media if you are trying to work out who somebody is and where they may be, some of that work is more complex and maybe is slightly slower than intelligence sharing within your own force area but it works. People bend over backwards to help and support. Probably the one thing that I think needs a bit of reflection on is the narrative about what this was and what was going on. In the early days, I attended one or two national meetings and the conversation was about right-wing people maybe being whipped up, maybe a controlling mind, and about people travelling on trains and restricting travel, because they were coming into areas and fomenting violence. That was not what I saw. The vast majority, in fact almost universally, everybody arrested, 169 arrests, were all Teessiders; the furthest they hailed from was Darlington, which is probably 12 miles away. They were people who lived in Teesside and who had managed to extend their horizons to Darlington. This was not people coming in from outside. In the early days of this disorder there was a lot of coverage in the media about what this was, but I think that the disorder in each and every area was different and it certainly did not fit that narrative where it was happening for me.

Further to that on the communication between ourselves, that is our role in this, so our gold commanders have an up close. We were engaging in quite a lot of national emergency meetings throughout almost daily and sharing what had happened, what was going to happen and the whole context operationally that we were all involved in. We also all had our own intelligence cells set up and they were communicating regionally and nationally.

Chief Constable Webster mentioned analysing the intelligence that was shared. Obviously you have your systems for sharing it, but it seems like the most time consuming and resource consuming issue would be analysing of that intelligence. We have some notes here. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner mentioned that thousands of hours of footage from body-worn video cams, CCTV and social media was scoured to identify some of the suspects, and similarly you have mentioned looking through social media, TikTok and other platforms to identify suspects. That seems like a huge use of time. Are you resourced well enough to do that?

It is a huge resource of time but policing is all about that, and any decision we make is a decision to take resource away from elsewhere. Of course more resource is always helpful but we have to make those prioritisation decisions every day. It was important to us very early on to be very proactive in arrests to try to reduce the chance of further disorder, and to very rapidly lay hands on the people we could identify and put them into the criminal justice system. We had a very big team doing that early on. We were arresting large numbers of people, particularly when you consider the size of the force, which is a smaller force, but very quickly we got people put through the criminal justice system. The courts and the CPS were superb. This was a real priority, and the speed and the support that we received was excellent. I sat in court for a day of sentencing watching these people go through within a week of the disorder, and it was good to be able to see that whole team come together. Yes, it is a lot of work. It takes a lot of time to go through footage and my officers are still doing that today. We have reduced the number in that team because of course we have lots of other business to do around all sorts of different risky areas of policing, but we will pursue each and every offender that we can identify and we will seek to identify everybody we can attribute a criminal act to. That will take some time, but we think it is absolutely necessary to do that. Sometimes you can speed up some of that—for example, through facial recognition technology using the Police National Database and things such as that—but much of it is manual detective work.

Is the real-time monitoring of social media all done from within your forces or do you get outside help from GCHQ or anyone like that, or other agencies?

There are thresholds of what policing can deal with and how intrusive we can be. Speaking from a Staffordshire point of view, we were very aware that there were closed groups, whether it be WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram, where people were sharing information. On occasions individuals, very helpfully for us, screenshotted that and shared them on other forums, so we were able to appropriately see what was going on. Obviously we do not take that as gospel; we still must verify and check. There is a degree of constraints for us in live time on what we can see, but there are technologies, mechanisms and capabilities where we can get a sense of what is going on in analysis of sentiment and community tensions. There are lots of false positives in that environment though, and if we reacted to everything that social media said was going to happen I am not sure what else we would deliver apart from looking for the next violent disorder incident or indeed protest. We must be judicious and, as Mark Webster says, ultimately human beings need to make judgments, not technologies.

Are you doing it internally? Are you getting help from outside agencies or is it just you within each force?

We have the capabilities internally and as appropriate there will be other organisations that can help us from different parts of the policing network as well. Of course local authorities also have the ability and capability to understand community cohesions and tensions. I think it is important that it is broader than just a policing look at what is going on online within communities, but we do have those capabilities.

