The Police The Riots: In Their Own Words

This programme contains strong language.

There's petrol bombs and bricks being thrown. They had control at that point.

And a lot of them knew that.

As we exited the car park,

the van was getting constantly pelted.

The thing that probably scared me the most was that the side door was about to fly open.

And someone was just going to come in and drag me off.

As soon as the officer went down, this kind of cheer...

And they're trying to throw quite large chunks of masonry on him.

I've never seen that level of hatred towards the police.

For five days last summer, England was looted and burned.

Confronting the rioters were just a few thousand police officers.

They held the thin blue line

when control of Britain's streets hung in the balance.

I had to say, "You're not going to get any more resources

"in the immediate future.

"You've got what you've got, you're going to have to try and hold the high street."

He said to me, "Are you joking?"

I mean, it was almost impossible to breathe.

Smoke started to bellow out from the roof

and my fear was something in there was going to blow.

What'll happen if the roof collapses

or a brick wall falls down?

Someone's going to get hurt.

Some people think that the police are some anonymous robot out there.

We're not. Back at home, my wife and my kids were scared.

The first film in this series

looked at what happened through the eyes of the rioters.

This is the story of last summer's riots

told by the police in their own words.

Saturday, 6th August.

Police helicopters flying over London relay alarming pictures

of disturbance unfolding in Tottenham, North London.

Supt Roger Gomm orders riot police to be mobilised

before heading to the control room at Lambeth.

Once I'd arrived, I checked that the service mobilise plan

had been activated, you know, where are the resources?

Are they there yet? Are they on their way?

And it was at that stage someone actually piped up,

"They're still on amber, sir. Would you like me to mobilise to red?"

I think my prompt answer was "Yes, immediately."

Two days earlier,

the Metropolitan Police had shot dead a local man, Mark Duggan.

Protesters demanding an explanation for the family

were angered by what they felt was a slow police response.

Peaceful at first, their demonstration turned nasty.

On Tottenham High Road, Chief Inspector Ade Adelekan

is now struggling to hold the line

against an increasingly militant crowd.

We're talking wheelie bins on fire.

wheeled towards us.

We're talking bottles from the off-licence down the road

being and set alight being made into firebombs and thrown at us.

I was calling for more backup.

I asked for public order trained officers to be deployed

as soon as they possibly could.

The fuse had been lit for England's worst riots for a generation.

I didn't necessarily have to go to Tottenham

but I was one of the only ones that were public order trained,

so I put my name up for it and said I wanted to go.

It took us about 45 minutes on the blue light run

to get to Stoke Newington.

When we got there, we were told we have to go to Tottenham High Road

to assist the officers that had been standing in front of the hostile crowd

for two or three hours.

We were the first officers to go there to help out.

As we drove past the police station,

somebody threw a brick which smashed our windscreen.

At that point, it hit everybody in the bus that

this is the real thing, and they potentially may die.

The kit we were wearing, obviously, is very uncomfortable and it's very warm.

It was hard to try to see what is going on in front of you.

You were very hot and emotional at the same time.

We were under attack by a very large crowd,

throwing anything that was there.

It was hard. It was very terrifying.

We were using tactics that we were trained to go forward

and backwards to disperse the crowd

but the crowd was so hostile that they wouldn't be dispersed.

At the Met's special operations room in Lambeth,

Roger Gomm has a bird's eye view.

We've got the helicopter television downlink.

Then we can link into the thousands of cameras across London

and actually we were able to see quite a lot of the disorder.

They were coming under a fierce attack.

And they were, initially,

doing what we would call short shield advances to drive the crowd back.

But, of course, if you go too far,

and you've got a junction on your left or you're right,

you could then expose yourself from attack from the rear

or even to be surrounded.

So, in effect, they were having to stand still

and what became very obvious is that the crowd realised this,

that the police weren't coming any further forward

because there wasn't enough of them.

The lack of officers dictated police tactics.

Without the manpower to make mass arrests,

the priority was to disperse the rioters

as best they could to enable fire engines to get to burning buildings.

We didn't stand still or stand there and watch on,

but at some point I had to make the difficult decision.

It was life. It was always going to be life above property.

At 11:30pm, a unit from Fulham arrives to relieve the frontline.

The experience still haunts Inspector Andre Ramsay.

We then got the nod to go forward up the road at the double.

That meant running in full kit, helmet on, shield,

running up a distance of around 800 metres.

And as we got closer, we could make out the silhouettes of rioters.

The noise then started to increased dramatically.

And communication became much more challenging

purely because of the noise.

