LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron has said his government
had started a fight back against rioters and permitted police to use
water cannons, as unrest, quelled in London by a surge of police,
spread across the country.
The PM said contingency plans were
now in place to have water cannons available at 24 hours’ notice.
Police in mainland Britain have never used the vehicles for riot
control before. Officers have already been authorized to use rubber
bullets to control Britain’s worst rioting since the 1980s.
London’s
Metropolitan Police put 16,000 officers on duty overnight, up from
6,000 the previous evening. That calmed the situation in the capital
after three nights of unrest, Cameron said, even as looting and arson
spread to Manchester, northern England’s biggest city. “We needed a
fightback, and a fightback has begun,” Cameron told reporters outside
his Downing Street office here on Wednesday. “We will do whatever is
necessary to restore order on our streets.”
More than 750
people have been arrested in London and at least 500 others in
provincial cities since Aug. 6, when the unrest began in the suburb of
Tottenham, after a local man, Mark Duggan, was shot and killed by
police who stopped his car intending to make an arrest. The violence
has led shops and offices to close early, forced the cancellation of
soccer games and raised security concerns a year before London stages
the 2012 Olympic Games, as the deepest budget cuts since World War II
cost more than 30,000 police jobs across the country. Cameron has
recalled Parliament for an emergency session tomorrow.
The
prime minister said the scenes of looting and arson this week showed
parts of society were sick, presenting police and politicians with a
new challenge. “It’s as much a moral problem as a political one,” he
said.
“Sentences are already being passed, courts sat through
the night last night, and will do again tonight,” Cameron said. “It is
for the courts to sentence, but I would expect anyone convicted of
violent disorder to be sent to prison.”
Cameron shrugged off
suggestions from London Mayor Boris Johnson, a member of the premier’s
Conservative Party, that the violence meant the government should
reconsider cuts to the police budget. Online