I am very keen to move us on to the next section but Bell has one very quick question and then I will bring on Robbie.

You mentioned that you had the capabilities but do your police forces have the resources and the training to monitor something that is moving at such a fast pace on social media?

I think it is fair to say that it is incredibly challenging and resource intensive. The spread of things on social media is just massive, and one of the big challenges for us was seeing the same message getting played out on different forums and each of those having to be researched individually and then drawn back to the same point of commonality and understanding that it is the same thing that is coming out from something else. The amount of resourcing around that is significant and was challenging to keep on top of in these circumstances. We used social media effectively after the disorder. We issued 108 images of people who had taken part in the disorder on our social media channels and were overwhelmed by the public support in naming some of those involved. It is fair to say that there were some real positives to us in the news and social media.

I am keen to move on to the impact on neighbourhood policing and other priorities. I have Robbie Moore, Shaun Davis and then Margaret Mullane.

Thank you all for your time. It is much appreciated. I am very keen to focus on the financial pressures that each of your forces have experienced. I will ask you all to dig into that a little bit and also explain what that means for other policing pressures when you have either a riot or the pressures that we saw over the summer come to the fore.

Our assessment of what this has cost our force so far, bearing in mind this is purely police numbers at the moment, is £705,000. Bear in mind we are a small force, we are probably around 1% of policing, but £705,000. There were letters of comfort issued early on to make sure there was not any delay in getting people out of the door and cancelling rest days and leave, and an awful lot of that went on. We still do not know what percentage of that will be reimbursed, but if it is not all reimbursed that will have an impact on force funding. I am aware under the Riot Compensation Act that most PCCs went out and asked for people to submit claims for maybe uninsured damage. For some reason we had a number of claims within Cleveland. One was of particularly high value. They totalled £416,000, but because nationally the aggregate value across all force areas was fairly low, I think the answer that my police and crime commissioner has is that that will not be reimbursed. That is significant. Of course it is his budget, but he disburses his budget primarily to the police force and for other commissioned services. If that comes out of the overall budget, again that will have an impact on the force.

To expand on two of the points that you made—I do not know if anyone else wants to add anything—on the reimbursement element, obviously you have no control of when within the calendar year protests are happening, but the financial budget is set at a particular time of the year. At what stage do you feel it is normal for reimbursement decisions to be taken and, therefore, when are you making decisions about the impact on other policing priorities that you are dealing with?

A good question. I am trying to hear my CFO telling me the answer to that in my ear, but I can pretty much predict that he would say that we will need to know that in time to adjust any future annual budget cycle or medium-term financial plan. We are in December now. There is not an awful lot more time to make any necessary adjustments before next year.

Chief Constable Heaton, is there anything you want to add or in addition to what has already been said?

I can give you my numbers if you wish.

Please do.

The total cost to Humberside Police stands at £493,000. If we get reimbursed under current arrangements at 85%, our shortfall will be nearly £138,000. Our claims for premises damaged and so on, which my colleague has alluded to, for us stand at £226,000. That is for eight premises. Another two premises may potentially lay claim. If we get the reimbursement—the shortfall plus the claim, for which at the moment the police and crime commissioner is picking up the cost—that will set us back £355,000, so it is not insubstantial. Again it will impact on next year’s budget if it comes for next year. Our financial year ends the same as the tax year, in April.

May I also ask about shift patterns? When you are making decisions around the allocation of resource during the peak period of a protest or beyond that, could you expand on the financial pressures when making decisions around shift patterns?

We cancelled rest days and we had a lot of people who volunteered to come in as well. For instance, our HR team at the weekend came into our main stations to meet and greet staff when they came off the frontline, which was amazing. We basically paid rest days. We did not cancel leave. We did not get to that point but we would have done had we needed to.

There are different timelines within the police regulations. If you cancel rest days with less than five days’ notice the individual is compensated at a higher rate than if they get more than five days’ notice. The less notice you have the more expensive it is and if you are doing something as intrusive as cancelling somebody’s annual leave it becomes more expensive again.