It was almost impossible to hear the radios.

It was a possibility that we might get shot at,

particularly if we were lured too far forward.

And I also saw what appeared to be machetes being dangled down

by the side of their legs.

So that was sending out a very clear message to me

that certainly if anybody got separated, you know,

it could all come to a very grisly end.

On our very first short shield run forward, I was knocked unconscious.

I don't know what hit me but it was clearly something extremely heavy.

I mean, literally, the lights went out.

Get the medics down here! Quick!

And the next thing I remember was being hauled up back onto my feet.

I just shook my head, tried to regain my vision. And...

there was no other option but to carry on.

The biggest consideration I had, personally,

was how long was this going to go on for? And how long would I last?

The Chief Inspector operating on the High Road phoned me up

to tell me they're exhausted, they need a break,

is there any relief for them, is there any more resources coming?

And I had to say to him, "Graham,

"you're not going to get any more resources in the immediate future.

"You've got what you've got, you're going to have to try to hold the high street."

And he wasn't sure if I was telling him the truth.

In fact, he said to me, "Are you joking?"

They managed to get into the Pride Of Tottenham public house

and anything you can imagine to be in a public house,

that was been thrown at us.

They'd managed to get chairs and tables out, frying pans.

When they started throwing knives at us,

and that point I thought, "This is it.

"You're going to get really badly injured."

There were thousands of items coming at us. It was raining at us.

It wasn't one at a time.

You couldn't really concentrate on different angles

because you knew it's coming from all different angles at you.

And then something hit me on the left side of my head.

Next thing I remember,

I've been dragged back towards the rear of the front line.

Behind the horses where all the engine officers were.

The Aldi supermarket stands out in my mind because

very soon after our arrival, they were forming up a baseline.

Smoke started to bellow out from the roof

and it was almost impossible to breathe.

We knew we couldn't fall back and we couldn't go forward.

Then there were enormous cracks

and the sounds of small explosions coming from inside

and my fear was something in there was going to blow,

and what'll happen if the roof collapses

or a brick wall falls down?

Someone's going to get hurt.

It was also at that point that we probably came under the most

sustained bombardment throughout our whole time

on Tottenham High Road.

Because the supermarket trolleys were being used by the rioters

to stock up with bricks from a nearby building site

and they're wheeling them around to their own front line

and then using those as immediate replenishment.

The police battle into the small hours to try to stem the turmoil

as Tottenham High Road becomes an inferno.

People wanted to hurt us.

People wanted to hurt us really, really bad.

And it was frightening for the officers.

If I'm totally frank, it was frightening for me.

I've never seen anything like it.

I pray to God I never see anything like it again.

When we got relieved, and this was about 2:30/3:00 in the morning,

I was being checked over by one of the paramedics.

We saw a guy running down the road with a massive plasma TV

in his hands and at that point we realised that the retail park,

which is literally next to where we stood, is being looted.

With all the police tied up on Tottenham High Road,

Tottenham Hale Retail Park has become a free-for-all.

'The fucking police are retards. I can't believe

'they're not even here yet.'

Everybody tried to arrest people that they could arrest

but a lot of people did get away,

purely because their numbers were ten times,

20 times more than our numbers.

There is no way that you can arrest somebody at that point

when you've got thousands of people in front of you,

all committing the same offence.

8am, Sunday 7th August.

The fires in Tottenham High Road

have finally been brought under control.

Inspect Andre Ramsay is relieved

after over eight hours on the front line.

I remember walking down Tottenham High Road

and the place did look like a war zone.

I, in fact, didn't get back to Fulham Police Station

until 11 o'clock the following morning.

And I got back to the yard there, totally covered in dust,

debris, glass, ripped, my boots were actually cut open,

only to be met by a chief inspector who quite happily asked me

could I get back in for two o'clock that afternoon.

BBC NEWS JINGLE

'Police in North London have spent much of the night dealing

'with rioting in Tottenham.

'Buildings, police cars and a double-decker us were set alight

'and shops were looted...'

As the British public woke up to the aftermath of the riot,

it was not just the rioters who were condemned.

Over the days that followed, the police would be roundly criticised

for not acting more robustly.

The perception was that the police had not done enough to stop

homes and businesses from being looted and burned.

We left the flat as the rioters were coming up the road.

The buildings were on fire. We legged the flat.

-We didn't see one police person.

-The fire engines couldn't be there because the police weren't there.

There was nobody there to protect us.

The Met acknowledged they had been caught on the back foot.

The big question now was could they contain it to Tottenham?

