The rash of vile far right riots over the past week or so, tendentiously connected to the shocking and appalling murders of three young girls in Southport, are reminders of one of the essential purposes of the criminal justice system is to maintain the peace and preserve order. There will be times and places when the issues that have led us to this place— public debates about immigration and social cohesion, the tone and quality of debate in our public square, the protection and vilification of certain communities— need to be had. In a democracy, that place is in Parliament and in the voting booth. What we have seen is not protest— it is mob violence, instigated and directed by racists. There is no justification for rioting nor for the acts of violence, destruction and harassment we have witnessed. And it is worrying that some, including the national Chair of Police and Crime Commissioners, have tried to do so.
Over twenty years of criminal justice experience suggests to me that politicians in response will be sorely tempted to reach for the legislative lever. Parliamentarians, many of them legally trained, are good at passing laws. The temptation to see every problem’s solution in the passage of a new law may prove all too great. But we need to take the right lessons here. The police already have a slew of powers to deal with rioting, powers to deal with public protest and processions and assemblies, and powers to conduct surveillance. Many of the acts witnessed in town centres across the country are criminal offences, which already carry significant sentences. The challenge for the criminal justice system is not the theoretical power of the state to maintain public order nor even, when we get to it, to have the powers required to deliver proportionate punishment.
The real challenge is can the criminal justice system deliver? In times of emergency, most recently the 2011 riots, we asked the system to respond. It did. The question before us is can it now? My hunch is that we may scrape through but we have a set of institutions creaking after years of neglect. We are now asking them to swing into action to deliver some of the criminal justice system’s other purposes, namely to ensure a fair hearing for all (yes, when they are even alleged child murderers and Nazi sympathisers) and to deliver proportionate punishment when they are found guilty. But do we have the lawyers to prosecute and defend the people arrested? Do we have the resources at court not just to ensure that cases are heard but that they are heard swiftly? Do we have the prison and probation resources to deliver the punishment Parliament intends?
We need to build back the system over the coming years so we can do so again (if we need to) and not just by scrambling around in a crisis. This requires making arguments in Whitehall in the upcoming Spending Review that we can’t go on with a criminal justice system held together with sticking plasters. We need to address the draining out of talent and capacity from the criminal legal profession. We need to take a more consistent national view on the deployment (and regulation) of facial recognition technology by the police, rather than the piecemeal approach we have seen. We need strong public institutions, properly managed, which can preserve the peace in all our communities and deliver a justice system in which citizens, poor or rich, low or high can get justice.