Mob rule has cowed the Metropolitan Police during Mark Duggan's trial
MARK DUGGAN was a nasty little gangster who lived by the gun and died by the gun.
It is natural for his family to be upset but it beggars belief that the judge in the case should be kowtowing to them by inviting them to comment on changes to police firearms procedures.
Why indeed should any changes be necessary when the thousands of incidents each year in which the police are armed result in so few actual shootings and only rare fatalities?
Supporters of the dead gangster, deprived of the verdict they wanted, rioted in the courtroom and terrified jurors whose only crime was to have done their job conscientiously over many months.
Why aren’t they being prosecuted? Because the police are afraid of inflaming the situation.
That is why they do not stop and search as often as they should – that and all the silly paperwork.
When I made my documentary on girl gangs many of the young women I spoke to carried knives as a matter of course, as other women might carry a lipstick.
They did so because they knew they would get away with it.
If instead they had thought they would be stopped, searched and detained instead of having a good night out they would have been less blasé about toting lethal weapons.
Yet the wimpish leaders of our boys in blue bleat about less rather than more stop and search.
The police response to gangs is pathetic. Scared of escalating confrontation into riots they pander to them rather than set out to squash them.
Of course there is a big place for community work, liaison and healing but they must be additions to normal policing not substitutions for it.
Neither the commissioner of the Met nor the judge should be making the silly sort of conciliatory noises which have emanated from them since the verdict.
Gangsters are always anti-social, often dangerous and we cannot afford for them to be seen as above the law.
The police should brace themselves, confront the gangs, make all the arrests necessary and if they have to face the riots and the violent reactions.
That in turn requires leadership and we lack a Mayor Giuliani but if he could tame New York our own politicians should be able to tame London.
Theresa May, what are you doing?
Bernard Hogan-Howe, what are you doing? Because from where I am sitting it looks like not much.