6pm, Sunday 7th August.

Croydon Borough Commander Adrian Roberts

arrives in the operations room at Lambeth.

He's got the job of directing the police strategy

over the coming days.

I remember coming into the control room

and things were starting to happen across the London footprint

that were already sucking us into action

before we'd had a chance to properly have a handover and a debrief.

We were straight into it, hitting the deck running.

Would-be rioters were using smartphones and the internet

to try to organise more trouble.

Social networking sites and BlackBerries are awash

with conflicting intelligence about where the next riot will be.

The Met has insufficient expertise and technology to deal with it.

The intelligence that was coming in, you know,

at the rate of one piece of intelligence per second, you know,

overwhelming, coming in. And I can remember saying, "Right,

"I'll put one person with a box of intelligence that was coming in,"

and saying, "You evaluate that intelligence."

We can't just chase every piece of intelligence

because we'd be even in a worse position than we were.

The Met later acknowledged that their inability to monitor social media

meant they could not get ahead of events.

8pm, Enfield.

Police tackle the rioters

but they are unable to bring the widespread chaos under control.

No-one would have...

could have understood or envisaged the sheer size

and scale that we experienced.

I defy anybody...to really have predicted that.

Rioting is now spreading across five London boroughs.

1am.

WPC Alanna Harris is in a response team

deployed from Kensington to Brixton.

I don't think I'd ever been to Brixton before that night.

I had no idea where I was.

Harris has had riot training but never had to use it.

With disorder widespread across London, riot kit is in short supply.

We were told, "Get your balaclavas on, get your NATO helmets on."

My serial ended up with no shields.

There wasn't enough.

When they arrive, the retail park on Brixton's Effra Road

is being ransacked.

'Right, I can see people carrying 50 inch TVs on their heads and shit.

'They can do this. It's mad!'

There are still looters inside Currys electrical store.

After a while, we noticed some hands appearing under the metal shutter

that was open a foot and a half

with one or two fire extinguishers.

They set off the fire extinguishers for a short burst

and this filled up the foyer with a smog.

And pretty much before I knew it, people were coming out of this gap.

One came straight towards me with a fire extinguisher.

And just had it setting off straight in my face.

I was completely blinded by this.

I think I just wiped it away as quickly as I could.

As looters come out of the shop, the police descend and arrest them.

But no sooner are they in custody than the police come under attack

from another mob that has rounded the corner.

They are outnumbered.

My inspector just shouted, "Everybody get out, now! Get out!"

I said I'll jump on the van.

The driver then...

um, employed a tactic that is to actually reverse at the group

so he started actually reversing.

And I was quite shocked at this, like,

we're going towards them, not away from them, um...

And he kept doing this backwards and forwards,

backwards and forwards, and he said afterwards

he was just getting massive thumbs up from our colleagues.

Um, and realised that this was working.

As we exited the car park, the van was getting constantly pelted.

The female prisoner was screaming her head off.

She was massively scared. But I was just forcing her down,

very scared that something's going to fly straight through

that window and crack her on the head.

The adrenaline was going through all of us.

The thing that probably scared me the most

was that the side door was about to fly open.

And someone's going to come in and drag me off.

And then, totally unbeknownst to me,

a brick had actually come through the window

and had very nearly caught me on the head right at the front of the van.

But it meant we had a hole in our back doors.

My colleague was holding a kind of handle

to try to keep these doors shut.

He then screamed, "I'm being attacked!"

And what has happened is this machete has just appeared

through this hole in the window

and just started hacking at his hand.

He was wearing public order gloves

and this basically pretty much saved his hand.

At West End Central police station,

WPC Harris tries to find out what has motivated the rioters.

One male that I arrested from Effra Road

when we were sat in the custody suite,

I don't know how the conversation started as such

but it was, you know, "What were you doing there, what were you doing?"

And he had quite clearly come out from Currys and yet he still said,

"You shouldn't have killed Duggan."

And I kind of turned to him and said,

"But you were burgling a shop."

And it just seemed to me that they were

so fixated on this Duggan being the reason.

But why would you burgle an electrical store

because police officers have shot a man?

And the girl who we'd arrested, she had a four-month-old baby

which she was obviously very worried about getting back to, fair enough.

But there must be something...

To leave a four-month-old baby to go and take the risk of burgling

from a superstore, from Currys... I don't know, there must've been something so strong in there

that just thought they'd all get away with it.

Why can't we?

When I got home, I'd been awake for over 24 hours.

I'd only had one proper meal.