Chief Constable Noble, is there anything you want to add on the financials? Does the same apply for decisions around reimbursement? I assume it does to all four forces.

Hopefully. We will see what emerges. We have all put in our requirements against the rules that have been applied, so we are very hopeful that that will be done in as timely a manner as possible, because the reality is that we have to pause investment decisions right now, as in people—in employing additional officers or staff. I have a budget gap in 2025-26 of £7 million already. The outlay we have already spent, not just in the immediate response but over the next 18 months, will be very significant, and if there is not that effective opportunity to reimburse policing then service levels to communities will have to shift and change, whether that is neighbourhood policing, proactive policing, tackling organised crime, working in partnership and so on. I appreciate that we are talking about the money element, and in some ways that is relatively easily captured. The consequences around communities and indeed inside policing organisations will be very significant, because we did not have this capacity sitting latent in policing at all. This is all spend that we just did not have. We would much rather have been able to apply it, if we ever did have it, elsewhere as well. Financial, human and community cost will be very significant over the next 18 months at least.

My next question will come on to the human element of it, but Chief Constable Poultney, was there anything on the financials that you wanted to specifically raise?

In the claim that we have lodged, we think we have spent about £750,000. The mutual aid cost on the day of the disorder alone was over £100,000.

I know that my colleague will ask about special grants so I will not go there, but what I would like to delve into a little bit is the impact on people throughout the summer and the impact on the workforce and the resilience of your teams. Do you want to give a bit of an overview of negative impacts that the summer period has had on the workforce internally and how you are allocating that force outwards?

I will be brief. We had 20 officers injured; thankfully, most were minor injuries, but one was more serious—an officer had a heart attack during the middle of the disorder. That was serious. He is not back at work but he is recovering. We provided support, welfare support, we were there on duty through the night and like many of the officers did not go home. There were occupational health staff there. We had debriefs. We made sure people were fed, watered, looked after. There was a very happy pizza establishment that had £1,000-worth of pizza ordered. We were looking after our staff to ensure that they could eat and drink. On the day there were injuries, bumps, bruises, there was a serious injury, but welfare support was there to debrief. I know that was very much appreciated by the staff themselves and by the federation. There will likely be cases of recurrent trauma at some point. When you are an officer and somebody is throwing bricks at your head, determined to try to cause you some damage, that will be an interesting policing experience, but we have the support mechanisms in place to try to support that. On the positive, because there is a positive side to that, the sense of esprit de corps and camaraderie was phenomenal. It really was phenomenal. We had officers who had done 14, 16 hours, had been pelted with missiles, who would go home and then turn around and come back within an hour and a half because they could not leave their colleagues to face that. We had people cancelling holidays, people coming in on their birthday. We had all sorts of stuff. So out of a terrible situation there was a really positive kick as well in morale and boost for the force.

This is not aimed at anyone in particular but you mentioned the implications of trauma as well as those negative implications that would have been dealt with by some forces. I know in the written evidence that the Committee received some forces specifically highlighted that and Jake Richards has also referenced it in some earlier questioning. Can you expand a bit on what you are starting to do, if anything, on specific lessons to be learned going forward about some of your colleagues who will have identified more anxiety associated with those sorts of experiences, more trauma-related circumstances?

A number of actions took place immediately after the disorder. We have a trauma-informed process that we ensured people were flagged to. We did some welfare and wellbeing roadshows across the force to give people the opportunity to speak to somebody from occupational health, to speak to a counsellor. We took chaplains with us. It was effectively just giving people an opportunity to have a conversation with people who would listen to them. There was a lot of anger, a lot of sadness and a lot of frustration. I absolutely share with my colleague the concerns about the long-term psychological impact that this may have and the impact that might have on our workforce in the future. I have brought with me for each of the Committee members a copy of our force wellbeing magazine. We did a special edition after the events. There were some stories in there, people sharing their experiences and how they are recovering and some information about the wellbeing provision that is in place. That is just to give you a bit of the context from a very people-focused approach. We are undertaking a formal debrief currently across our planning, the operation on the day and things done subsequently, such as the welfare provision. We are doing that with the assistance from the College of Policing and we will ensure that any lessons that we learn are adopted from that. It was raised a week or so afterwards that perhaps we had gone too early with some of the wellbeing roadshows. We were really keen to get out to talk to people and let them know that these things were in place for them and then it came back that that might have been better waiting for a week to give people time for it to sink in. I think the police treatment centres opened their doors to people who were not necessarily paying members for that, and we are all grateful for the support they have given to help our officers recuperate. We had 67 officers from South Yorkshire injured on the day. We had several broken bones, concussion, officers knocked out, due to taking missiles to the head, so this was a serious day where officers were under significant threat.

