A police chief branded claims of two-tier policing “nonsense” as he insisted his officers had been “entirely fair” in the way they responded to the summer riots.
Mark Webster, the boss of Cleveland Police, told MPs “people don’t want to listen to the facts” when asked about the debate which erupted amid accusations that some criminals were getting special treatment from police because of their background.
His comments came after riots swept the country in July and August in the wake of the Southport stabbings.
Answering questions from the Commons Home Affairs Committee on Tuesday, the chief constable said the “narrative” around whether there was two-tier policing in the UK was “really unhelpful sometimes”, adding: “And I go so far as to say sometimes it’s nonsense, and it does tend to undermine.”
“Without fear or favour if you were involved in criminality, you were arrested, or you will be arrested,” he said as he insisted his force was “very fair” and stressed that people were arrested when there was “clear evidence” they were suspected of committing violent disorder or other crimes.
People “don’t necessarily want to listen to the facts, and if it doesn’t conform with the view that you want to put across and you want to accuse police of two-tier policing, it does have a really negative effect on my officers”, he told the committee.
“Factual debate doesn’t seem to be a way through countering some of this argument,” he added.
The force had urged the public to “check what you’re reading on social media before you act” and to question the source and motive of the information, the MPs heard.
Earlier in the session, Mr Webster said forces do not have the “capability to police the entirety of social media”, adding: “Clearly these entities are far, far bigger than anything policing has got to offer.”
Staffordshire Police chief constable Chris Noble said it “does not make any sense for policing at all to show favouritism whenever we’re built on respect for the rule of the law”.
He added: “This is a very different set of circumstances from the very 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.”
“So if two-tier policing is bringing people swiftly to justice, I’m not quite sure many people would argue with that,” he said.
The allegations are “not nice to hear, but we’ve got relatively thick skin”, he said, but added: “We are very protective of the integrity of our officers”.
Asked what was behind the riots, Mr Webster said there were “common factors” among many of the areas where unrest occurred, adding: “Many of them are challenged communities. The social fabric is quite difficult across many of them and I think that probably makes them fairly fertile to be either whipped up or for violence, maybe out of just wanting criminality, boredom, any number of different issues.”
He cited examples of people being sentenced who had “been out, they’d had too much to drink, they’d walk past and thought, why not?”
“That’s not a representative sample, but I think much of that desperation, this lack of hope, lack of state, nothing to lose, I think much of that certainly impacted on the riots and the disorder that took place in Cleveland,” he added.
Judi Heaton, the chief constable of Humberside Police, also told the committee how vital the justice system functioning quickly was to “nip this (the riots) in the bud”, adding: “We couldn’t have a situation where, nationally, we were facing disorder like this, day in, day out, week in, week out.
“So actually, swift justice happening and being seen to happen was really important.”