I'd probably drank maybe two bottles of water and the adrenaline

had kept me going and I got home and just pretty much fell apart.

Monday, 8th August, 12:30am.

Following the second night of violence, acting Met Commissioner

Tim Godwin increases the number of police on the streets to 6,000.

1,700 more than the previous night.

I have a lot of very brave officers

ho will continue to police this city.

Just give us the space now to deal with the people that are doing it.

By late afternoon, riot police are stationed in many

of the city's likely trouble-spots

with increased powers of stop and search.

But Godwin would later face criticism for not mobilising more officers.

When you're planning a police operation, there is a cost involved.

Whether they're working overtime or more importantly for me,

you've taken them away from their local boroughs

to police an event somewhere else so there's always a cost involved.

As evening approaches, all of London is on high alert.

Sutton Commander Guy Ferguson fears his borough may be next.

Young people and members of the public were coming up to us,

and some of them were quite excited

about what they thought was going to happen.

They'd say, "You know there's going to be disorder in Sutton tonight?

"We've got it on Facebook, we've got it on Twitter,

"this is what's happening on our BlackBerries."

It was quite obvious to me that there's real potential for disorder.

Later on in the evening, the mood of the crowd really changed.

Some of them were pulling up scarves and pulling down hoods

and I thought, "This is the prelude to something really rather nasty."

I was absolutely determined it wasn't going to happen in my bit

of London and so at that point I took a decision

to disperse the crowd.

So I gathered together the officers that I had,

formed them in a line across the high street

and moved down from south to north down the slope of the high street.

The men and women that I had with me

were in their ordinary beat duty uniform.

They are not public order equipped,

they weren't specialist public order people at all.

I got the officers to get their batons out and hold them

above their heads by way of a show of strength

so that people realised that we were the police

and we were going to take control of the situation and we were in charge.

Ferguson's decisive action stopped any would-be rioters

in their tracks.

But other parts of London aren't going to be that easy.

4:30pm, Hackney. It's one of London's poorest boroughs.

Fight the feds, fight the feds. Fight all the feds.

Some people here hold a deeper animosity to the police.

A stop and search caught on film ignites an already angry crowd.

Don't fucking try to express my role. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Local rector Rob Wickham saw the aftermath.

There's an extraordinary sense that you feel just before a storm breaks.

It felt very heavy and very oppressive.

Something was going to happen.

And in the end there was an altercation between a member

of the police force and someone else who was there,

there was a slight scuffle but that's all it took.

In the thick of it is Special Constable Michael Lewis,

an unpaid police volunteer.

When it all kicked off, that was one of my first ever shifts

and I'm like, "God, what do I do?" Cos I don't know what to do.

SHOUTING

It wasn't nice.

You can tell the difference between someone driving past in a car

full of youths shouting, "Fucking pigs!"

and someone shouting at you in your face in line,

"You're a fucking pig."

It was venomous, that's what made it scary.

I remember seeing our car being trashed. It was crazy.

They had control at that point and I think a lot of them knew that.

What happened in Hackney took the disorder to a new level.

Here, looting was a sideshow

and the police themselves are the target for the community's anger.

Firstly, I heard a colleague shout, "Get your baton out, get your baton out!"

And I'm fumbling around with this new equipment. All the pouches

tight on my baton and I couldn't quite get it out

cos I was like, "Argh! What the...?" I've never had to use it before.

Reinforcements arrive including a dog unit

commanded by Sergeant Pete Madden

who has served in the Met for 30 years.

So we're arriving at a very, very hostile situation.

And we just immediately deploy from our dog van and we assist

the units that are already trying to disperse these rioters away.

People don't come that close to the dogs and that's fine

cos the dogs aren't there to become close to.

They're there to drive people away.

Tell them to move. They're on camera.

Some people might tend to argue with a police officer.

If a 40 kilo German Shepherd is running down the road at them,

they'll tend not to argue and perhaps disperse.

Our visors get steamed up, it's hard to see,

it's very, very hard to hear.

Radio's going on a lot, the helicopter noise, alarms, shouting.

CAR ALARM

Adding to their difficulties, it's hard to distinguish

between rioters and people who have come along for entertainment.

Best day ever. This is Hackney for you.

Get me some alcohol. Go and get me some alcohol.

Generally I assume if they're masked up and hiding their identity,

that they're intent on engaging in criminal behaviour

and others are just there

like it's some sort of sightseeing festival,

like there's gladiators in the Colosseum.

I don't know if the person who stands to one side is perfectly innocent

or if he's someone

who's going to launch a brick at the back of my head the minute we've gone past.