Is there anything additional that has not been said?

Very briefly, normally whenever I prepare for Committees like this, the UK audience is the public. For me in many ways today it is my own staff. We have shared the link in advance and hopefully they will get a chance to watch this and get a sense of the balance of support and challenge around policing in these critical events. We had 35 officers injured so 35 families were impacted as well—it is not just the officers themselves. In day-to-day policing we invest a huge amount around wellbeing, resilience, supporting officers, debrief. It is very difficult to prepare for events like this. Very often your best is a much more tailored response, but the health service was outstanding. One of my officers who was injured said that what Burton general hospital did humbled him beyond any event in his life. The health service stepped up as well as us as employers stepping up and really made a massive difference for those initial recoveries, but this will change some officers for the rest of their lives and they will live with the impacts of it for the rest of their lives.

I am very conscious that we really strictly have you for only another five minutes. I hope we can impose on you a little bit longer because we have quite a lot of questions we still want to ask. I want to bring Margaret Mullane in on abstractions and impact on other policing priorities.

One of the things that we undertook to try to mitigate the impact, which had an impact on the officers themselves, was we had to extend people’s working days. We put everybody on to 12-hour shifts instead of eight or 10-hour shifts. Bear in mind that people had already been at the frontline of disorder or dealing with events peripheral to it, and they were then coming back to work for extended periods over the next few days. It was really important that we maintained our neighbourhood policing activity and invigorated it. That was not just in the specific area where the disorder had happened. It was across the force area because clearly the community needs went much further than that single site at that time. For us the answer was in extending the working hours of our officers who had already worked long, extended hours, and hard hours at that, and I am grateful to them for doing that. It enabled us to maintain business as usual across the force area because we could not allow this to impact on that.

They will get paid.

Our public order trained officers have day jobs. We pull them out of those day jobs to staff public order events. When we were notified of the protest taking place, we had to at that point cancel rest days for everybody across the force to be able to provide the public order response as well as maintain business as usual. The cost and impact of it has been among those officers. Many of them went for a couple of weeks without a day off and worked really long hours, during what was, for many of them, the summer holiday period.

To add, it was a similar situation for us, although we will owe some staff for cancelled leave and things such as that, which will not be paid. As we work through the next year or 18 months, there will be the odd day where this officer is not on duty because they are using one of these accrued rest days. There will be a slow tail of impact with people using up those days. At the height we had 320 people policing the disorder in Middlesbrough. Every one of those officers has a normal day job and it is not public order policing. They are detectives, community officers, all sorts of things. Many of those officers will have a load of 15, 18, 20 cases, so all of that will have been impacted on to a degree. That is inevitable. On going out looking for the suspects that we have identified, we are prioritising those who we know are criminally active and are likely to cause harm. If one of our offenders, for example, is a repeat domestic violence offender, we will prioritise them and go and get them to ensure that we mitigate some of the delays that may have occurred because of the disorder. It is very difficult to quantify that because if you have 320 officers each carrying 15 or 20 case loads, each one will be impacted to a degree. All you can say is, in general terms, there will be an impact on maybe the speed of justice in some of the other activity.

It will not have an impact on that anybody we can identify and locate will face justice. That will happen. We have a lot of knife crime in our area and a lot of violence against women and girls. We constantly need to make a judgment as to where that resource balance is to ensure that we deal with it on a basis of harm and immediacy and urgency. I guess in policing we are all making those decisions every day.