We are getting all sorts of verbal abuse.

I'm less bothered about that because that isn't going to hurt me,

that isn't going to crack my skull open,

that's not going to break my leg.

It's missiles, that's what I'm worried about.

There's petrol bombs being thrown, there's bricks being thrown.

There was a lorry that had tried to drive through the crowds

but had got stopped and smashed up and that was carrying wood.

That was just like a truckload of ammunition.

Radio said that they were taping Stanley knives to wood to throw

and making spears.

You could potentially be severely injured or even worse.

I can't explain how scary that was.

And all I remember is seeing a brick come over the barricades.

It hit the floor, split in two, bounced up and whacked me straight in the eye.

It's not just tapped me, this has really smacked me in the face.

And I remember a medic being shouted,

but I knew that we were outnumbered

and there was not enough police officers there

and I'm thinking, "All I've got is a black eye and a bit of blood,

"I can still do this job. I don't need to go."

What use am I if I go and sit in a hospital bed,

especially when there's people who probably need to go to hospital.

And I refused to go.

-POLICE:

-Keep moving!

The police go on the offensive in an attempt to disperse the crowd.

I saw a bottle bank that had been upturned

and a hell of a lot of those bottles were thrown at us.

They managed to move the mob on but they regroup on Clarence Road

near Hackney's sprawling Pembury estate,

notorious for its armed gangs.

There was a real kind of build-up of testosterone.

You had people from the police who were just as pumped up

as the rioters were pumped up.

On one level it's kind of like watching stags fighting,

in terms of the level of intensity about what was going on.

Police now find themselves on the rioters' territory.

There's a huge crowd, probably a couple of hundred.

Rival street gangs have agreed a temporary truce

to fight their common enemy, the police.

There was a lot of chatter on social media and BlackBerry messaging

about people looking to kill a police officer.

For Madden, it brings back chilling memories.

I was on duty the night that Keith Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham

and I heard his serial screaming for help on the radio.

One of the most haunting things I've ever heard.

It could have happened to us that night.

Police push forward to clear the area.

But just as they seem to have control of the road,

they're ordered to withdraw.

Some of my officers were quite dispirited by that.

They'd achieved something. There was a risk to them in doing so,

but we'd been effective and we'd done a good job.

They weren't really understanding quite why we were being pulled back

and not retaining possession of the ground that we'd won, effectively.

Fearing the presence of firearms,

the unit has been pulled back for its own safety.

The Met has not just got Hackney to worry about.

Disorder is now breaking out in 22 London boroughs.

At Lambeth, Commander Adrian Roberts struggles to effectively deploy

the 6,000 officers he has at his disposal.

I had Post-it Notes on one wall representing each borough.

I had an instruction that said anyone who gets any information about the borough,

write it on a Post-it and overlay the one in front of it.

That's what we had on that wall. On the other wall

we had the 70 or 80 PSUs,

which is a group of 25 public order police officers.

We had them on there trying to track a map where they were around London.

As riot police are posted to the worst trouble spots,

some areas are left with no riot-trained officers.

In Roberts' own borough of Croydon,

there is a shortage of police that will have devastating consequences.

BlackBerry messages sent between the rioters and seen by police

show that Croydon is a possible target.

There would have been snippets of intelligence.

Remember, not all the stuff that's out there on social media is what's going to happen.

We didn't have any clue that Croydon was going to feature in the way that it did,

but then the scale jumped and quite quickly turned on a sixpence.

We started getting people coming to the station with throw-away comments

such as, "Has it started yet?"

People coming up to me saying, "I've got this message on my phone

"saying it's going to kick off in Croydon."

In the absence of Croydon's riot-trained units,

British Transport Police step into the breach alongside local beat officers.

As I exited the station, we saw about 200 people rushing past

along the London Road and down towards the bottom of the hill.

I'm not a public order officer myself.

I'm literally a neighbourhood police officer.

I don't have a stack of helmets and shields and protective clothing.

I literally went out with what I had on.

As I walked out,

I can remember the air crackling with static,

static electricity. It was quite...

Literally the hairs on the back of your neck would stand on end.

And there were hundreds and hundreds of people in the road.

There was a collection of perhaps a dozen police officers

at the top of the hill.

And people in the roadway started to put on balaclavas and face coverings.

Oh. Oh dear.

We've got trouble. We were clearly hopelessly outnumbered.

The mob starts to hijack vehicles along London Road,

even pulling a driver from his moped.

In the rioters' hands, vehicles now become weapons.

At first there was a couple of young lads on a moped

and they came right up to the police lines.

In my opinion, they were counting us.

They stood there for a few seconds, counted us,

span round and went back into the crowd at the bottom of the hill.

And then the whole crowd began marching up the road

with this four-door saloon car as a figurehead.

As it approached, it came through at full speed,

straight at police lines. There was no intention to scare us.

They were trying to run is over.

That was absolutely without a shadow of a doubt attempted murder.

If we had not jumped when we did, it would have killed one of us.

So that was quite terrifying. Quite terrifying.

Plus the fact that in the back of your mind,

once the car had driven at us once, who's to say there isn't another car?

Every time we heard a vehicle approaching

we were shouting out a warning from all angles. "Vehicle! Vehicle!"

I got a text message from my wife quite early on

almost jokingly saying, "You're not at West Croydon by any chance, are you?"

I literally had enough time to say, "Yes, but I'm safe."

As dusk approaches, rioters across London vent their anger

not just on the police but on their own communities.

In Hackney, bystanders watch in horror

as rioters start to set fire to their neighbourhood.

About 10 or 12 people on bicycles with their balaclavas up

who were just circling around, waiting for the next chance.

You could see people making petrol bombs with their balaclavas up,

then these would be thrown.

What really frightened me was the absolute intensity

of trying to set fire to the shops,

even though there were people living above them.

The police still stationed in Hackney head back into the Pembury Estate,

from which they had been withdrawn because of the danger.

My officers would rather get hurt going forward than going back.

There's pops from the various cars. Some of those are tyres.

We're concerned about petrol tanks going.

It's too dangerous to get the fire brigade up there.

We haven't got the situation under control.

We've now got to get people out of their homes

because we're fearful that these cars are going to explode

and people are going to be injured in their homes.

In other boroughs, the same scenes are playing out

as rioters start fires indiscriminately.

At Lambeth, Commander Adrian Roberts can see rioters

set fire to vehicles and buildings in his own borough.

Among the targets is a local landmark,

the 140-year-old Reeves furniture store.

'I've seen nothing like this in my life ever.

'This is... Jesus Christ. This is absolutely crazy.'

I was brought up in the area. I was married in Croydon.

My wife was upset. She was in tears because this is where we grew up.

Reeves Corner was where we bought our first sofa.

The fires ripping through Croydon will become the worst in the city,

but in some parts of Croydon until the fire brigade arrives,

the transport police and local officers have to deal with them on their own.

One incident earned Sergeant Paul Crouch and fellow officers a commendation.

There's a block of flats next door to this burning building.

Everyone was saying, "There could be people in that building. We need to get to that junction quickly."

And the flames by now are starting to lick the outside of the building.

If somebody was trapped up the top there,

who do they look to to save them?

They look to the police, the fire brigade.

We were the only ones there so it had to be our job to do it.

We were pressing all the buzzers on the door entry system

and we weren't getting many responses.

There was a young Metropolitan Police Special Constable,

very polite, pressing the buzzers.

"I'm very sorry. You're going to have to leave."

People weren't responding.

He said, "I can't get in. I can't open the door."

I said, "Break the window. Break the window. This is life and death."

You could see he wasn't sure about doing that so I did it.

Inside, residents hear the break-in but don't realise it's the police.

We could hear sounds.

We thought it's the guys who had gained access to the building,

so we reinforced our doors to close it tighter.

There were nine flats in there on three floors.

We went through knocking on all the doors.

Lo and behold, there was a couple of people asleep, totally oblivious to what was going on.

We could hear footsteps coming up

and then we heard a loud bang on our door and it was the police,

running up the steps frantically trying to bang on each door to say,

"Fire, fire! We need to come out."

Some people are reluctant because they knew what was happening.

We woke one poor chap up who'd been working nights, totally oblivious to everything.

He was very grateful. He said, "What is all this about?" He was really angry.

"You've knocked on my door!" He got out the front and saw it

and he went... I won't say what he said but he swore loudly and then went,

"Thank you, thank you, thank you."

He was brave enough to say, "I'm going to rescue these people.

"I'm going to tell them what's happening

"because clearly they're not aware

"that the fire is spreading to their building."

He saved our lives.

Over the hours that follow, the crisis in London deepens.

Desperately short of manpower, the police are repeatedly driven back.

It's now a national emergency.

Facing total breakdown of law and order,

some borough commanders call for baton rounds or rubber bullets,

which have never been used on mainland Britain.

It was the gold commander's decision not to deploy them.