We managed to avoid a lot of abstraction from our neighbourhood teams. We backfilled it with some overtime to make sure that people were on the ground, given the importance of local connection during that time, particularly for people who felt vulnerable, so people who were seeking asylum, all those sorts of communities and including our own staff as well who felt affected by it. Going back to the other question Mr Moore raised about injuries and so on, we had only police officers injured, mostly bumps and bruises, I am thankful to say. One person had to have stitches but much like my colleagues described earlier, they returned to work very quickly. One or two of them that I spoke to said that it is okay to be okay as well—not everybody who was involved was traumatised. I think it is important to note that as well.

I want to move on to the political response and we have questions from Paul Kohler, Jake Richards and Shaun Davies.

I will just ask a quick question on abstractions. Are you all saying that the policing of these abstractions, in so far as they happened, did not really affect neighbourhood policing? That is not my experience in London where abstractions have a huge effect on neighbourhood policing. Is that because London is different?

Sorry, but to clarify, that is not what I said. Many of these officers came from neighbourhood posts to police the disorder so I think there will be, but of course this also has had a positive effect in showing communities that we support and protect them. It is not a binary that this was good and this was bad, but there will have been some abstractions from some of those functions as well as the CID, traffic departments and everybody else.

In the short term, you can change your approach around your response policing to generate some additional officers who can step into the breach and minimise the amount of neighbourhood abstractions, but over a period of time they may well then have to cover some of those shifts in response policing. It is difficult to track, but in the short term neighbourhood policing is never more important than whenever you have tension within community and so we will do all we can to try to protect them.

Thank you. Moving on to the political aspect, the Government announced that there were daily meetings between the Home Office and senior police officers. What was your input into that? Were you aware of that? Were you part of that? How helpful was that process?

I had a call from the Home Secretary the day after the disorder to see how we were, how it had gone and whether we had what we needed. I also had a visit from the Policing Minister the Friday after the disorder, prior to the second weekend.

I saw similar levels of interest as well as from local MPs and other elected representatives in showing support for policing and seeing what they can do to assist, as well as being thoughtful about their role in the recovery phase and what happens after the immediate heat of the disorder settles.

I saw similar political interest after the event from the Home Secretary. I had a visit from the Deputy Prime Minister, who came and met a number of officers who were involved on the day. The meetings were attended by those who are likely to come in January to the national meeting between police representatives and members of the Government.

Was it about care and support rather than, “What do you need at the moment? We are dealing with it. Is everything okay”?

There were appropriate levels of intrusion as well into what the policing response looked like, how might it shape and form, and the early learning, which is quite appropriate to have. I suspect that in January panel members who were more directly involved in those conversations will be better placed to answer that.

There has been a lot of talk about two-tier policing in these riots over the summer. First, what effect has that phenomenon had on your force and your officers? Also, how does it make you feel for accomplished police officers?

For the officers you have in front of you, it is difficult to respond to that last comment. I heard the term nearly 15 years ago in Northern Ireland in relation to the intercommunity dynamics there. I am careful how I boil that down, but often it was about one side feeling another side was better treated than they were. From a policing point of view, there and here, it does not make any sense for policing at all to show favouritism when we are built on respect for the rule of law and integrity and approach. It is difficult to take. However, on the other hand, you also need to work with the perception, even if the facts are not there. We are dealing with a different set of circumstances here with the complex rights and balances we need to strike around protest policing. This is dealing with thugs and criminals who are trying to kill police officers, set fire to buildings and commit serious criminal offences. If two-tier policing is bringing people swiftly to justice, I am not quite sure many people would argue with that. The final point is that we are part of a criminal justice system with checks and balances. Even if there is a right to challenge a policing decision, which there is, the CPS is intimately involved, the courts are involved and, clearly, Committees like you, the IOPC and HMICFRS have a scrutiny role to play to validate those perceptions one way or another. It is not nice to hear, but we have relatively thick skins and are protective of the integrity of our officers in the investigations they conduct.

I support everything that Chris Noble says. I will probably stick my neck out a little bit and say it is unhelpful sometimes and I will go so far as to say sometimes it is nonsense and it tends to undermine. We have arrested 169 people, charged 91, 32 are remanded in custody, 28 sentenced, and five are not yet charged. About a fifth of those are juveniles under 18 and 79% are white. That is 96 of them. We have 14 Asian offenders. We still have outstanding suspects, 49 white, 17 Asian and two black. An Asian offender was sentenced yesterday to just under three years for an offence of violent disorder, for stamping on somebody’s head. The numbers and the proportions there represent what happened on the streets. Without fear or favour, if you were involved in criminality, you were arrested or you will be arrested. The difficulty with the narrative is that those are the facts but people do not necessarily want to listen to the facts. If it does not conform with a view that you want to put across and you want to accuse police of two-tier policing, it has a negative effect on my officers.

That is all fair. You spoke about the CPS being expeditious. On that issue, although you are right and bringing criminals swiftly to justice should be applauded, clearly some in the public see this look like special treatment. How can the Government or all of us and you do a better job at explaining this in these circumstances?

That is difficult because we do and we try, but of course that message does not necessarily get traction. Factual debate does not seem to counter some of this argument. That is a difficult question for me to answer. We are fair in our policing style. If you look at our stop and search data, for example, it has no disproportionality. We are representative of our communities. It is difficult when something snowballs and almost gains a life of its own, such as the perception of two-tier policing. The people we arrested are the people for whom there was clear evidence they had committed violent disorder or other criminality. That is what my officers did. They are the facts. How we can to the narrative is quite difficult. We pushed constantly through our communications, “Please check what you read on social media before you act. Please check before you act,” because in many instances we stood resource up to respond to something that in reality was not tangible and was not a likely event but had been whipped up. The media literacy and ability to challenge what you are told and wonder who that is, why they are telling me that, what their motive is, whether it is somebody I have heard of before and whether it is reputable is not often there. That is quite a challenge.

Part of it as well was being able to nip this in the bud, for want of a better phrase. We could not have a situation where nationally we faced disorder like this, day in, day out, week in, week out. Swift justice happening and being seen to happen was important.

Is there a strategy going forward? There is thought, but is coherent thought going into how to counter this unfairness?

Yes. For me, this is where the Committee’s work is valuable for us. We have seen that in a number of areas where committees across Government have been incredibly valuable at bringing in the evidence, questioning, validating, testing it and then presenting a clear report. Policing has a key role, but the response has an element of, “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” The advocates and critics of policing, especially those with no axes to grind but are focused on community benefit, will have the loudest voices, whether locally or nationally on the work that you do. Whatever product emerges from the conversations you have will feed the debate and will, hopefully, be evidence-based and influential.

On a micro issue, a lot of this evolves in social media. Forgive me if this is a naive question, but does every force have a social media strategy and a communications team? Is this part of their brief? Sorry if that is a silly question.

We have a corporate communications team that has an outward focus on social media. On the day of the disorder, we had a communications officer within the command suite looking at what was coming in as well as putting out the right messages for us. That is pretty embedded across forces.

It seems pretty clear to me from the evidence you have given today that you have an enormous amount on your plate. Talking about managing narratives without getting too political, can the PCCs play more of a role here to help you with that narrative and the public-facing piece? It does not seem that you have time to be politicians, but you have this elected official. Is there a role for them and could they perhaps take on more of this burden from you?

We will ask them this in January, don’t worry.

I had better go first. Ben Adams and I have had this conversation in what I will call peacetime as opposed to times of crisis and challenge. He is respectful of my role, especially whenever we are dealing with live operational incidents with potentially criminal justice investigations and tails to follow as well. We have a key role in working with partners and voices in the communities and engagements with elected representatives, with that partnership and that healthy respect for each other’s roles and responsibilities. I see it as valuable. Those early conversations between chiefs, commissioners and indeed the wider elected representatives in a local area are important, because words carry weight and consequence.