I can fully understand his rationale for that.

It was based on his fear that the situation would escalate.

You're basically deploying firearms onto the streets of London

to deal with disorder.

Puffs of smoke come out of the gun

and it looks like we're firing guns at rioters.

How would that have gone down in the media?

With the general public, would we have lost support?

More worryingly,

would firearms have been used by rioters towards the police?

During the course of the night, police make over 300 arrests,

but many rioters escape for the simple reason that there is nowhere to put them.

We stopped a car that was quite literally full of weapons.

They've got baseball bats and crowbars

and a whole assortment of really vicious weapons.

So it was great having them and we've got them...

..but were there any cells left in London?

Absolutely not.

So someone in authority had made a decision

that we were to seize the weapons,

record the details of the individuals,

and release them to be dealt with on another day.

Towards four in the morning the rioting across London finally subsides.

When we got back in the vehicle,

we took off any high visibility clothing to identify us as police

and we took all the back streets

and we kept out of trouble as best we could.

When I got home, despite the fact that I absolutely stunk of smoke,

I was covered in dirt and brick dust and dripping with sweat,

my wife gave me a big hug and said well done.

And that's when it sort of hits home a little bit.

I'm quite lucky here. Quite lucky I got out of that.

-NEWSREADER:

-Prime Minister David Cameron has cut short his holiday

and returned to Downing Street to take charge of the crisis.

During the early hours of Tuesday morning,

politicians and senior police officers arrive in the capital.

We had to come back to London

so I left, very early hours of Tuesday morning

and was available of course to attend the first Cabinet Office Briefing Room

chaired by the Prime Minister on the Tuesday morning.

It was, as one would expect, pretty tense.

Quite rightly the Government was saying, "Why aren't you doing more?"

Following the Government meeting, acting Met Commissioner Tim Godwin

promises an additional 10,000 officers to police the capital.

Many people questioned why he had not provided them sooner.

It struck me that the scaling-up was proportionate.

If the Commissioner had over-prescribed what he required

and the Metropolitan Police Authority received a substantial bill from other forces,

they would have asked him what he thought he was doing.

It's a very difficult balance to make because whatever you do,

probably you're going to get it wrong to some degree.

With 16,000 officers, many brought in from other forces,

now policing London, the riots in the capital are finally brought to a full stop.

But rioting has now spread to other English cities.

In Liverpool, children as young as ten are caught up in the rampage,

as crowds attack police vehicles and loot shops.

Argh! Liverpool rule the riots!

In Manchester, senior police officers fear the worst.

Tuesday, August 9th,

watching the streets from police headquarters is Federation rep Ian Hanson.

I went into the control room around four o'clock that afternoon

and I could see on the monitors that we had a significant number

of people making their way into the city centre.

My real serious concern as I saw the build-up of numbers

and I saw what was an incredibly thin blue line was

a police officer is going to get seriously hurt if not killed tonight.

As in other parts of the country, Greater Manchester Police

say they were overwhelmed that night by the scale and nature of the disorder.

The extreme lawlessness they faced

and the tactics they used to deal with it would spark national debate.

Keep away!

Anticipating trouble in Salford, GMP sent elite squads of riot-trained officers

to the precinct and nearby estates.

There were a group of young lads just behind us here

who were wearing hoodies with stones in their hands

and then lots of residents started coming out to find out why the police had arrived.

There was no actual rioting occurring at that time.

The police try to disperse the troublemakers

but full-scale rioting now breaks out.

Very quickly it escalated.

For almost two hours, police now come under fierce attack.

Overwhelmed and on unfamiliar territory,

the unit commander makes a tactical decision to withdraw.

The commander in charge of the operation in Salford

had to withdraw police officers from the patch

purely to ensure that nobody was seriously hurt or killed.

That's a big thing for the police of Greater Manchester to have to withdraw.

It's a really significant step.

Salford precinct is now left in the hands of the rioters.

At that point people really started to let rip.

I just saw half a dozen young lads in hoodies

and they were running out over the barriers, jumped across.

They saw the BBC car.

They rocked it and tipped it over.

And then they set it on fire.

There were a lot of young lads then running around.

There were cars on fire at Lidl.

They set fire to part of the marketplace.

They had things like hammers and bits of wood

and they were trying to break into the shops and steal the goods.

Unable to regain control of the area, GMP call for outside help.

Seven neighbouring forces send back-up,

among them a unit of 25 riot police from Cheshire.

Coming in the daylight, all of a sudden it went quite black

because there was a lot of buildings, vehicles on fire.