I am mindful of the time. In this evidence session we have heard about each individual force looking at social media companies, social media engagement and so forth, and subjective judgments about when a protest turns into violent disorder. What is the role of the national policing infrastructure around this? Would it be better for a national body to engage with social media companies? Would it be better for a national body to do the horizon scanning on social media? Would it be better to have a national force or body to deploy public order officers into individual areas? Your insights and views on that will be helpful.

Each agency or each body will have a take or an interest in social media for a particular purpose. I have worked in Greater Manchester Police. I have worked in the National Crime Agency, in Cumbria and now in Cleveland. Each one has its own capability to look at things on social media. None of them has the capability to police the entirety of social media. Clearly, these entities are far bigger than anything policing has to offer. Actually, I do not want a national body being the response if I need to find out about some social media issue on the streets of Hartlepool. I need that to be local, I need it to be quick and I need it to be informed by my operational people on the ground. I need something locally to do that. Equally, I need to be able to go to others for that wider support. Chris Noble mentioned earlier the tiered structure. If I have an interest in a number of people who may be overseas and have posted things online about the disorder, because I think they have committed criminal offences, of course I will go up that chain to find the right people who can help me with the right thing. We do have a co-ordinated structure. I am sure that will come up in January and it will be interesting to see whether people at the national level have different views. I would hate that to be taken away from me so that a national body owns that but I need it today or tomorrow or in two hours for local policing on the streets of Middlesbrough.

It is important that you are able to interpret it using your own force context and your regional surroundings. That all being done at a national level is a risk.

Yes. From my perspective, UK policing’s greatest strength is that it is local. Its greatest challenge is that it is local. This disorder definitely gives lessons for us to reflect on and also about how we approach serious and organised crime and counter-terrorism. What is the right balance between what we do once nationally to provide that consistent approach and then what we deliver locally because we know local people? Clearly, you are local elected representatives as well as having national responsibilities, and you want a local feel from people who get their local area, who they see, who they can rely on and who respond to their local needs. That is core to the debate here. If we need a shift, how do we make sure it is cautious and thoughtful as opposed to stepping away from a model that is still envied the world over with a local feel and approach to policing?

The whole internet space needs some attention in general. I will leave it at that.

Wise words.

What is the balance between what is a protest and what is not a protest, particularly—it has been mentioned in the evidence session—where initially locally it looked like a protest but nationally other things were going on? Do we have the balance right in this country when deciding between a legitimate protest and thugs using protest as an excuse to bring their supporters on to the streets time and time again to cause chaos and disturbance to communities and use it as a vehicle for other means?

I will briefly put my other hat on. I have tried to hide it until now. I am the police chiefs lead for protest across the country. For me, the balance is set by legislators or the judiciary around what is protest and what is not. We were dealing in August specifically with violence and that shifts the pendulum away from protest because protest may well have a degree of resistance but it should be non-violent. The relevant rights around protest are disengaged then because we are dealing with violent behaviour. The law is clear but in, for example, the life cycle of activity in a town centre and when it moves from protest to violent disorder, there can be a period of blurred lines. All I can say is, from a Staffordshire point of view, it became clear when it was not a protest.

I do not know if anyone wants to add anything to that but, finally, there is a threshold test. Even low-level antisocial behaviour during a protest multiple times across a year might not necessarily tip over the threshold of violent disorder, but is it legitimate protest in your view? Do you feel that you can push back as chief constables in your local area?

Yes, there is a much wider debate there around acceptable protest activity and levels of tolerance that the law and community should accept. That is a whole session in itself. Police commanders on the ground still have a challenge to weigh up some challenging sets of circumstances. When do they intervene? When do they remove people from a road? When do people get arrested for particular offences? Irrespective of the law’s precision, because of ECHR considerations, interpretation at the time will always be scrutinised in court in slower time. We do not have the ability to apply slow time to policing. We have to make judgments at the time based on the facts we have.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Ben Maguire want to come in. I realise that we are imposing on you, but I hope that is okay.

Sorry. As we come to an end, in the interest of making sure this does not happen again, what do you think was behind the riots?

Gosh, there’s a question. I will try to swerve your question, but I will say that it is pretty clear that when you look at the locations where this disorder occurred, many of them probably have some common factors. Many of them are challenged communities. The social fabric is quite difficult across many of them. That probably makes them fairly fertile ground to be whipped up for violence, maybe out of wanton criminality, boredom or any number of different issues. I sat in court for a full day seeing some of the individuals being sentenced. Most of the people who came through Teesside Crown Court on the first day of sentencing had been out, had had too much to drink, had walked past and thought, “Why not?” That is not a representative sample, but much of that desperation, despair, lack of hope, lack of stake and nothing to lose certainly impacted on the disorder that took place in Cleveland.

I have a quick follow-up to Shaun’s question and it goes back a little bit to the intelligence sharing and monitoring that we were talking about earlier, the border between peaceful protest and violent disorder, and pre-emptive arrests and pre-emptive monitoring of suspects. This is an open-ended question but how do you balance that, especially when you do not know how it will develop and it is a fast-moving situation that can quite quickly go from peaceful protest to violent disorder?

Chris Noble is the expert and he will correct me if I am wrong but certainly with ours, we needed to make a judgment as to whether we could engage with these people to effect some kind of influence over what would happen. During that, as happened on our occasions, those individuals appeared to trip over into criminality and then the judgment was made by my commanders at that point that arresting them may give us an ability to reduce the risk of that protest. They are experienced and they are good. They may make a different judgment on a different day with different weather and with different numbers on the street. They have the nous and experience to make that judgment. I could never codify that and say, “If this, you will.” There has to be a lot of experience in that judgment. They took those judgments at the time. Unfortunately, they did not nip it in the bud as you might want, but the balance is difficult. They could have gone in and aggravated the situation. That is the decision and that is the balance that they have to judge every time.

We have seen those pre-emptive arrests taking place, for example at some of the G20s or the climate change conferences, where there is clear information and a clear intention about what will happen. If a threshold is breached, police can intervene. We have seen it recently as well with a group called Palestine Action. Policing, again, has been proactive in its approach around arrests, but we need to be proportionate around that because it should not be about locking up people who say something that people may well find offensive. It has to be clearly based in law and process before we do it. We will use that tactic, but it is linked to the levels of harm that might be caused.

In addition to that, in our case the organiser of the protest co-operates with the police. They have had similar protests and speeches in Hull city centre before and since that have been peaceful. It is not easy to pre-empt.

Thank you for your time. If any of you want to add anything else, please, this is your opportunity. We have just about beaten a division bell that is coming any moment. In particular, could any reforms to the national policing system assist in these circumstances? Do you have any thoughts on that or anything else you might want to say before we conclude, in the order we started?

Not particularly. If anything comes to mind, I will write to the panel afterwards, but nothing above what I have said today.

Going back a few questions to the two-tier policing approach, there is a fantastic example for me of how that is not how we do business. On the day of the disorder in Rotherham, I had two officers in a van trying to get to colleagues who were injured. That van was surrounded by protesters who were rocking it from side to side. They had to decide how they would get out of there. Part of their decision-making process was that if the van went over, the protesters would get hurt. They were thinking broadly about the protesters and protecting their lives as well as those of the residents of the hotel. That was a proper example of it in actual time.

In 30 seconds from me, the opportunity to look at what policing did is valuable. We welcome that without any arrogance or defensiveness around what we can learn and do better. However, as colleagues have touched on, what happens before and what happens after are fundamental for community cohesion, understanding our communities and some of the drivers. That is not excusing behaviours. It is recognising that going forward we have communities with significant tensions and fractures and we need to be thoughtful about how we address that.

I echo the comment about cohesion going forward. Members of the community are still frightened by all this or at least have perceptions around some of the anger that was involved. We saw violent disorder, but the anger was raw from some of those people and they still feel that. We will have to work hard on that for a long time to come.

Thank you very much for your time. I realise we have gone longer than we told you we would, but we have beaten the Division bell so that is something. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Committee. With that, I will conclude the proceedings.