Immediately on getting out of the van, you could feel the tension.

Most of the shops along Salford precinct had been looted at this point.

Our specific task we were told was to protect the fire brigade

and the Salford precinct market area from attack.

We wanted to create a buffer zone so they can't get hit by the missiles

so they can do their work.

While GMP riot squads conduct a roving patrol,

the Cheshire unit of 25 officers is left to hold the precinct on its own.

They come under intense attack.

Shields are obviously impacting. They're large stones and rocks.

They could do a lot of damage.

'That is a big rock.'

They were getting quite close to the shields at points.

At some points they're able to run up with rocks, boulders,

you know, bits of masonry that you can throw from a couple of metres.

You can see their face, you can hear what they're saying.

They obviously want to do you some serious harm.

We don't know at this point. Are GMP in a position to come and assist us?

One of the serial sergeants has gone down.

Somebody's hit him with a metre-long scaffolding bar

or something very similar to that. There's a kind of cheer.

CHEERING

Seven or eight of the crowd surged forward.

I was frightened. Who wouldn't be frightened?

I certainly was frightened because at this point you don't know how things are going to escalate.

Fortunately, the officers move forward to protect him.

I dread to think what would happen if they hadn't.

Would I have struck somebody?

Of course I would. If somebody was trying to hurt a colleague

or potentially do him serious damage, then of course I would.

Meanwhile, Greater Manchester Police

are stretched between Salford and the city centre.

Specialist anti-gang units break up the mob and arrest key suspects.

GMP's hard-line approach was welcomed by many members of the public.

But one incident posted on YouTube

showed police hitting youths with their batons away from the riot.

There was no complaint from anyone involved

and the officers were not censured.

It polarised public opinion.

Police officers can use reasonable force.

That begs the question

that when we're seeing probably the most serious disorder for years

in Greater Manchester, what is reasonable force?

We heard this phrase at the time from our political leaders that they want to see robust policing.

We asked the question at the time, what is robust policing?

Police officers are confused.

In the past, we've seen where police officers have engaged robustly

with people involved in riot and disorder situations,

yet the next day members of the media and other agencies

have picked apart minutely every decision they've made

and every decision to use force.

There has to be an acknowledgement that police officers will do their best,

but in a difficult and dangerous situation like that

they need to have the confidence that the political masters

and senior officers will support them.

By the early hours of the fifth day, police in Manchester

and other cities have regained control of the streets.

England's summer riots had finally run their course.

Following the riots,

police move swiftly to arrest thousands of suspects,

many of whom were identified from CCTV.

At the height of the rioting,

this had been impossible as the lack of officers had constrained tactics.

They had been limited to dispersing rioters

rather than meeting the public demand

for overwhelming force and mass arrests.

A barrage of criticism was levelled at the police,

in the press and at Westminster,

for their failure to prevent the riots.

What became increasingly clear earlier this week

was that there was simply far too few police deployed onto our streets

and the tactics they were using weren't working.

It's always interesting when politicians become experts in police tactics.

It's easy to pass judgements. What would they like us to do?

Let's see you put the public order kit on.

Let's see you experience what it's really like to be behind a shield.

We don't have standing armies of public order trained officers

like they do in some parts of the continent.

Our public order cops are the cop that was driving the area car in Bromley,

or driving the area car in Wandsworth the day before.

Official reports following the riots acknowledged that police tactics were hampered by inadequate numbers,

that they should sometimes have intervened more promptly and assertively,

and that intelligence was flawed.

But they all praised the bravery of the officers on the frontline.

You don't know what's going to happen.

There's a gang of people there

and there's more of them than there are of you.

You can't, you can't explain how...

I can't explain how scary that was.

We were lucky not to lose one of us and that does make you think,

"What have I just been involved in? What did I witness?

"What did I just play a part in?"

So, yes, when you really think about it, it's scary.

Over the next couple of days we were seeing the newspapers and things

and other colleagues go, "Were you actually there?"

"Yeah." "It looked terrible." I said, "I didn't have time to think."

When you first turn on the news channels and you see the scale of it,

I remember saying, "Look, that's where we were."

I looked at it and I thought, "Oh, my God. I was there."

When I got up on Tuesday afternoon and rang the office I was told I didn't need to be in till six

and I had the opportunity to take my dog out for a walk in the park.

It was almost bizarre in that this was the first quiet time that I'd had

when no one was trying to kill me. It was nice.

The park was normal but it seemed bizarre

because I'd spent the best part of 40 hours under threat,

under missile attack, and looking after my team of officers.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd